Prince Philip visited Australia more than 20 times over 72 years — with and without the Queen

When the British battleship HMS Ramillies sailed into Sydney Harbour on March 14, 1940, the crew included an 18-year-old midshipman, Philip Mountbatten (also known as Philip, Prince of Greece).

It would be first of more than 20 visits to these shores for Prince Philip — who died on Friday — with or without his wife, the Queen.

The Ramillies stayed in the Garden Island dockyards for a couple of weeks while the high-profile young sailor enjoyed the hospitality of posh Sydney families and a welter of dances, parties and outdoor sports.

In early April, the ship made its way to Melbourne, and Philip took advantage of another brief furlough to spend a week at a sheep station, which he described years later as the best holiday he’d ever spent: « perfectly natural life; no frills and no fads ».

But the fun was soon over and the following four months were spent sailing from Fremantle to Columbo, Aden and Alexandria, protecting the troop ships of the Australian Expeditionary Force on a dangerous journey across the Indian Ocean.

In the years that followed, Prince Philip saw active service in the Mediterranean (present in the Battle of Crete, the Battle of Cape Matapan and the Allied invasion of Sicily) and then in the Pacific. He was in Tokyo Bay, as first lieutenant on the HMS Whelp, when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender in September 1945. The Whelp then sailed on to Sydney in November.

During this second sojourn, he stayed at Admiralty House, and went several times to the home of the Greek Consul-General and a Greek Orthodox Church. He was also seen surfing at Palm Beach and Bondi, horseback riding and shooting, as well as dancing at the very fashionable Princes nightclub.

He appeared laughing on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, sitting on the ground after falling out of the revolving barrel at Luna Park.

The « Woman Reporter » from The Mirror in Perth said he was « as simple, as natural, as easy to talk to as any Australian boy-friend I’ve ever met », and he declared in return that he loved Australian girls for their freshness and their unaffected manners.

The only time he used his title, he swore, was « when I’ve got a lass to take out to dinner, can’t get a table. It’s useful then, believe me! » As he left Australia, he was carrying local cosmetics for his cousin Princess Marina and there were 20 tonnes of food in the hold for the heavily-rationed British.

The first royal visit

It would be another nine years before he returned, and in unimaginably different circumstances, for the royal tour of 1954 — the first by a reigning monarch, who happened to be his wife. Eight weeks long and encompassing 70 cities and towns, it remains the most elaborate and best-attended event in Australian history: 75 per cent of the population are estimated to have turned out for the young Queen and her dashing Prince.

The casual sailor was now Duke of Edinburgh, travelling with 15 suits, the service uniform of each of the armed services, trunks full of casual and sports clothes and every kind of hat.

His European origins had been put behind him. Although widely known as « Phil the Greek » (my father never called him anything else), there was not a whisper of this nickname heard in public. As historian Eddie Butler-Bowden once pointed out, anyone else in his situation would have been described by the tabloid papers as a « gold-digging continental », but, there was now no talk of Consul-Generals or anything Hellenic.

Australians were reassured that he had « not a drop of Greek blood in his veins, has spent no more than 15 months of his life in the country and cannot even speak the language ». And there was certainly no talk of girls.

From the moment of his engagement in 1947, there had been fascination with how this vigorous young man would adapt to life in the shadow of his wife, initially the Heiress Presumptive and after February 1952, the Queen. Many decades later this was still a point of great interest in the Netflix series, The Crown.

The most important thing Australian women’s magazines wanted their readers to know was that while Elizabeth might reign in public, the Duke wore the trousers at home. The 1954 tour, their greatest combined performance to date, was the first chance for the world to see if this balancing act was going to work.

There was little doubt, really: Philip was lauded as a thoughtful husband whose support was indispensable to his wife. He was said to help her through awkward social moments through his wit, and through visits to industrial or scientific installations through his masculine understanding.

He noticed children and old people in the crowds and drew them thoughtfully to her attention; his war service stood him in tremendous stead as he could address ex-servicemen as one of themselves. He was commended for keeping up her spirits and guiding her decisions:

« The Duke’s whole approach to the tour is as fresh and as stimulating as a cold drink on a hot day. He has no set pattern of behaviour to follow, so that he can do almost exactly as he pleases. This gives him a wonderful opportunity to lift the dull routine of the tour into something lively and of more general interest. »

The military personnel running the tour may not have always appreciated this independence.

Even before the tour started, the Duke had decided the official reading list was dull and had somehow found a copy of Power Without Glory, Frank Hardy’s very controversial novel about politics, corruption and crime.

He was keen to know how much was based on true events, and when he couldn’t get much joy out of ABC journalist — and future managing director — Talbot Duckmanton (who recalled later that it had all been rather difficult and a test of his diplomacy) he interrogated some willing students at the University of Melbourne, during an undergraduate « rag » where he was made to walk, grinning broadly, down a red carpet that had been eaten by moths.

