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preparatory school in England, Cheam, to which he was later to despatch Prince
Charles. Cheam was followed by a brief two terms in Germany at the school founded by
Kurt Hahn at Schloss Salem, home of Philip’s sister, Dolla, and her husband Berthold,
later to become better known after its transition to Scotland as Gordonstoun. Hahn, a
German Jew, was arrested after the Nazis came to power in 1933 and, after the
intervention of highly placed British friends, he fled to Britain, where he founded
Gordonstoun. In 1934 Philip was sent to school there, a formative experience which he
was also to insist his sons must share.
As a teenager, despite being a member of a large extended family, Philip was very
much on his own. Friends at Gordonstoun remember there always being uncertainty as
to where he should spend his holidays. He was fond of his third sister Cecile’s husband,
George Donatus of Hesse, and spent most of his holidays with them at Wolfsgarten or in
Darmstadt, but this haven came to a tragic end when Cecile and George were killed in
an air crash in 1937 en route for the London wedding of George’s younger brother,
Prince Ludwig, to an English girl, Margaret Geddes. In London Philip stayed at
Kensington Palace with his Mount-batten grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of
Milford Haven. ‘He was very independent,’ his sister said, ‘he and his grandmother had
frightful tussles of will.’ His Mountbatten cousins remember on one occasion seeing
Philip race up the stairs at Kensington Palace and stopping at the top to stick his tongue
out at her. He also stayed in the country with his mother’s brother George, Marquess of
Milford Haven, and his exotic lesbian Russian wife, Nadejda. In 1938, the year after
Cecile’s death, George Milford Haven died of cancer, leaving Prince Philip in the
occasional care of his younger brother, Lord Louis.
At this point in Prince Philip’s career, Lord Louis did not represent the ‘surrogate
father’ he is often made out to be. He was only beginning to take an interest in his
nephew, who seems to have first visited Adsdean, the Mountbattens’ country house, in
the spring of 1938, accompanied by his cousin, David Milford Haven. ‘Philip was here
all last week doing his entrance exams for the Navy,’ Mountbatten wrote to his wife in
terms which suggest this was his first prolonged encounter with his nephew at close
quarters. ‘He had his meals with us and he really is killingly funny. I like him very
much.’ 15 According to Mountbatten’s official biographer, the decision that Philip should
join the Navy and not, as he had first chosen, the Air Force, was Mount-batten’s. It was
as a result of this decision that when in July 1939 the King, the Queen and the two
Princesses, accompanied by Mountbatten, made an official visit to the Royal Naval
College at Dartmouth on the Victoria & Albert, his nephew, Elizabeth’s cousin, was a
cadet there. ‘Philip accompanied us and dined on board,’ Mountbatten noted briefly in
his diary on 22 July 1939, and on the 23rd: ‘Philip came back aboard V and A for tea
and was a great success with the children.’ Just how much of a success Philip was,
Crawfie, with the benefit of hindsight, was only too willing to elaborate.
Philip was extremely handsome; tall with Nordic good looks, bleached blond hair and
fine features. He was confident and, Crawfie thought, a bit of a show-off and ‘rather offhand
in his manner’. The crucial meeting took place at the Captain’s House at