Shortly before the Duke of Edinburgh turned 90, Buckingham Palace put out an announcement that he was reducing the number of organisations and charities with which he was involved. He gave up a couple of university chancellorships — at Edinburgh, held since 1952, and Cambridge, held since 1976 — and stepped down as patron of a number of outfits including UK Athletics.
The interesting point about all of this was not so much that the duke was finally slowing down, but that as he entered his tenth decade he was still busier than men 20 years younger. As the palace pointed out, he was still associated with more than 800 organisations.
At the age when most men have long since retired, he was not much of a pipe and slippers man. But, even as a younger man, Prince Philip was far from the traditional royal figurehead, turning up to cut a ribbon, shake a few hands and go on his way. Philip got involved, providing a pithy and focused input that often left those unused to his ways somewhat shellshocked.
His name will forever be associated with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, now operating in 141 countries and territories and an almost essential part of every ambitious teenager’s CV. About 2.5 million young people have received awards in the UK alone. It is hard to imagine now that when it was first conceived in 1956 it was seen as a pioneering experiment that was intruding on territory already occupied by organisations such as the Scouts. Sir David Eccles, then the minister of education, told the duke: “I hear you’re trying to invent something like the Hitler Youth.”
Although the scheme was not his idea — its creator was Kurt Hahn, the visionary educationalist who was his headmaster at Gordonstoun — its success was due in no small part to Prince Philip’s energy and commitment. He handed out the Gold awards well into his nineties, attended fundraising meetings, chaired the biennial council meeting and offered a constant stream of advice, help and encouragement. But the duke was not someone to stand on ceremony: at the council lunch, an open buffet, he would queue for his meal like everyone else.
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His desire to have an impact started early in his marriage, when he took on the presidencies of the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs and the National Playing Fields Association (NPFA), now Fields in Trust. Mike Parker, his good friend and private secretary from that time, said: “He wanted to make a difference and, if necessary, he was ready to make a noise.”
With the NPFA he went at the task, in the words of one palace observer, “like a bull at a gate”. He came up with the idea of a £500,000 appeal fund to build new playing fields and sports facilities throughout the country, and unnerved palace officials by agreeing to go on film with the appeal. The film was shown at every cinema in the country; Philip wrote his own script. He even proved skilful at getting stars to help out, persuading Frank Sinatra to donate the royalties from two of his bestselling records to the fund. When Philip got Sinatra and his wife at the time, Ava Gardner, to perform at a midnight fundraiser, it was an association that prompted a sniffy reaction among more snobbish circles.
Gyles Brandreth, who first came across the duke at the NPFA, once wrote: “He is a fearless and effective fundraiser and an intelligent and persuasive leader, with an unnerving eye for detail (and flannel and flimflam), who is at his best when given a problem to solve, a difficult meeting to chair, an internal row requiring resolution.”
He would pack his schedule with meetings, speeches, lunches, banquets, informal talks. When he retired, Buckingham Palace revealed that he had undertaken 22,191 solo engagements, made 637 overseas visits, given 5,493 speeches and written 14 books. He was colonel-in-chief of eight regiments, and patron of no fewer than 20 cricket organisations.
This was not just turning up: wherever he got involved, he made his presence felt. His frankness could border on rudeness, and he got people’s hackles up on too many occasions to count. But he motivated people, he got results and, as his biographer John Parker noted, at the end of the day those who had suffered the rough edge of his tongue “regardless of any abuse he may have handed them . . . all turned round and said what a nice chap he was”.
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One of his great passions was wildlife. He was a fervent believer in conservation long before it became fashionable. He took over from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands as international president of the World Wildlife Fund (later the World Wide Fund for Nature), who saw that they needed someone who had an entrée to heads of state and government ministers. He also took over from him at the helm of the International Equestrian Federation.
