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wrote. He and Milford Haven ‘went mad and we danced and danced and danced… the
best night of all’. 10
Philip had had a tough, often uncomfortable war. At first, from January 1940, he had
been kept out of harm’s way on various undra-matic postings around the Indian Ocean
on an elderly battleship, HMS Ramillies, as a midshipman based in Colombo escorting
Australian transports to the Mediterranean until the Italians invaded Greece in the
autumn of 1940. From January 1941 he joined the battleship Valiant at Alexandria and
was plunged into action. His first experience of war had come on 28 March off Cape
Matapan in the southern Peloponnese when his battle squadron under Admiral
Cunningham had sunk several Italian warships. Life had been difficult and dangerous
off Crete towards the end of May when several ships in his squadron were destroyed by
German fire and Valiant itself narrowly escaped being bombed and sunk by a Dornier.
Several miles away the following day, his uncle had his destroyer, the Kelly, sunk under
him; when he finally got ashore in Egypt, one of the first people to greet him was his
nephew, impeccable in white ducks and sporting a golden beard and moustache, highly
amused at his uncle’s dishevelled appearance. In June 1942 Philip, at twenty-one one of
the youngest first lieutenants in the Royal Navy, was posted back to Britain as a second
in command on the destroyer Wallace. It was then that he met a young Australian,
Michael Parker, who was to become his close friend and boon companion. Parker was
first lieutenant on his fellow ship, Lauderdale, and both were on a tough but
unglamorous assignment, convoy duty up and down the east coast of Britain from
Rosyth on the Firth of Forth south to Sheerness at the mouth of the Thames Estuary, an
area known as ‘E-boat Alley’.
In 1944, the year of Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, Mountbatten, in collusion with
Philip’s cousin King George of Greece, made not just one but two moves to advance
Philip’s cause. In March King George boldly raised the subject of an engagement with
his cousin, George VI, only to meet with a firm rebuff. ‘We both think she is far too
young for that now,’ George VI told Queen Mary. ‘I like Philip. He is intelligent, has a
good sense of humour & thinks about things in the right way… We are going to tell
George that P. had better not think any more about it for the present.’ Mountbatten
returned to the charge in August with the idea that Prince Philip should change his
Greek nationality for British citizenship as a first step and, having discussed the matter
with George VI, flew to Cairo on 23 August to put the idea to the Greek King and to
Philip, who happened to be in Alexandria then with his ship. Even before Mountbatten
arrived in Cairo, George VI had fired off a warning shot across his bows. ‘I have been
thinking the matter over since our talk,’ the King wrote to him on 10 August, ‘and I have
come to the conclusion that we are going too fast.’ Mountbatten, he said firmly, should
confine his talks with George of Greece to the question of citizenship. Mountbatten took
the hint; ‘Family hold back’ was to be the policy for the present. ‘Philip entirely
understood that the proposal [British citizenship] was not connected with any question
of marrying Lilibet,’ he wrote to his mother, Philip’s grandmother, on 28 August, ‘…
though there is no doubt that he would very much like to one of these days.’ Six months