Despite their misgivings, there was little doubt that the King and Queen did little to dissuade Princess Elizabeth from seeing Philip. ‘He is intelligent, he has a good sense of humour and thinks about things the right way,’ the King wrote to his mother, Queen Mary. He added, however, that both he and the Queen thought her ‘too young for that now, as she has never met any young men of her own age’.

At Dartmouth, Prince Philip had excelled. He won the King’s Dirk as the best all-round cadet of his first term and capped it with the best cadet of the year. This was an exceptional performance as most of his contemporaries had already been at Dartmouth for several years while he was at Gordonstoun. He spent his book token prize on a copy of Liddell Hart’s The Defence of Britain, a significant choice as war with Germany was looming despite Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s promise of ‘peace in our time’. On 3 September 1939, war with Germany was declared.

Prince Philip’s first posting as a midshipman was to the battleship HMS Ramillies in January 1940 in the South Pacific. Philip spent the few days of his shore leave in Australia, working on a sheep farm rather than joining his shipmates who were having fun in the bars of Sydney. Over the course of several months, Philip was posted from ship to ship and, as a midshipman, was required to keep a log of anything of interest aboard each vessel. His journal has been praised for the detailed observations of technical matters, illustrated with plans, maps and diagrams and the occasional humorous note. According to the log, Durban was a favourite port of call and is mentioned several times with exclamation marks added – no doubt code for some good times had there.

Prince Philip’s fourth posting was to HMS Valiant in the Mediterranean fleet, where he first saw action at the bombardment of Bardia on the coast of Libya. His log records, ‘The whole action was a spectacular affair.’ He then spent two days in Athens where he saw his mother, Princess Alice, and cousin Alexandra among other Greek relatives. At a party there on 21 January, he caught the eye of the politician and diarist Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, whose entry for that day reads: ‘Prince Philip of Greece was there. He is extraordinarily handsome . . . He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy.’