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from the plane. None the less, when he became Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute
Regiment in 1977, he insisted on going on the regimental parachute training course.
Despite his personal diffidence and timidity, he was physically brave and seemed to
enjoy testing his courage to its limits, and although not naturally athletically gifted he
showed real grit in his determination to succeed in physical tests and in sports like
skiing and polo. He did not, however, much enjoy his naval career and hated his
preparation for it at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, an experience which he found like
going back to school, describing it as ‘irritating… incomprehensible… demeaning’. Once
on board ship he felt himself inadequate and was haunted by the naval achievements of
his father and his great-uncle, both of whom had shown outstanding ability in the
service. He felt as though he were constantly being measured against them and when his
father visited him on his ship after he obtained his own command, he was so nervous he
forgot his own officers’ names when introducing them. Mountbatten did his best to help
bolster his great-nephew’s confidence. When Charles was sent on a training course at
Portsmouth, he coached him in navigation, a subject for which, being utterly
unmathematical, the Prince showed little aptitude. Charles lacked the gregariousness
necessary for naval life; while at Portsmouth he refused to be billeted in the mess with
the other trainees and commuted daily to Broadlands. He felt extremely uncomfortable
aboard HMS Jupiter, his second ship, where, according to a fellow officer, the wardroom
conversation was ‘pretty revolting’; his shipmates found him ‘diffident, unsure, wary,
vulnerable’. As commanding officer of his own ship, HMS Bronington, however, he was
popular with his crew; he never shouted at them. His kindness and soft-heartedness
made him unsuited for service life; when one of the seamen on Jupiter was killed in a
road accident, the Prince was distraught and telephoned home in tears. ‘Charles really
must learn to be tougher,’ Elizabeth commented.
The objectives of Charles’s education as drawn up by his parents and Mountbatten
had been ultimately to fit him for his job as future King. Cheam and Gordonstoun had
been the first steps in the toughening-up process, taking him away from the warm
embrace of home, pitching him into daily contact with his contemporaries and teaching
him self-reliance. Elizabeth and Philip had already had to face up to the fact that that
part of his education had not been a startling success. Charles had emerged from his
ordeal with what self-confidence he had thoroughly dented; Geelong under the tutelage
of Checketts and his formative contact with the primitive peoples of New Guinea had
given him, as Elizabeth had hoped, a lasting fondness for Australia. The Navy had been
supposed to teach him discipline and leadership and give him work experience of the
armed forces of which he would one day be titular head. Outwardly, the image of
Charles flying jets, making parachute jumps and commanding his own ship had
portrayed him as the dashing, Action Man Prince of Wales. Inwardly, to judge from the
letters and journals reproduced in his authorized biography, the experience appeared
not to have changed him much and, worse, to have left a festering resentment at having
his life mapped out for him.
Charles emerged from the Navy in 1976 to find himself with no role in life beyond his