Prince Philip adored his sisters, but spent much of the evening explaining to Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg how the glass blower had managed to trap a bubble of air in the stem of his champagne glass. Philip felt completely at ease with the international set of glamorous rich playboys and Alfonso, who later married the fifteen-year-old Fiat heiress Ira von Fürstenberg, was one of those whose company he enjoyed.

Rather as with the Thursday Club, it made a change from the stuffy post-war British establishment who so mistrusted him. It upset him that he was treated as an outsider by them, but he knew that with the Queen he would be able to share challenges together. And with two children to raise on top of their public duties, they had plenty to keep them fully occupied as they moved into the next stage of their lives together.

Chapter 6

PARENTHOOD

Almost exactly a year after their wedding, the 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth gave birth to a boy. The Westminster Abbey bells rang out and a 41-gun salute was fired in his honour by the King’s Troop Royal Artillery. The fountains in Trafalgar Square were floodlit blue and almost 4000 people flocked to Buckingham Palace to watch the comings and goings of the medical team.

The birth, at 9.14pm on a foggy night on 14 November 1948, had not been an easy one. The official bulletin, pinned to the gates of Buckingham Palace, announced that ‘Her Royal Highness and her son are doing well’. It was later revealed he was born by Caesarean section, but such was the prudery of the age that this was never officially disclosed. Even her friends were not informed. Breast feeding was not spoken of and pregnancy, especially a royal pregnancy, was a condition that polite society feigned to ignore.

In another indication of the contemporary attitudes, Philip did not attend his wife during her confinement. When her labour started, Mike Parker remembers the royal family gathered in the equerry’s room to await news of the birth. The King was stretched out by the fire and the prince was pacing the floor. Eventually Parker took him off for a game of squash. ‘Well, time stretched a bit and he was getting restless,’ Parker recalled. When the King’s private secretary Tommy Lascelles bought the good news, Philip bounded upstairs into the Buhl Room, which had been converted into an operating theatre. He then held his first born, still wearing his sporting flannels and open-necked shirt.

His wife was drugged after the operation and did not come to for some minutes more. But as soon as she did, Philip presented her with a bouquet of red roses and carnations, thoughtfully provided for the occasion by Parker. Elizabeth would later say that her husband’s face was the last she saw before she slipped under the anaesthetic and the first she saw when she came around again.