The prince who took a short cut
Prince Philip, the Queen’s consort and father of the current British monarch, visited Switzerland many times ‒ far more often than his wife. On one such occasion, he took part in the 1981 European Four-in-Hand Carriage Driving Championship held in Zug, where his actions placed the jury in a delicate situation.
Michael van Orsouw
Michael van Orsouw has a PhD in history and is a performance poet and author. He regularly publishes historical books.
Website: geschichte-texte.ch
What they didn’t tot up were his numerous faux pas, a genuine source of embarrassment to the royal household. Not realising he could be overheard, he once commented about journalists: “Here come the bloody reptiles!” He remarked to a fellow countryman he met in Hungary: “You can't have been here that long ‒ you haven't got a pot belly.” And during a visit to China, he told British students: “If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed.”
Mother confined to a Swiss clinic
His mother Alice of Battenberg suffered from schizophrenia, diagnosed by none other than psychoanalyst Sigmund Freund himself. She was therefore admitted against her will to the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, an institution for patients suffering from ‘nervous disorders and mental illness’, to use the parlance of the time, run by Ludwig Binswanger. Its many celebrity patients included artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and actor Gustaf Gründgens. For the young Philip, his mother’s confinement meant being passed from one relation to another for the next two-and-a-half years. He was only allowed to visit her at the Swiss clinic on a handful of occasions.
Thankfully, this did not appear to colour his view of the country, and he would later travel to Switzerland many times. For example, he came to Frauenfeld in 1974 for an equestrian competition. He also paid regular visits after taking on two important offices, serving from 1964 to 1986 as president of the Fédération Équestre Internationale (FEI), the international governing body of equestrian sports, at that time headquartered in Bolligen and Ostermundigen, and as president of WWF, based in Gland on Lake Geneva, from 1981 to 1996.
The prince on the box seat
Prince Philip was involved in the event in a dual capacity, both as FEI president and as an elite athlete taking part in the competition as a member of the reigning team of four-in-hand world champions. The horse-mad aristocrat had barely arrived in Zug when he leaped into his carriage and set off along a main thoroughfare towards the Lorze river. Used to trotting along the other side of the road at home in the United Kingdom, his team of four horses veered dangerously to the left. Luckily, the Prince was able to steer them back to the right side.
The Zuger Tagblatt newspaper quoted the reaction of onlookers: “We’ll probably never get to see Philip that close up again”. The prince appeared very relaxed and spent an hour-and-a-quarter driving around the green area by the river. Reporters asked him how he liked the canton of Zug. With his typical, undiplomatic bluntness, his royal highness replied: “Not quite enough room for my taste.” The horses were returned to the stables, where the prince rewarded each of them with a lump of sugar before helping out with the unharnessing and grooming. When at the stables or the competition grounds on the site of Zug’s traditional cattle market, the prince looked for all the world like a stable boy. On one occasion, when requesting admission in broken German, he was brusquely turned away by the security man, who failed to recognise him. You see, Philip had left his official rosette, which would have granted him access, in the Range Rover.
A little tipple in a country inn
The competition brought together 40 teams from 13 nations. The prince drove a metal-wheeled carriage that had been built to his specifications in 1975. He had only taken up four-in-hand driving when pain in his wrist forced him to stop playing polo. It then occurred to him that carriage-driving might just be the thing to replace polo. Although quite a challenge, he is known to have relished the sheer pleasure and satisfaction it brought and once remarked that he was especially pleased at still being able to work with horses.
But now, standing beside his horses in the Herti stadium, Philip was “barely able to hide how touched he was by the wave of sympathy directed towards him.” Or so the reporter for the Luzerner Tagblatt newspaper believed.
A gentleman at the reins
And so the gentleman finished 10th out of 40 participants, and the British picked up the bronze medal in the team competition. In an impromptu celebration to toast their success, Prince Philip and his colleagues sat cross-legged on the ground and passed bottles of whisky around the circle. As the evening drew on, the prince and other members of the British team were to be seen dancing enthusiastically to live music played by three accordionists. The Zuger Nachrichten newspaper commented that he was “in high spirits and danced almost non-stop”. An indication that the prince had left his less than happy childhood recollections of Switzerland far behind?
