Prince Philip fled Greece as a baby carried in a fruit box
Born on a dining room table in a Corfu villa in 1921, Philip was a prince of both Greece and Denmark. Eighteen months later a revolutionary court banished his father, and a British warship evacuated the family with the infant tucked into a fruit box. He grew up without a home country and became Britain's longest-serving royal consort.
His childhood scattered across Europe. The family settled near Paris, where a teacher remembered him as a know-it-all but always remarkably polite. By the early 1930s his four sisters had married German princes, his mother was confined to an asylum after a schizophrenia diagnosis, and his father had moved to Monte Carlo. Philip went to Salem in Germany, then followed its Jewish founder Kurt Hahn, who had fled the Nazis, to his new school at Gordonstoun in Scotland. He never really spoke Greek and later said he thought of himself as Danish.
He finished Dartmouth naval college as the best cadet on his course and served through the Second World War, while two brothers-in-law fought for Germany. Mentioned in dispatches for controlling a battleship's searchlights at Cape Matapan, he became first lieutenant of the destroyer HMS Wallace at 21, one of the youngest in the navy. When German bombers crippled the ship at night off Sicily in 1943, he set a raft of smoke floats adrift as a decoy and the ship escaped. He was in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender.
He had begun writing to the 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth after escorting her around Dartmouth in 1939. George VI agreed to the match in 1946 on condition that the engagement wait until she turned 21. Philip dropped his foreign titles, became a naturalised British subject and took his mother's family name, Mountbatten. Some courtiers objected that he was a foreign prince without money whose sisters had married into Nazi-linked families.
After Elizabeth became queen in 1952 he left the navy as a commander. He championed carriage driving, chaired The Duke of Edinburgh's Award for young people, and belonged to more than 780 organisations. When he retired in 2017 at 96 he had carried out 22,219 solo engagements. He died at Windsor in 2021, aged 99.
Source: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
