The Great Survivors by Peter Conradi

Author:Peter Conradi [Conradi, Peter]
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Tags: monarchy, royalty, royals, peter conradi, the king's speech, Princess Diana, Grace Kelly, Queen Elizabeth, royal family, Kate Middleton, Prince William, Prince Charles, royalty of europe
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2012-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

‌Chapter 10

‌Learning to Be a Monarch

Situated deep in the countryside of north-eastern Scotland, Gordonstoun was founded in 1933 by Dr Kurt Hahn, a German Jew with some unusual ideas. Hahn had been headmaster of Salem Castle School in southern Germany, but fled after being threatened by the Nazis. As a young man he had visited Morayshire to recover from illness and so the following year chose to establish his international school in two seventeenth-century buildings there.

Hahn set out to blend the traditional British public-school ethos with a philosophy derived in part from Plato’s Republic. Thus the head boy was known as “Guardian”, the school’s emblem was a trireme and the regime was Spartan. Hahn believed young people were “surrounded by a sick civilization… in danger of being affected by a fivefold decay: the decay of fitness, the decay of initiative and enterprise, the decay of care and skill, the decay of self-discipline, the decay of compassion”, and set himself the task ‌of combating such a situation.1

The four hundred boys wore shorts the whole time, regardless of the weather, and began each day with a run in the grounds, followed by hot and then cold showers. They slept in crude wooden beds in dormitories, where the windows were always left open at night – which meant wet sheets or a light dusting of snow for those unfortunate enough to sleep next to them. Emphasis was put on militaristic discipline and physical education, including sailing and hill-walking. It was intended, said Hahn, to be a place where “the sons of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege”.

It was into this curious world that Prince Charles, a rather shy young thirteen-year-old and heir to the British throne, stepped in April 1962. Charles, the first child of the then Princess Elizabeth, was born in the Buhl Room at Buckingham Palace on 14th November 1948 just after eleven p.m. Outside, a crowd, three thousand strong, celebrated until the early hours of the morning, ignoring the entreaties of the police to quieten down.

In the autumn before her son was born, Elizabeth had declared, “I’m going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.” Yet, inevitably, duty intruded, especially after she became queen, and Charles, not yet four, like other royal children before him, was brought up by nannies. “He was very responsive to kindness,” recalled his Scottish governess, Catherine Peebles, “but if you raised your voice to him he would draw back into his shell and for a time you would be able ‌to do nothing with him.”2

Prince Philip wanted his son to come out of his shell and so, at the age of eight, after three years of Peebles’s lessons, he was sent to school – making him the first heir to the British throne to be educated with other children. This being class-based Britain, where the children of the affluent are educated separately from everybody else, it could not be just the local primary school. Charles was sent instead to Hill

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