The duke was an ideal choice in Prince Bernhard’s view because he had the enthusiasm, contacts and international position which meant he would be listened to with respect. “Letters from him have to be answered. People have to respond to him,” Bernhard said. As Philip himself admitted: “It would be foolish to deny that a title always looks good at the head of a charity.”
At the WWF, Philip ensured he made a difference. He arranged that its 25th anniversary should be held in Assisi — home of St Francis, patron saint of birds and animals — to forge a permanent alliance between conservation and religion. Later, when the Pope included an ecological passage in his Christmas broadcast, the duke made sure that the WWF gave a proper response.
Over the years there were significant changes in the duke’s attitude to nature. “The younger duke,” Tim Heald wrote in his biography, “is excited by the sheer adventure of discovery.” His writing is “exuberant, curious, funny but seldom contemplative or reflective”.
Thirty years later Philip was talking about man’s relationship to the natural world. “If God is in nature, nature itself becomes divine, and from that point it becomes reasonable to argue that reverence for God and nature implies a responsibility not to harm it, not just for our own selfish interests, but also as a duty to the creator.”
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Such passages revealed a more thoughtful Philip, the same man, perhaps, whose extensive library of more than 11,000 books included not only works on conservation, science, engineering and the navy, but several hundred volumes on religion.
As well as a keen conservationist, the duke was an avid follower of country sports, a combination of enthusiasms that many have seen as inconsistent, if not hypocritical. The duke, naturally, had little time for what he saw as the ill-informed, urban views of the anti-bloodsport lobby. Big game hunting was harder to defend, however: there was a considerable fuss back home during a tour of India when he and the Queen were photographed with the tiger he had shot. This was in 1961, the same year he became British president of the WWF. It was, as far as is known, the last tiger he killed.
His interest in country sports began when his four sisters all married landowners with large estates in Germany. He wrote: “There was nothing I enjoyed more than going out with my brothers-in-law in the early mornings, or just before dusk, to sit up with them for a roe-buck or to creep through the tall pines in the morning twilight in the hope of hearing and tracking down a capercailzie as it greeted the rising sun with its strange clucking display.”
His other great interest was in scientific and technological research and development, having been variously the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the initiator of a designer’s prize with the Design Council, the president of the Council of Engineering Institutions and, indeed, more other bodies than there is space to mention. At the age of 93 he was still engaged enough to write an article for the New Scientist in praise of engineers: making a noise, as Mike Parker said, just as long as he could.
As he told the BBC, his passion for engineering dated from the end of the war when it dawned on him that engineers were vital in getting Britain back on its feet. “It seemed to me that the thing that really needed encouragement was manufacturing, which was always dependent on engineering, to try and recover from the war,” he told Today on BBC Radio 4. “We were completely skint, seriously badly damaged. It seemed to me the only way we were going to recover a sort of viability was through engineering.”
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He retained a lifelong interest in industry. Inspired by overseas visits and a realisation that working and living conditions were often less than adequate, in 1956 he set up the Commonwealth Study Conferences, which are designed to get people from all walks of life to examine the relationship between industry and the community. They are still going today.
When he announced his official retirement from public life in May 2017 — at a time when he was still associated with more than 780 organisations — a host of charities thanked him for fighting their corner over the years, from Book Aid International, which supplies libraries across Africa, to Muscular Dystrophy UK.
It was not only the big names who had cause to be grateful. Among the smaller charities and groups that enjoyed his support was the Accrington Camera Club in Lancashire, of which he was a life member from 1977. Harry Emmett from the club said at the time: “We wrote on the off chance to see if he would like to submit any photos he had taken to an exhibition we were having. The next thing we knew, the curator of the gallery hosting the exhibition had a call from Buckingham Palace checking if we were genuine. A caseload of prints he had taken on holiday were later delivered. The great thing about it was, it was something that he had a passion for, a hobby that he was sharing with others rather than just being a figurehead.
“Since then he’s remained a member, which we’re very grateful for and which has given us great bragging rights over other camera clubs. Having his name is the ultimate one-upmanship.”
