Elizabeth by Gyles Daubeney Brandreth

Author:Gyles Daubeney Brandreth [Brandreth, Gyles Daubeney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241582602
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

By every account, Prince Philip was especially good with babies and small children. ‘They like him and he likes them,’ is what Countess Mountbatten told me. ‘No question about it, Philip was a very good father to his children when they were young.’ According to Lady Kennard, ‘He was a wonderful parent. He played with his children, he read them stories, he took them fishing, he was very involved. I remember we stayed with them in Scotland when Charles must have been about one. The three of them were so happy together, easy and relaxed. Philip has been marvellous with his grandchildren, too. He’s just good with the little ones.’ In the summer of 2002, when the prime minister, Tony Blair, and his wife, Cherie Booth, went to stay at Balmoral, Philip took a special shine to the Blairs’ two-year-old son, Leo. Proudly, Leo sang the whole first verse of the National Anthem to Philip and Philip responded happily by singing Leo the second verse. Cherie Blair told me, ‘I have to say that both the Queen and Prince Philip are really, really good with little children. You couldn’t fault them.’ (Whether you could fault Mrs Blair is another matter. I was told, on good authority, that when the Queen came to see Leo in the nursery at Balmoral, Mrs Blair had instructed her nanny not to curtsy to Her Majesty.)

Philip and Lilibet were very happy with their new baby. Parenthood suited them. According to all of their friends to whom I have spoken – friends who knew them in the 1940s and 1950s – the first few years of their marriage were, in many ways, the happiest. ‘Perhaps inevitably,’ Gina Kennard said to me, ‘Princess Elizabeth was not yet Queen, Philip was still in the Navy. They were young, they were relatively carefree.’ And they were cosseted. They were devoted to little Prince Charles, but they did not have to tend to him unaided. He had two Scottish nurses in constant attendance: Helen Lightbody, who arrived on the recommendation of the Duchess of Gloucester, whose sons she had looked after, and Mabel Anderson, who placed an advertisement in a nursing journal and was amazed to find herself invited to Buckingham Palace for an interview with the Princess.

Before Charles was born, Elizabeth had declared, ‘I’m going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.’ Well, she was – but, inevitably, because she was a princess as well as a mother, because ‘royal duty’ called and all her life Elizabeth made answering the call of royal duty her first priority, and because it was the way of her class and her time, much of the nitty-gritty of childcare was left to Mrs Lightbody and Miss Anderson. (Both nurses were maiden ladies. Because Helen Lightbody was the more senior, she was given the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’ as Alah Knight had been in her day.) Until Clarence House was ready for the family to move in to in July 1949, the baby

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