The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (21 page)

The charity for which Prince Philip is probably best known is the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, which he founded with Kurt Hahn in 1956. Nearly ten years ago I was asked to present Gold Awards on his behalf to young people who had achieved the top accolade and duly put aside a morning to spend in St James’s Palace. The Duke’s rudeness is legendary but his behaviour that morning took my breath away. With so many Gold Award recipients these days – about five thousand each year, which is a real testament to its success – he can’t do them all in person so celebrities of one sort or another are asked to help. In this instance each of us was given a group of award recipients and put into interconnecting state rooms; we were to present the awards and the Duke, we were told, would come into each room to meet us all and talk to the recipients. I did my stuff and the Duke came into the room as planned; he spoke genially to all the young recipients, quizzed them, joked with them, congratulated them heartily on achieving their Gold Award, but when he was introduced to me the smile vanished from his face, he looked me up and down – I swear he snorted but I could be making it up – and walked on past without a word. But I am in good company – he did the same, I am told, to Jennie Bond, for many years the BBC’s royal correspondent.

However, having now watched him on many occasions and spoken to dozens of the organizations with which he is involved, including the NPFA, I have had to swallow my pride and prejudice. They all agree that he can be unspeakably rude, he has a fearsome temper – which he has handed on to most of his children – and is not unknown to have reduced people to tears, but he is the ultimate professional, is as sharp as a razor, and still, despite being well into his eighties, phenomenally hard-working. There is no excuse for being rude to people who are not in a position to answer back (or failing to be civil to someone who has given up time on your behalf) but he is very much a product of his age and circumstance, and those who work with him appear to forgive him.

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme was not the Duke’s invention although he has been the driving force behind it for nearly fifty years. The educationalist Kurt Hahn formed the basis for it back in 1934 but it was not launched in its present form as a national youth programme until over twenty years later, when he approached Prince Philip. Hahn was the man who founded Gordonstoun, the outward bound-type boarding school in Morayshire in the north of Scotland where Charles was so miserable during his teens, and where his brothers followed. Hahn also founded Outward Bound, another of the Duke’s charities. Prince Philip had been one of the first pupils at Gordonstoun, after Hahn was forced to flee Nazi Germany and move his revolutionary school from Salem to the Moray Firth. Gordonstoun was his solution for civilizing adolescents; the other feather in his cap was United World Colleges, which he founded in 1962 as an international sixth-form college, preparing adolescents for life. He believed that education could tear down national barriers and promote international cooperation and therefore peace.

The idea behind the Award Scheme was to give young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five from every background and situation a chance to experience challenge and adventure, and thereby a sense of achievement and personal fulfilment. It was inspired by the same philosophy that drove his schools. He wanted to make the tough compassionate and the timid enterprising, to create citizens who would not shrink from leadership and, if called upon, could make independent decisions and put the right moral action before expediency and the common cause before personal ambition. The young people who sign up for the Award know none of that; they do it because it’s fun and their mates are doing it, but they come out at the other end with a lot of the qualities Kurt Hahn was rather pompously striving to foster.

Vice Admiral Mike Gretton, who was director of the Award from 1998 until 2005, had known the Duke of Edinburgh in a naval context ‘where his reputation for telling you that you were talking nonsense went before him’, so there were no particular terrors for him in working for the Duke on dry land.

And I’ve been told I’m talking nonsense quite a few times since – usually with a huge guffaw of laughter and as long as you argue back and make your case it’s fine. One of the most fascinating things I’ve found about him is when you’re having one of these ding-dongs – good discussions I would call them – at the end the outcome was not always clear – had HRH accepted my point? Then I’d go to Miles Hunt-Davis, his brilliant Private Secretary, and say, ‘We had this discussion and he didn’t actually say “Yes, Mike, I totally agree with you”, or “No, that’s nonsense”.’ And Miles would say, ‘Mike, if he’s said nothing, you’re okay. It means he’s accepted it, he just doesn’t say so quite so clearly.’ The
first time this happened was over a very technical detail about the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award age limits. I went to brief him about this and he was pretty grumpy about it; he wasn’t liking it and I was arguing it backwards and forwards, and I came out not really knowing whether I had got his mind or not. Two weeks later we were at the Waterside Hall in Belfast having our General Council, with a thousand people there from the Award, and someone asked a fairly hostile question from the floor about this change to the age limits. It was fourteen but it’s more sensible to apply it as Year Nine in the English system when some children are thirteen and some fourteen – that would allow the younger ones to join with their peer group. He answered that question from the floor with all of the points I had deployed to him, much better than I could have quoted them, and that shut the audience up and there was never another word about it again. It was a minor but contentious issue, which he had hoisted in totally and transmitted logically. Very, very impressive. I just wish he had told me earlier; but that’s not his style. I think he just likes to think about things and keep people on their toes, so they cannot presume which way he’s going to jump.

There are three different awards – Bronze, Silver and Gold – and four components to each award, but there is no element of competition. It has nothing to do with ability; each individual sets his or her own goals, has help from an adult mentor, and success is measured on a personal level by how far he or she advances. So it is as valuable for people with handicaps, special needs and social disadvantages as it is for the able-bodied sons and daughters of the middle classes. Indeed, in 1956 the scheme was initially aimed at young men who left school as early as possible and who did not get jobs before starting National Service at eighteen. So making the Award
available to young people with different backgrounds has always been a priority for the Duke of Edinburgh.

It also thrives abroad. It is now operating in 115 countries – not always under the same name but always the same programme – and since 1956 over five million people have taken part in it.

Paul Arengo-Jones was, until he retired recently, general secretary of the International Award Association.