As the tour wore on, becoming rather repetitious in every state, Philip’s tepid jokes became the thing that journalists most hoped for.

He warned an amateur photographer that his face might crack the camera, confided to a porter who « just went wobbly at the knees » that he hadn’t got a ticket for the train, delighted schoolchildren by pretending to grab an apple off an archway at the North Hobart Oval, and told a dental student that he knew all about Australian teeth because he’d seen so many of them in open Australian mouths.

From crocs to uranium

The 1954 Tour was really the high point of Australia’s adulation of the British royal family, but the Duke of Edinburgh made a further 19 visits over 57 years in which support for the monarchy and the republic ebbed and flowed in the opinion polls.

He was here again as soon as 1956, arriving for the first time by air, to open the Olympic Games in Melbourne. He also shot a crocodile (not at the Games) and inspected the uranium processing plant at Rum Jungle.

In 1962, he came for the Commonwealth Games in Perth and completed 59 engagements in 10 days, driving himself around town in the Rolls with the chauffeur in the passenger seat — before popping back home for Christmas and repacking his bags for the Queen’s second tour of state in February 1963.

A long pattern of official visits with the missus, punctuated by low-key « working trips » was then established, along with a persona which moved along a spectrum from fresh to maverick to grumpy and eventually to something more akin to « racist uncle ».

A number of the Prince’s visits were on business for the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, a scheme he founded in 1956, which was introduced in Australia in 1959. The Awards are based on a broad idea of self-improvement, physical fitness and community service and in the past 60 years, more than three-quarters of a million young Australians have taken part.

During these many visits, he acquired a large private collection of Australian art. According to journalist Juliet Rieden, he purchased 16 works by Indigenous artists, including Albert Namatjira, in 1956. Namatjira had been the only Aboriginal Australian to receive an invitation to an event in 1954, attending a garden party in Canberra.

In 1963, the Queen bought a work by Sidney Nolan for the Duke for his birthday and in later years, either by purchase or gift, he added paintings by Clifton Pugh, Donald Friend, William Dobell and Olga Clare Garner.

At the time Prince Philip retired from public life in 2017, he was still associated as patron, member or fellow with 36 Australian organisations.

‘What’s the matter with these people?’

In 1968, the Duke was described in the press, slightly sarcastically, as a « semi-independent statesman ».

During the course of his solo visit, he had spoken feelingly of the need to conserve our forests, enjoyed a brisk stoush with the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, and given an address to the National Press Club in which he opined freely about problems in the Commonwealth, the medieval nature of local government in Britain, and the future of the monarchy in Australia.

As reported in the Canberra Times:

During the referendum on a republic which finally took place many years later in 1999, the Prince kept uncharacteristically quiet, but it was later reported that not only was he surprised when the republicans failed, but actually said « What’s the matter with these people? Can’t they see what’s good for them?! »

A foiled assassination

It has been claimed that the Duke of Edinburgh was subject to an assassination attempt here in Australia in the early 1970s.

In March 2014, a former journalist and intelligence officer published allegations that the Irish Republican Army attempted to assassinate Prince Philip in Sydney on a solo visit in 1973. Warner Russell was working for the Sun newspaper and listening in to police radio when he heard the news that explosive devices, some real and some decoys, had been found along the route of the Prince’s motorcade, and swiftly secured by an army bomb disposal team.

He also claimed to have received a phone call 24 hours earlier from a man with a « guttural voice », who told him, « We are going to get that Greek bastard, the Duke. He is a dead man ».

Mr Russell immediately reported the phone call to the authorities, who informed him that the threat was credible. The IRA were known to be seeking revenge after the British Army had shot 14 unarmed Catholic protestors during the Bloody Sunday demonstrations.

According to Mr Russell, a Government D-notice was issued right away to prevent details of this attempt becoming public. The Duke’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was, of course, assassinated by the IRA in Ireland in 1979.

Final visits

Other trips in later years included the silver jubilee tour of 1977, the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982 and the Bicentennial in 1988.

The Duke aged, publicly at least, into an unrepentant curmudgeon. Sometimes his remarks were merely edgy (asked to stroke a koala in 1992, he replied, « Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease ») but others were worse. In 2002 he asked Indigenous performers in far north Queensland whether they were still throwing spears at each other.

Eventually, it reached a point when he was simply so elderly that public sympathy veered round again to admiration, if sometimes grudging, for a man who had seemed so very taken with this country and been coming here to do his duty for so long. The final controversy — the much-derided decision to award him an Australian knighthood in 2015 — wasn’t even really held against him, but rather Tony Abbott, the prime minister who proposed it.

Prince Philip last came to Australia in 2011, to accompany the Queen to a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth. It had been a very long time since that sporting young midshipman had first disembarked for some R&R during a war.

Dr Jane Connors is the author of Royal Visits to Australia.