Today, 10 June 2020, is Prince Philip’s 99th birthday.
The Duke of Edinburgh and husband to Queen Elizabeth II was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1921.
To mark his birthday, here’s a closer look at Prince Philip’s early life and mother, who herself led quite an extraordinary and unconventional life – even for a royal.
Who was Prince Philip’s mother?
The Prince was born in Greece to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg.
When he was a small child, his parents were exiled from the country with most of the rest of the Greek royal family in 1917, and again in 1935 after their brief return because Prince Andrew was partly blamed for the fact that nation lost the Greco-Turkish War.
As a result, Prince Philip was educated in Germany, France and the UK.
His mother, Princess Alice, was Queen Victoria’s great-grandaughter, thus making he and his wife the Queen third cousins.
Princess Alice was born on 25 February 1885 at Windsor Castle and was found to be congenitally deaf after her mother noticed that she was having trouble pronouncing words.
After her diagnosis, Alice’s mother encouraged her to learn how to lip-read.
Alice married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1903 and lived with her husband in Greece until their forced exile in 1917, which was due to Andrew’s involvement in the Greco-Turkish war.
After this first exile, Prince Andrew, Princess Alice, Prince Philip and his four older sisters lived in Paris for a short while before Philip was sent to live in England and his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The Princess was committed to a Swiss sanatorium in 1930 and became a patient of none other than Sigmund Freud, who was said to have blamed her illness on ‘sexual frustration’ and recommended x-raying her ovaries to eliminate her libido.
Princess Alice stayed at the sanatorium for two years and is said to have had an extreme religious conversion around this time, believing she was receiving divine messages.
When she left the institution, she lived separately from her husband and devoted herself to her religion and charity work.
During World War 2. when the Nazis occupied Greece, Princess Alice bravely hid a family of Jewish refugees in her home even though such a thing would put her at great personal risk.
The Germans seem to have presumed that the Princess was a supporter of theirs, however when asked by a German general if there was anything he could do for her, she reportedly told him: ‘You can take your troops out of my country.’
After World War II, Princess Alice opened a Greek Orthodox nursing convent called the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, dedicated to helping the sick and vulnerable in Greece.
She is said to have grown increasingly frail in her later years, and in 1967, she moved into Buckingham Palace where she lived until her death in 1969 at the age of 84.
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