Exclusive! My Secret Life With the Duke of Edinburgh

I'm well aware 99EndOf  readers don't rush here for commentary upon the (remarkably prolonged) lives of the high and mighty .But this one is an open goal, so please bear with me as I wander down memory lane to my summers in the sun with the recently deceased chap the papers and telly are full of -yes, you know the one. 

It wasn't an acquaintance I expected to make; my family being not particularly close to the Royals. To start with, the Windsors didn't hang out much in the slums of east-end Glasgow in the 1960's. Beyond that, my father (a delusional card-carrying Communist) believed the correct response to the sight of royalty was to sharpen the local guillotine and organise a mob. Maybe that's why Britain's first family  gave the Gorbals such a wide berth, who knows? 

But when the new century dawned, I began seeing rather a lot of HRH the Dook, or as my colleagues and I used to call him, Phil the Greek. You see, for several years, during the spring and summer, he and I would spend many of our weekends going -discreetly- to the same posh places and obsessing on the same weird thing. Now if anyone from Buck House is reading this (and I know you are) before you get on the phone to the libel lawyers, let me state that weird thing was a harmless, little-publicised activity called Horse Driving Trials.

HORSES AND HOUNDS

More by chance than choice, in 2004 I had been persuaded to start writing for Horse & Hound magazine. Within a few weeks I was deluged with work. It turned out my ability to deliver coherent, accurate copy with tidy grammar and spelling wasn't that easy to find among the horsey set. I became, in short, a desirable commodity. 

It's flattering being a prized fish, even in a small pool that smells of horse-dung. I happily took on reporting gigs for carriage driving, county shows, showjumping, dressage, even a bit of long-distance horsiness called endurance, which I can assure you is well-named.

Then one weekend I was dispatched to a leafy park on the outskirts of Brighton to cover a "Horse Driving Trial" which would be (I was promised) a lot more exciting than the processions of horsey cleverness that were my bread and butter. This was music to my ears - until I heard the surprise detail. Be aware, I was told, the Duke of Edinburgh invented this sport and he will be there, participating, and you're pretty much  bound to meet him.

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

There are, as every guttersnipe would expect, a list of  'do's and dont's' regarding rubbing shoulders with the anointed ones, and a heavy implication that if you screw up you'll be back on the dole by sunrise. Ominously, however, I was neither designed nor trained for compliance or submission. 

So I packed my H&H journalisming kit and set off for a three-day stint Stanmer Park in a mindset of well, guess this'll be the end of my cushy horse-reporting job because I was not -repeat not-  going to be calling HRH "sir" or "Your Royal Highness" this side of the grave. I'm no Commie but I don't kiss ass, least of all to multi-millionaire playboys who traded up in the marriage market.

 En route to the horse-driving trial I mused on various scenarios that might occur. Maybe Phil the Greek would win  something and I'd have to interview him. If I failed to deliver a sufficient display of grovelling, would that be the end of my country larks?  We would see.

I had already learned that the onsite H&H reporter is a bit of a teeny-weeny celebrity at a horse show. Everybody pretends to like you. Let's get real -nobody else is likely to write about them. It's not as if even one percent of the public give a flying fetlock what the hell happens at an obscure horse-competition in a remote park. I was operating in tiny, obscure world of specialists and feteshists. But even though I'd only been embracing this kind of madness for a few weeks, goddammit I was getting paid, so I rolled with it.  

THREE DAYS AND NIGHTS

Long story short, Phil won nothing at all, but we met anyway, and the grand Greek honcho who earned his millions by walking quite close to HRH Queen Elizabeth II turned out to be exactly what you might expect. Selectively loud and/or withdrawn, wildly self-important and detatched (by turns), egotistic and armed with completely unshakeable confidence. The kind of confidence that comes from knowing you can leave the vicinity on the helicopter in which you arrived, with a snap of your royal fingertips. And we talked (at his request, not mine). He was polite to a fault, and cleverly evaded the protocols with which I would never have colluded. In return, I made no references to guillotines or ptchforks.

A horse-driving trial lasts three days so there's an unavoidable social element which must be addressed. It goes like this:

Friday night (post-dressage) all the competitors get mildly pissed. Friday's a relatively easy day because dressage is mainly dress-up in 19th century clothes and making horses dance. It's not at all dangerous so the atmosphere was chilled and WTF it was usually nice weather and you're pratting about on a country estate playing with dobbins. Life could be worse. I was gobsmacked by the whole palava. Everybody -myself included- made camp and drank too much before retiring to our tents.

Saturday all the competitors drove their horses - one horse, a pair of horses, or a team of four- on a gruelling marathon run, climaxing with an adrenalin-charged race against the clock through a series of eight obstacles built out of railway sleepers and such. It was patently very dangerous. People got hurt. Horses got hurt. It was cross-country stagecoach racing on steel wheels. Think Ben Hur re-shot on on a gigantic up-market farm.On Saturday nights a marquee went up, beer bareels appeared and everyone got properly pissed, mainly from relief that neither they, nor their horses, had got killed. 

Sunday was reserved for a speed-competition where the horses dashed through a twist-and-turn course against the clock. At the end, everybody's points (over all three days) were totalled and winners were declared and rewarded (with worthless trophies and nothing else). Which made sense to the likes of Phil, because when you're that bloody rich another trophy is all the extra you can get out of life. But plenty of the competitors were not super-rich, just super crazy.  

