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occupants of probably the most insecure throne, they had had neither time nor
opportunity to accumulate valuable possessions. In 1922 Philip was a more or less
penniless refugee in Paris, where his family settled in St Cloud, supported by Prince
Andrew’s brother, Prince George, who had had the good fortune to marry a woman who
was not only a Bonaparte but also the granddaughter of Louis Blanc, founder of the
Monte Carlo casino. It was not exactly a lonely life; there were other houses on the St
Cloud estate besides the big, ugly villa in which Prince Philip’s family lived and Paris
was full of royal cousins, both Russian and Greek, refugees from the various regimes.
Prince Philip himself lived in an extremely cosmopolitan, virtually all-female household
consisting of his Greek father, his German mother, his four sisters (who thought of
themselves as Greeks), a Greek lady-in-waiting, a French governess, a much-loved
English nanny, Mrs Nicholas, an Italian butler and a French cook. It was an explosive
mixture; ‘there were always terrible rows among the staff,’ Prince Philip’s sister, Sophie,
recalled. Perhaps in revolt against the preponderance of women in his family and
household, he grew up an aggressively male little boy, described by his first headmaster
as ‘rugged’ and ‘boisterous’. Photographs of the time show a blond little boy with a
fierce, independent expression, but, perhaps as a result of Nanny’s influence, he was
apparently ‘always remarkably polite’.
Prince Philip’s parents were in many ways an ill-assorted couple. His father, Prince
Andrew, was described by his youngest daughter as ‘delightful, extrovert, with a colossal
sense of humour, very amusing’. Prince Philip, who got on extremely well with his
father when he was around, which was increasingly rarely, inherited his father’s
forehead and the shape of his head, and his mother’s fine nose and lips and the narrow
Mountbatten eyes. Princess Alice had been very deaf from childhood, but she had
learned to lip-read in several languages. She was very strict with her children; Prince
Philip’s relationship with her was good if not superficially affectionate. She was as
courageous and independent-minded as he was. While living in German-occupied Athens
during the Second World War (when she lost over 40lb living off flour mixed with warm
water), she saved the lives of two Jews, a mother and daughter. They had two rooms at
the top of Prince George’s house where she lived and when the Germans came to look
for them, Princess Alice pretended to be not only deaf but half-witted, so they went
away.
Princess Alice did not play a part in her son’s adolescence. When Philip was only ten,
a very vulnerable age, his world began to crumble round him, not for the first or the last
time. His mother had a breakdown, apparently caused by the menopause, and was sent
for treatment to Vienna and Berlin and subsequently to a Swiss clinic. The house at St
Cloud was given up and Prince Philip’s father went off to live in the South of France. By
1931 all his sisters had married German aristocrats: Princess Sophie, the youngest,
known as ‘Tiny’, married Prince Christopher of Hesse at the age of sixteen in 1930; his
three other sisters all married in 1931 – Margarita to Prince Godfrey of Hohenlohe-
Langenburg, Theodora, known as ‘Dolla’, to Berthold, Margrave of Baden and Cecile to
George Donatus, Prince of Hesse and the Rhine. Prince Philip was sent to the