The Telegraph
Like the rest of the nation I will be watching television today at my farmhouse in the Yorkshire countryside when Prince Philip is laid to rest in St George’s chapel, Windsor, before he is finally interred in Frogmore, with the Queen, when she dies. For all of us it will be an emotionally charged moment of significant national importance; as someone said this week, “when a great oak falls, the view changes.” The landscape that is the Royal family is now very different to the one we have all known since Philip married Elizabeth more than six decades ago. Frogmore House was a special place for the Duke. It was here he had salvaged much of the interior of HMS Britannia, surrounding himself with mementos from the ship that meant so much to him in a life well lived. The dining table and chairs from Britannia commanded much of the room, its walls encased in the ship’s original walnut panelling, while there were silver mementoes and photos of the vessel at sea and in the various ports visited, and a tattered fragment of the Union Jack brought back from Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. As Philip’s final journey unfolds before he is interred in the sacred resting place of the House of Windsor, it is inevitable I’ll reflect on the day he invited me to spend an hour or two with him, much of it filled with laughter in Frogmore. We met just after the turn of the century to record a TV programme on a subject few knew he was passionate about, his love of painting – Philip himself was an accomplished artist – and to talk about his great friend the late Edward Seago whose work was being exhibited in a London gallery. Norfolk-born Seago had joined Philip on his 1956 Britannia voyage to Antarctica to paint its icy seascape and menacing mountains, finding time to also capture Philip on deck in sub-zero temperatures, seated at an easel as he, too, put the continent he saw before him on canvas. Today Seago’s pictures fetch thousands. Prince Philip had 60 in his collection, most hung at Balmoral. The Prince brought many of them down from Scotland and talked passionately about the voyage, his memory pin sharp on places, names and the whaling station on South Georgia, clearly entranced by the mystery and pristine landscape of Antarctica. I thought we had got on pretty well, after all I had interviewed Philip before, at Buckingham Palace, where I was summoned to talk to him in the late Eighties about the World Wildlife Fund, of which he was the first president.
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