  

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The Driving Duke had cooked up this travelling summertime circus with another carrige-driving maniac from Yorkshire called George Bowman -they were pals-  and together they had turned it into an international sport which the public scarcely knew existed. So now I spent my summer weekends at gaffs like the royal estate of Sandringham or the magnificent country houses of Farleigh and Catton etc watching the antiquated equestrian fantasies of rich British obsessives made real. It was nuts but it was bucks and what the hell it was better than working.

By the third summer I knew everybody's names and really looked forward to these fantastical weekends away. I could hardly believe I was getting paid to watch people engage in a sport with no prizes and no audience to speak of either. I had the odd horsey natter with our royal figurehead and all was amicable.

One morning in 2006 I woke in the tented village in the (utterly magnificent) landscaped grounds of Catton Hall and went for an early stroll along the riverbank. It suddenly occurred to me that the Dook had craftily recreated the entire "King Goes Travelling" experience all by himself. There he was, slumbering in a hefty four-poster bed after a goodly banquet in the Great Hall, while outside the tree-lined driveway, a few dozen more common people with horses pitched tents, necked their sandwiches and beer and waited for him to wake up so the day's events could begin. More theatre than sport, I thought, and then I thought some more. Why, I wondered, was I the only journalist at these events? 

The truth, of course, was simple. An unspoken arrangement meant the Press, who would normally crawl naked over burning coals for a candid snap of a Royal at play, were told to stay well clear. Privilege is infectious, however, so the gentleman from Horse & Hound, given his peculiar, elevated status, was permitted into the playground. Laugh? I nearly fell in the river. Sadly, I realised my growing collection of agreeable photographs featuring Phil and his chum the fragrant Lady Penny Romsey had better stay private, and indeed they have.

HORSEPOWER IS REAL

I was learnng thta horses matter, and they always have. For most of recorded history, I came to understand, horses and carriages were -in Europe at least- the very stuff of power. For the Kings and Queens of the Middle Ages, horses were not mere playthings or symbols of wealth, but the actual weapons of war, the elite means of travel and the tools of social control over the peasants. You can easily see why royal types remain so very horsey to this day. 

Horses meant power. When the evil Count first appears in Bram Stoker's masterpiece Dracula, he is driving a coach drawn by four coal-black horses, foaming monsters, their manes flashing in the wind. (The coach-and four was very much the 19th century Range Rover 4x4). This image of horsepower and carriage announces his great wealth, his unquestioned ownership of the land and the scope of his power over the local people. A great part of Dracula's appeal as a character was that confluence of corruption, wealth and supernatural power in the form of a vampire who refused to die.    

These thoughts leapt to mind when I heard the Duke had popped his clogs. As you may have noticed, they don't go quickly into the night, these Windsors. Not that I ever saw him feasting on anyone's jugular, you understand. I never felt the need to festoon my tent with garlic and crucifixes. To be honest I never even got on the wrong side of him, because the Driving Dook never managed to win anything while I was reporting, so I never had to do the formal interview with quotes from him etc. 

I knew, however, that for three years he was quietly gagging to be quizzed about the sport he loved so much. They are that insecure, take my word for it. But I had a strict rule that only winners got quoted, so on that wheel his ego was never turned. 

TOMORROW'S VAMPIRES

There remains one small but succulent anecdote which I will revisit, with a brand new relevance. The Masters of the Universe in Silicone Valley announced this very week that their top scientists are investing billions into the fast-developing process of supplying young blood to old millionaires to extend their vitally important lives. (This is California codespeak for "we're already doing it -give us a ring today!") Such an in-your-face swing into open vampirism has gone largely unremarked. but not, I imagine, in the palaces of the great and good where geezers stagger on to 99, toodle pip.

So lets rewind, one last time, to the summer of 2006 when I was, as usual, at Stanmer Park covering a Driving Trial for Horse & Hound. At sunrise in the tent-park, the editor of a rival magazine offered to drive me around the obstacle course in his 4x4, to give us an informational edge about forthcoming events. Having eff all else to do at that ungodly hour, I agreed. 

Parked at obstacle two, I was mumbling incoherently about the possibilities of breakfast, when a huge, dark 4x4 with tinted windows pulled up next to us. The driver's window hissed down to reveal the grinning skull of HRH himself, plus assistant. Acquaintances all, we exchanged nods. 

My companion -a devout royalist and loyalist- swung into warp-factor ten brown-nosing: Good morning Sir! I must say you're looking well! and so forth. A 30-second chat established that the Duke and his backstop (the assistant every driving competitor carries) had a combined age of 179. The pipsqueak I was stuck next to went back for one last grovel -My word, 179  sir! How on earth do you manage to look so damned healthy, your Highness? he bleated.

Phil the Greek opened one of those small smiles that billionaires use to shut you up with.

"Monkey glands," he said, and drove away, towards the Great Hall in the distance.

Ian Andrew-Patrick

The above is a true story. Life's like that. Truth really is that mundane. Elsewhere on this blog you can find rather more useful, interesting and revealing articles on a variety of subjects, not least the Coronavirus crisis. Please share, repost and publicise any and all information and links you find. In an age when censorship is running out of control, it matters that we share.  99EndOf has no affiliation with any political party. We support only the individual, and the rights and freedoms to which we are all entitled by birth in a free country.