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when the Island Sailing Club had given him a Dragon-class yacht as a wedding present.
For years he sailed this boat, which he named Bluebottle, in the Cowes week races,
crewed by his colourful sailing companion, ‘drinking, yarning and singing chum’, Uffa
Fox. Fox, a builder and sailor of small boats, and Philip became a feature of the Cowes
week regatta; with Fox the Prince sailed Coweslip, a Flying Fifteen, one of Fox’s designs,
given him by the people of Cowes, and Bloodhound, apre-war twelve-metre designed for
ocean-racing. Philip was intensely competitive; people who sailed with him had to have
nerves as cool as he had. ‘He would have been a wonderful helmsman if only he’d had
more time to do it,’ a sailing friend said. ‘He was as cool as a cucumber – at Cowes he
would get into a schmozzle of yachts crowding round a buoy in roaring water and he’d
sail into the melee and come straight through without touching anyone.’
At Cowes he enjoyed the after-race life as much as he was allowed to. He joined a
spoof club known as the Imperial Poona Yacht Club, originally founded by Oxford
undergraduates as a take-off of colonial bores. He is on the membership list as the
‘Maharaja of Cooch Parwani’, which loosely translates as ‘the Maharaja of Not-a-Lot’,
and when Buz Mosbacher, an American member, skippered his boat to victory in the
America’s Cup, the Prince sent him a telegram: ‘Poona is proud of you. Cooch Parwani.’
Like the Thursday Club, the Poona Yacht Club is a wardroom, let-your-hair-down
experience in the course of which grown-up yachtsmen with serious sailing credentials
behave like boys. The Duke enjoyed it, feeling safe in the company of men who would
not talk to the press, of whom he was becoming increasingly wary. ‘He wasn’t able to
go to the Poona or things like that if there were women there in case the media made up
rumours,’ a friend said. ‘There were always rumours…’
The four months ‘alone’ on Britannia represented a watershed in Prince Philip’s life.
Significantly it was at that point that Baron went out of his life, swiftly, as we have
seen, to be followed by Parker. Philip had invited Baron to join him in Australia for the
Olympic Games and Baron had decided that, in order to make himself more mobile for
the tour, he would have an operation to ease his arthritic hips, the result of a bad car
crash in 1922. The operation went tragically wrong and he died suddenly in hospital on
5 September 1956 aged forty-nine. His death caused a sensation at the time. ‘Lordly by
name and lordly by nature he dared to cut a dash,’ his friend, the journalist Donald
Edgar, wrote in a two-part obituary entitled ‘The Man Who Knew Everybody’. ‘Baron
was a gambler,’ Peter Ustinov wrote, ‘and it sometimes seemed to me as I watched him
at work and at play that for him the whole of existence was a pastime with a score.’ 5
Curiously, when after Baron’s death Parker visited his studio to find a replacement
photographer for the tour, he rejected the star pupil, Antony Armstrong-Jones, as ‘too
bohemian’. Parker’s enforced departure left a large hole in Philip’s life; they had been
companions in arms and ‘mates’ in a real sense for so long. Parker had provided a
breath of fresh air in the stuffy corridors of the Palace, contributing to the light-hearted
tone of Philip’s staff there. He was genial, relaxed and good company. He had kept
Philip company whenever needed, even learning to fly with him under Peter Horsley’s
tuition. ‘Prince Philip was a very good pilot – went solo very quickly,’ Horsley said.