Prince Andrew of Greece after his exile and his son Philip's attitude towards him
Fathers come in all sorts.
One of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark's relatives described him as a "deeply unhappy man". Andreas parted from his wife soon after his expulsion from Greece and spent the rest of his life with his mistress in Monte Carlo, where he lived mostly aboard the yacht "Davida", passed his time in the casino and drank heavily. For the last five years of his life he did not see his only son, Philip. Andreas died in Monaco, at the Hôtel Métropole, on 3 December 1944.
His wife Alice suffered from fits of madness that took hold of her, and for many years was treated for paranoid schizophrenia in psychiatric clinics in Switzerland.
In effect, Prince Philip was deprived of parental upbringing from the age of eight, deprived of a home and a family hearth; his only thread to a family was his mother's relatives, who supported him during his schooling in England. Despite this unsettled upbringing, he never permitted himself a single word against his father. From 1939 Prince Philippos served in the British Royal Navy. Nine months before his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, the future queen, in 1947, he took British citizenship and the surname Mountbatten.
When the memoirist Hugo Vickers wrote an authorised biography of Princess Alice and showed Philip the draft, the Duke of Edinburgh drew attention to the words saying that Andreas had "abdicated his role as husband and father", and objected: "Nonsense! Every summer I spent a three-day holiday with him." And when his own biographer Giles Brandreth wrote that Prince Andrew had sailed off to the south of France, Philip corrected him: "My father did not 'sail off' to the south of France, he went by train."
Such a man of principle, a man for all seasons, true to his family. A pity that his infantile grandson Harry did not follow in his grandfather's footsteps.
