Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life. Philip Eade

Alice and her son caught up with the rest of the family. Their first sight of three-month-old Philip was a welcome distraction for the mourners and Alice’s brothers took turns at cradling their future protégé in their arms. When they eventually got back to Corfu, Alice was surprised to find Andrea at home on leave, following an escalating series of disagreements with his commander-in-chief.

      The auguries for Andrea had not been good ever since he had arrived at the front. In his account of the Greek campaign in Asia Minor, aptly entitled Towards Disaster, he later alleged that the deficiencies of his troops had been part of a republican ploy whereby his division ‘would suffer disasters, in which case I would have borne the responsibility’.¹³ To begin with his men had acquitted themselves surprisingly well, however, and in early August Andrea had been promoted to take command of the 2nd Army Corps. By this time, though, ‘all military prudence had vanished’, he wrote, and the ‘prevailing idea of GHQ was that the enemy no longer existed, and that an advance to Angora [Ankara] was only a military promenade’.¹⁴ Even after crossing the Anatolian Salt Desert and capturing the strategically important Kale Grotto range, Andrea felt that the victory had been Pyrrhic. They had very little ammunition left and still less food. The horses in his division were dying for lack of fodder and there was no firewood for his soldiers to cook with.¹⁵ Meanwhile the enemy had succeeded in withdrawing without any losses in prisoners or materiel.¹⁶

      The Greek military plans, drawn up by one Major General Stratigos, seemed to Andrea to be wrongheaded and contradictory. On more than one occasion he had deemed it prudent to carry out an alternative manoeuvre to that prescribed by headquarters. Eventually, however, when, during the battle of Sakaria, he refused to obey an order to attack, fearing it would be disastrous, his commanding officer General Papoulas decided he had had enough: ‘The only person competent to judge and decide is myself as Commander-in-Chief,’ he barked.¹⁷ When Andrea then asked to be relieved of his command, the staunchly royalist general would not hear of it.¹⁸ However, as rumours about Andrea’s supposed ‘lack of fighting spirit’ began to spread through the Greek ranks, Papoulas eventually granted him three months’ leave, whereupon Andrea made his way straight to Corfu.

      His spirits were temporarily lifted by seeing his son for the first time, but after two months he gloomily returned to Smyrna. From there, on New Year’s Day 1922, he wrote to his friend Ioannis Metaxas bemoaning the impossibility of the exhausted Greeks holding their defensive line. ‘Something must be done quickly to remove us from the nightmare of Asia Minor … we must stop bluffing and face the situation as it really is. Because finally which is better? – to fall into the sea or escape before we are ducked?’¹⁹

      Andrea avoided the denouement he dreaded as he was posted in the spring to Janina in the province of Epirus in north-western Greece. On his way there, he spent Easter on Corfu, where Alice’s sister Louise and widowed mother Victoria had been helping to look after the children. The eldest, Margarita and Theodora, aged seventeen and sixteen, were ‘perfectly natural,’ wrote Victoria, ‘& Alice brings them up really well’.²⁰ She thought that Cecile, nearly eleven, would ‘certainly be the prettiest of the lot’ while seven-year-old Tiny (Sophie) was ‘great fun’ and ‘the precious Philipp the image of Andrea’.²¹

      Aged eleven months, Philip could ‘stand up alone now & sits with bare legs on the hard road & crawls on it without minding the stones. He is in fact as advanced & sturdy for his age as all the others were & has the same tow-coloured hair.’²² Aunt Louise reported that her little nephew ‘laughs all day long. I have never seen such a cheerful baby.’²³

      At the beginning of May, Alice accompanied Andrea to Janina and spent a couple of weeks there helping him to set up house.²⁴ Shortly after returning to Mon Repos, she travelled with her children on to London for the wedding of her younger brother Dickie Mountbatten to Edwina Ashley, granddaughter and heiress of the fabulously wealthy Jewish financier Sir Ernest Cassel. Dickie and Edwina had met in October 1920 at a ball at Claridge’s, hosted by Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, shortly after Dickie’s first love had broken off their engagement. Later that year they had been guests of the Sutherlands at Dunrobin Castle when Dickie received the news that his father had died. Within days Edwina’s grandfather was dead, too, and their shared bereavements brought them closer.