In very simple terms, it encourages young people to do what they like doing better, to learn more about it and to find an adult who will encourage them. The outcome is their own feeling of self-worth goes up in leaps and bounds because, for the first time in their lives, they are doing what they want to do, not what teachers or parents want them to do, and they are finding they can do it better and are having a relationship with an adult who is only there to help that person do what that young person wants to do.

A high percentage of the Award Groups are operated at schools and youth organizations but they are also run in prisons where, according to Arengo-Jones, there have been extraordinary results:

In South Africa they conducted a survey to see how many of the seven thousand young people who had been through the President’s Award programme – as it is called there – had re-offended and found that seven had. That figure would normally have been 86 per cent. It’s incredible and a bit risky because they sometimes change their name. But even if that figure is wrong by 100 per cent or 200 per cent, it is still so substantially below the normal as to be unbelievable.
But every time I go there I get another set of figures which is the same. It stops them re-offending, and the prison service makes it available to all young people who go through the system.

In Britain the figures are also good. In one area in the southeast the re-offending rate of young people engaged in the Award Scheme was 2.5 per cent compared with 32 per cent of young people on final warnings and 85 per cent on probation orders who were not in the Award.

The Duke has handed over much of the practical day-to-day running of the International Award Association to Prince Edward; but Prince Philip is still Patron, and although the 50th anniversary in 2006, when he will be eighty-five, might seem the ideal moment to step down from the entire operation, he shows no inclination to do so. He is still involved, still influential and still participating in the triennial International Forums, last held in 2003 in Barbados. Father and son were there together, both staying in the same unglamorous holiday block as everyone else, in simple rooms with a double bed and bathroom, no valets, just protection officers. Prince Philip doesn’t enjoy the fuss that so often goes with the territory. At a conference in Auckland one year he was irritated by the convoy of cars with flashing blue lights that the local police had laid on to escort him. When he arrived at the event he walked down the line of policemen and said, ‘When we leave I want three or four cars; no more.’ Five cars were waiting for him when he came out of the conference; he counted them. ‘Come on,’ he said to his companions, ‘we’re walking’, and they walked the mile or so back to the hotel. It caused total confusion but it was the last time there were too many cars in the convoy. He hates the use of sirens, hates driving through red traffic lights. ‘Why can’t we stop?’ he will ask.

Paul Arengo-Jones, twenty years his junior, is in awe of the Duke’s stamina.

He works incredibly hard for us. We did a tour of the West Indies; seven countries in five days. He was seventy-nine or eighty at the time and I had managed to borrow a private jet and met him in the Bahamas and had crammed the programme. There’s a rule with his programme: never leave empty spaces. What’s the point in being there if you’re not going to work? is his attitude. So when we were planning it I drew up this horrendous programme. I sent it up to him saying, ‘This is the maximum we can fit in. I hope Your Royal Highness will draw some lines.’ It came back, tick. At the end of it I was absolutely on my chin strap, exhausted; private aircraft, chauffeurs, it didn’t make any difference. He was utterly unfazed by the whole thing, striding forward, ‘What do I have to say now? Where am I going? What do I have to do?’

He is also impressed by how hard the Duke works. He can write to him 365 days of the year and no matter where the Duke is, whether at Balmoral, on a foreign tour or on holiday, he will get a response within three or four days, and often will have typed it himself. If he has asked for a message, for example, the Duke will draft something and send it, saying, ‘Is this okay, do please just scribble on the paper so I can make the changes on my computer.’ Says Arengo-Jones, ‘I’ve given up writing notes for speeches, I just provide bullet points that I’d like included or names he might mention, and he will do it all himself. I believe every evening before he goes to bed he clears his desk. I’ve certainly been phoned at 11.00 at night by a Private Secretary saying, “We need that brief, could you get it delivered to Government
House at 6.30 a.m. so he can read and absorb it before breakfast?”’

He always comes to everything very well briefed, he’s always on time, knows when to be there and when to leave; both him and the Earl. You say you’d like them to come to a cocktail party from 6.00 to 7.00. They say, ‘Okay, how many people?’ You say, ‘About a hundred and twenty’, and they say, ‘Okay, forty minutes’. They know exactly how long it takes to work a room and come out the other side without having to go round twice or feeling spare at the end. They will talk to everybody. Once in South Africa they were going round meeting everyone and one group moved because they thought they were going to be missed and the Duke got to the end and I said, ‘Right, I think that’s the lot’ and he said, ‘No, there’s one missing’, and looked round and spotted them and was off, had a chat with them, then said, ‘Now we go’. He had noticed when he went in who the groups were; he’s an utter professional. You go back into the room and everyone says ‘Wow’ because he’s talked to them all and he’s interested and he’s very knowledgeable.

Another well-known charity with which the Duke’s name has long been associated is the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature as it’s now called). He agreed to be President for five years and is just clocking up his 33rd year and still going strong. Making conversation over lunch with girls and staff from the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in March 2004, during a visit with the Queen to mark the school’s 150th anniversary, he asked the chairman of the Council how long he had been in post. Having originally taken the job on for five years, the answer was very many more. ‘I did exactly the same thing
with WWF,’ said the Duke. ‘Goodness,’ said one of the girls, ‘I didn’t know you had an interest in wrestling.’

Dr Claude Martin who has worked with him at WWF for many of those years says he has been a very good Chair. He’s been on hundreds of trips to see wildlife and endangered species, and opened doors all over the world to the most influential people. ‘We were once on a trip into the Congo basin and on into forest. Prince Philip complained he never saw any wild animals because there were so many bloody policemen hiding in bushes they scared everything away. So we took him into forest with no one and saw masses of wildlife. He loved it.’