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most wonderful, loyal man,’ he later told his biographer. The whole incident made him
think ‘it was the end of the world’.
Charles shrank every time he had to leave home for Gordonstoun. ‘There were tears,
and you could never find him when the car was waiting – he might be upstairs bathing
Prince Edward or something,’ a courtier remembered. Philip tried to get the whole
miserable process over as quickly as possible. ‘Papa rushed me so much on Monday
when I had to go, that I hardly had time to say goodbye to Mabel and June [the nursery
assistant] properly,’ Charles complained. ‘He kept hurrying me up all the time.’ The
experience took its toll on Philip too; a friend remembers him coming back from taking
Charles to school, white-faced and, unusually for him, walking wordlessly to the drinks
tray to pour himself a stiff drink. By now Elizabeth and Philip had come to admit that
the Gordonstoun experiment had not been a success. Dermot Morrah, in his ‘privileged
account’ of the young Charles, was authorized by Elizabeth to write:
The contrast between their son’s naturally introspective temperament and the determinedly outward-looking
ideals promulgated by Kurt Hahn for his foundation was driving him still further in upon himself… The
Prince spent three years trying with his innate conscientiousness… to follow in his father’s footsteps in all
school activities… but he was doing it against the grain. 4
In 1965, when he was seventeen, he was given a respite from Gordonstoun by being
sent to school in Australia. In keeping with the ideas behind his education, he was not
going there for his own pleasure but because Elizabeth felt that the heir to the throne
should begin to have some first-hand experience of the Commonwealth, and in
fulfilment of a promise she had made on her Coronation tour of Australia in 1954.
Charles was to spend six months at Timbertop, the country branch of Geelong, often
known as the ‘Eton of Australia’ (although it was in fact modelled on Gordonstoun
lines). The decision was taken by Philip, in consultation with Sir Robert Menzies, the
Anglophile, monarchist Prime Minister of Australia, and Dr Robin Woods, who, as Dean
of Windsor, was the clergyman closest to the royal family (and whose brother happened
to be Archbishop of Melbourne and Chairman of the Board of Governors at Geelong).
Charles was apprehensive about Australia and a new school environment as, from
past experience, he had every right to be. At seventeen he was still pathetically attached
to the nursery. ‘It is an awful long way away and I shall hate leaving everyone for so
long, especially Edward and Mabel [Anderson],’ he wrote. He told his grandmother that
he was taking two wristwatches with him, one of which would always be geared to
English hours so that he would know what the time was at home and what everyone
there would be doing. Elizabeth understandingly ruled that the decision whether he
should spend one or two terms at Timbertop should be left to him. Just as his shy
grandfather, George VI, had had when he entered unfamiliar territory at Cranwell and
Cambridge, Charles was provided with a ‘minder’ (a protector from the outside world),
in the form of one of his father’s equerries, thirty-five-year-old Squadron Leader David
Checketts, a man who was to be the mainstay of the Prince’s life for the next thirteen
years. Checketts established himself with his wife and children on a farm not far – in