Renaissance man

IT is likely that only now will Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, begin to be fully appreciated for the contribution that he made to the life of Great Britain. In his later years, it became amusing for the press to paint him as a caricature: a peppery, rather inconsiderate man, forever putting his foot in it. One journalist followed him on an African trip and confided to The Duke’s detective that, for him, it had been a wasted journey as no gaffe had been made.

This trivialisation of so much of what The Duke did was tiresome for him, although he pressed on regardless, with a clear vision of what he aimed to do and the drive to follow it through until the goal was achieved.

Prince Philip’s life was nothing if not an unusual one, particularly as seen by a generation growing up in the new millennium, when most of the restrictions that circumscribed his youth have been laid aside.

The son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, he was born a Greek prince with no Greek blood, on June 10, 1921, at Mon Repos, a villa in Corfu, overlooking the