Prince Philip’s family name before he became Philip Mountbatten was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a name handed down from his Danish great-grandfather, but the German connections in his family tree were the cause of some gossip among the establishment in the early post-war years. Indeed, this may have been one of the reasons why he was initially treated so poorly by some who worked in the palace.

It is a fact that all four of Prince Philip’s sisters married aristocratic Germans, of whom two were active in the 1930s in Hitler’s Nazi party. None of the sisters was invited to the wedding of Philip and the Queen, largely because of these links to our wartime foes. But if that was the case, it was also true that Philip’s mother Alice risked her life to save persecuted Jews in Athens during the war, for which she was awarded Israel’s highest award for a foreigner. In 1994, Philip and his sister Sophie went to Jerusalem to receive the award posthumously on behalf of their mother.

For his own part, one of the greatest influences in Philip’s life was Kurt Hahn, a German Jew who founded Salem school and later Gordonstoun. Hahn had to flee Germany to escape persecution from the Nazis. There is a world of distinction between being German and being a Nazi, but in those difficult times some chose not to make that point. Indeed, as we will see later, these spurious allegations would never entirely go away.

The fact is that, in common with the British royal family, Philip has German blood on his mother’s side and many German relatives. This background still has an impact, even in some minor ways: for example, they retain the German custom of opening their presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas morning, following the tradition that Prince Albert maintained.

His mother’s family name was Battenberg and her father was Prince Louis of Battenberg, a German who joined the Royal Navy aged fourteen and rose to the rank of First Sea Lord by 1912. Although he was married to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Victoria of Hesse, Louis was forced to resign in 1914 because of anti-German sentiment brought on by the war, and he subsequently anglicised the family name to Mountbatten. For the same reason, in 1917 King George V abandoned the German-sounding family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and changed it to Windsor, after the castle.

The royal family had taken the dynastic name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Albert. By contrast, Philip was forced to abandon his family name for his children in favour of Windsor. His reported reaction was to exclaim: ‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.’ But, under a declaration made in Privy Council in 1960, the name Mountbatten-Windsor was applied to male-line descendants of the Queen and Prince Philip when a surname was required.