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during the war, was about to marry again, to Prince George of Hanover. Philip
borrowed a Canadian army vehicle and dashed across war-ravaged Europe to turn up
unexpectedly in time for the wedding at Salem in May 1946.
He was not only virtually homeless but also practically penniless with only his naval
pay to live on, just enough to run a black MG sports car. On his return to England he
went to a naval training establishment at Corsham near Bath called HMS Royal Arthur;
whenever he had leave, he would dash up to London and beg a bed at the Mountbattens’
house at 16 Chester Street while they were spending the weekend at Broadlands. On
Saturday nights he would be out till the early hours. The Mountbatten servants loved
him: ‘He was so considerate, so anxious to avoid giving trouble to people who, after all,
were paid to look after the family, that we all thought the world of him and looked
forward to his visits,’ wrote John Dean, then butler at Chester Street and later Prince
Philip’s valet. 2
Philip was very short of clothes, often arriving in London with only a razor and
without even a clean shirt. At night after he had gone to bed, John Dean would wash
and iron his shirt for him and mend his socks. ‘He was very easy to look after, and never
asked for things like that to be done for him, but I liked him so much that I did it
anyway.’ Dean noticed that whenever he did bring a weekend bag, it always contained
a small photograph of Elizabeth in a battered leather frame.
Philip’s independence of spirit and his refusal to kow-tow to anyone were qualities
which particularly appealed to Elizabeth, surrounded as she was by the deference of
courtiers, servants – anybody, in fact, with whom she came into contact outside her own
family. They were not, however, qualities which endeared him to courtiers. Opposition
to the idea of her marriage with Philip came not so much from within her own family as
from the older courtiers, Tommy Lascelles, now the King’s Private Secretary and
therefore the most influential man at court, and Joey Legh, and also from the King’s old
friends, Lords Eldon, Stanley and Salisbury, and the Queen’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon.
‘They were bloody to him,’ one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting recalled. They would
have preferred the Princess to marry someone with a high position of his own, who
would have slipped easily into court circles – a rich, sporting, English duke rather than a
penniless foreign prince. The Greek royal family were regarded as being very much at
the bottom of the royal heap; frequently without a job and, by royal standards, without
the means to support themselves. Princess Marina’s pride in her breeding and her
closeness to her own family, to her sisters and Prince Philip, came not just from a sense
of superior bloodlines but also a touch of ‘poor relation’ feeling. She is alleged to have
referred to the Queen and her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Gloucester, as ‘those common
little Scottish girls’. Some people at court were suspicious of the Mountbatten
connection, regarding Uncle Dickie as ‘too pushy’ and ‘a German’. At the end of the
Second World War the British as a whole, always xenophobic, were understandably anti-
German. Moreover, Mountbatten and his wife were regarded by the British
establishment, including the Queen, as either dangerously or ludicrously left-wing,
whichever way you liked to look at it. ‘My father, you see,’ Countess Mountbatten said,