Their first year of marriage, living at Buckingham Palace, was not easy, but eventually Clarence House became available. ‘It was a shambles,’ Mike Parker remembered. ‘But it was got together very quickly, and they furnished it with a lot of their wedding presents.’ After his turbulent childhood, it was the first proper home Prince Philip had ever had. He had finally found real happiness and stability with the woman he loved, but it was to be short-lived.

Chapter 2

CHILDHOOD CONTRASTS

Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England, and Prince Philip of Greece were born in an age when it was almost unthinkable for a member of any of the royal families of Europe to marry a commoner. Princes married princesses, royal cousins married royal cousins. When Queen Victoria married her first cousin, twenty-year-old Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, a dynasty came into being that linked the thrones of Britain, Denmark, Greece and Russia with the Grand Duchies of Prussia.

Princess Elizabeth arrived in the world at 2.40am in 17 Bruton Street on 21 April 1926 in the heart of London’s Mayfair. At the time, London was the largest, most polluted and dirtiest city in the world with a population of nearly 8 million. Sheep were still allowed in Hyde Park, their fleeces covered with soot from the smoke-filled air, but they kept the grass under control and shepherds competed to be allowed to graze their woolly flocks in the London parks.

The British aristocracy, with their fine, large houses and estates, enjoyed immense privilege, and although the First World War had altered the domestic class structure, their lives still revolved around the sporting calendar. In Mayfair, most of the five-storey houses were privately owned and boasted magnificent ballrooms. They usually stood empty during the shooting and hunting seasons – the furniture covered with dust sheets only to be brought to life again during the London season. The smartest department stores were Harrods, which boasted a magnificent food hall and whose present building was completed in 1905, and Selfridges, which opened in 1909. Despite this, there were very few grand hotels, such as the Savoy and the Ritz, with the Grosvenor House not opening until 1929. The little princess learnt to ice skate there aged seven as they had a skating rink in the Great Room, the mechanics of which are still in place below.

The house where the princess was born was the London home of her grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, who also owned a Scottish estate (Glamis Castle) and a country house in Walden Bury, Hertfordshire. The pillared, double-fronted house in Bruton Street no longer exists, but opposite, at number 10, the 1930s façade of Norman Hartnell’s showrooms bears testimony to the grandeur of the area.