The Duke at 80

HE is the Prince Of A Thousand Gaffes. Think of the most inappropriate thing it is possible for the consort of a head of state to say in any given circumstance and chances are, somewhere along the line, Prince Philip has managed to say it.

Top of the list of howlers has to be his comment to British students in China, during a 1986 state visit. "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed," he said.

But there are plenty more. "You can't have been here that long - you haven't got a pot belly," he told a British citizen he met in Budapest, Hungary, in 1993. "You are a woman, aren't you?" he asked a local woman in Kenya in 1984 after she had presented him with a gift. "It looks as if it was put in by an Indian," he said in 1999, pointing at an old-fashioned fuse box in a factory near Edinburgh.

Some of the things he says are so daft it's almost endearing, in an appalling sort of way. "Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf," he told a group of deaf young people in Cardiff in 1999, referring to a nearby school steel band. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?" he asked a driving instructor in Oban, Scotland, during a 1995 walkabout.

To judge Philip simply on his headline-making blunders, however, probably wouldn't be fair. Anybody who has spent most of their adult life as little more than the shadow of their more significant spouse is surely entitled to an outburst or two now and then. More remarkable than his blunders, perhaps, is the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh has somehow managed, for almost 50 years, to play the part of the Queen's dutiful consort without flipping his lid more often.

It can't have been easy. Back in the late 1940s, when Philip was first linked romantically with the future Queen, he was the all-action hero, the dashing naval officer who had swept the young future Queen off her feet.

He was a figure straight out of romantic fiction. Impoverished son of a former Prince of Greece, he was evacuated from Corfu with the rest of his family in 1922 at the age of 18 months after his father, a lieutenant-general in the Greek army, was banished for his alleged part in the heavy defeat of the Greeks by the Turks earlier that year.

Philip was carried into exile in a British warship, his makeshift cot was made from an old orange box

The young prince's childhood was fairly bleak. He grew up largely without a permanent home because his family relied on the generosity of well-placed friends and relatives in various European countries. His parents gradually grew apart and his father moved to Monte Carlo while his mother, who was deaf, became an Orthodox nun.

Philip attended schools in the UK and Germany before ending up at Gordonstoun, where his uncle, the ambitious Lord Mountbatten, began to take a keen interest in his nephew's progress.

Much has been written about Mountbatten's role in promoting Philip as a future husband for a future Queen - but his plan to elevate the Mountbatten family name to the status of a royal dynasty failed.

The first publicised meeting between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip was at the naval college in Dartmouth in 1939, when the princess was just 14.

Good looking and athletic, Philip apparently impressed Elizabeth by jumping over the college tennis nets.

The couple continued to correspond and met on several occasions. Philip, who had a successful naval career during the war, was invited to spend Christmas 1943 with the Royal family and, by the end of the war, newspapers were speculating on a romance.

Their engagement was announced on July 10, 1947 when the princess was 21. Philip had become a naturalised British subject, renouncing his Greek royal title. They married on November 20, 1947 at Westminster Abbey when Philip was created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich.

But the royal house never took the name of Mountbatten, which Philip himself had earlier adopted. Instead, he became a Windsor.

The early years of their marriage appear to have been happy, but friends say the Duke changed when, in 1952, the Queen acceded to the throne. At the Coronation in Westminster Abbey in June 1953, the Duke knelt to pay homage to his wife, before kissing her left cheek. The full weight of the state came down on him as he assumed the role - but not title - of Consort to the Sovereign.

Behind closed doors, Philip may have continued to assert his authority as head of the family. But in public, at least, he has been for nearly 50 years resigned to his constant task of supporting the Queen. He gave up his beloved naval career, has no constitutional role, sees no state papers and, although he was a member of the House of Lords, never spoke in the chamber. A difficult role to play for a man who, some say, could have risen to become First Sea Lord had he not married a princess.

The Duke has been no stranger to York or North Yorkshire, visiting on a number of occasions down the years - most recently in July last year when he and the Queen accepted an invitation from the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, to attend a Millennium celebration service at the Minster.

It was there he did something which proved there was more to the Duke of Edinburgh than merely his gaffes or his autocratic manner.

It was as the Queen and her party left the Minster. Crowds thronged Duncombe Place. Barriers had been put up to create a central walk along which the royal party moved. At one stood a little girl, clutching a bunch of flowers. All eyes, and cameras, were on the Queen. The Duke, almost unnoticed, came over to the little girl, helped lift her over the barriers, and encouraged her to run over and present her flowers to the Queen.

To many he remains an enigma, aloof and remote. To others he is a controversial, unsympathetic figure, unnecessarily harsh to his children and prone to making outrageous comments.

But, as he approaches his 80th birthday, he is also a fit and active man with a sharp mind who has created a worldwide network of character-building pursuits for youngsters through the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme.

He has championed the National Playing Fields Association and the World Wide Fund For Nature, and still works tirelessly for a wide range of charities and causes.

Perhaps the best way to sum him up is to adapt a phrase from Frank Sinatra.

Whatever else you may think of him, one thing is for sure, at least Philip can say: "I did it my way."

Updated: 10:32 Thursday, June 07, 2001