After a brief honeymoon in Schloss Heiligenberg, one of several castles the Battenberg family owned, the couple sailed to Greece on the royal yacht Amphitrite. Alice was now a member of the Greek royal family, although she had never set foot in Greece, having been brought up with her parents in England. After a short stay in the royal palaces in Athens, Alice and Andrea moved to Corfu.

Their family home was called Mon Repos, a substantial villa built in the classical style in the 1820s by the British High Commissioner, Sir Frederick Adam, for his Greek wife. Although lacking in services such as gas and electricity, it was a palatial home by the standards of Corfu. Standing in grounds thick with orange and lemon trees and gardens scented with eucalyptus and pines with views across the Ionian Sea, it would eventually be inherited by Andrea from his father in 1913. He referred to Mon Repos as his ‘royal chateau’.

The island was Homer’s ‘beautiful and rich land’ and Odysseus’s last stop on his journey home to Ithaca. Mon Repos is on the Kanoni Peninsula south of Corfu town on the site of the ancient capital, Corcyra. The residence is shabby but the rooms are beautifully proportioned and it is not hard to imagine how lovely it once was. A small plaque on the outside gates is all there is to say it was the birthplace of Prince Philip, as the interior is now a museum and the dining room where he was supposed to have been born is empty, apart from a few glass cases with displays on the history of the Mon Repos estate.

Andrea and Alice had four daughters between 1905 and 1914 before, after a gap of seven years, Prince Philip was born on 28 May 1921 (later adjusted to 10 June when Greece adopted the Gregorian calendar). The family doctor decreed that the dining-room table was the most suitable place in the house for the delivery. As an officer in the Greek army, Andrea was away fighting the Turks at the time of the birth, so Philip’s first few months were spent in the company of adoring females who doted on him.

The housekeeper, Agnes Blower, when interviewed many years later, said that Philip with his blue eyes and blond hair was ‘the sweetest, prettiest baby’. She added that the family were ‘as poor as church mice’. Perhaps her memory was failing, as Andrea employed (in addition to the housekeeper) an English nanny, Miss Roose, a Greek cook, an English couple and some local footmen. While the four daughters were growing up, there was also a French governess. Even in exile years later, Andrea had a valet serving him until his dying day. The house was well stocked with baby food and clothes, which Nanny Roose ordered from London.