      When, soon afterwards, Dickie travelled to India in the retinue of his cousin, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), Edwina joined him at the Viceregal Lodge in Delhi, where their courtship intensified beneath the disapproving gaze of the Viceroy’s wife, who, failing to foresee Dickie’s glittering future, hoped that Edwina would find someone ‘with more of a career before him’. At a St Valentine’s Day ball held by their hosts, Dickie asked Edwina to marry him and she said she would.²⁵

      The magnificent wedding took place on 18 July 1922 at St Margaret’s, Westminster, with the Prince of Wales as best man. The congregation included King George V and an assortment of royalty and nobility from across Europe. Philip’s sisters were all bridesmaids, although Philip himself was left behind in the nursery of Spencer House.

      A month later, on 26 August, they were all still in London when, with a thunderous roar of artillery, Atatürk launched his devastating assault on the overextended Greek front in Turkey. Within a few days, it had turned into a rout, with the bedraggled Greek forces hurriedly withdrawing to the coast. They evacuated Smyrna on 8 September and the ensuing Turkish occupation of the city was accompanied by a massacre of some 30,000 Greek and Armenian Christians, a great fire which only the Turkish and Jewish quarters survived, and the flight of more than a million Greek refugees. It was a national humiliation on an epic scale.

      As the remnants of the Greek army regrouped on nearby Aegean islands, a handful of colonels took charge and called for revolutionary action to purge the national shame. Their leader was Nikolaos Plastiras, one of Andrea’s least friendly subordinates during the campaign.²⁶ On 26 September an aeroplane flew over Athens demanding the resignation of the government and the abdication of King Constantine, a demand which Andrea advised his brother to accede to. Constantine was replaced by his eldest son, who ruled briefly and unhappily as King George II.

      Andrea had been on leave in Athens as the disaster at Smyrna unfolded, and the British embassy reported that he had done his reputation with the Greek people no good by remaining ‘absent from his command in Epirus while such tragic events are happening to his country’.²⁷ It was subsequently understood that Andrea would now accompany the king into exile, the British ambassador, Francis Lindley, warning that any delay would be ‘most dangerous to their lives’.²⁸ However, when the king and queen slipped away from Greece in a grubby troopship bound for Palermo, Andrea was not with them.²⁹

      Instead he had returned to Corfu to be with Alice and the children on their return from Dickie’s wedding, the revolutionary government having assured him that, providing he resign his commission, he and his family would be safe at Mon Repos. They soon found themselves more or less under house arrest, however, their movements and conversations monitored by police, their post opened and scrutinized. As the hunt for scapegoats for the Greek defeat intensified, they all worried about what might happen to Andrea.³⁰

      In Athens, the new government set up a commission of inquiry into the disaster in Turkey, presided over by General Theodore Pangalos, Andrea’s old classmate from military college and now a ruthless staff officer ready to throw in his lot with the revolutionaries. The British embassy considered Pangalos ‘extraordinarily capable’ yet also ‘vindictive’, ‘a bad character’, ‘a fanatic’.³¹ Eight of those held responsible for the military debacle – including two former prime ministers, ministers of the interior, war and foreign affairs and two generals – were soon arrested and on 23 October it was announced that they would be tried by a special court martial.

      Three days later one of the revolutionary colonels came to Corfu in a destroyer and took Andrea back to Athens with him so that he could give evidence at the court martial. Andrea was told that he would be away for two days but after two weeks he had still not returned. Alice received a smuggled pencil note from him to say that he was being kept ‘strictly alone’ and was probably now going to be accused rather than