The Telegraph
A dining room table on which Prince Philip was said to have been born is now used in a City boardroom - and the Duke was once even invited to have lunch around it. The Duke’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was said to have delivered the future consort to the British monarchy on the table at a villa in Corfu in 1921. Its unlikely journey across the continent began in 1932, when the Greek royal family asked the British consul in Greece to sell their furniture from their summer villa. The Duke had left Greece with his family ten years earlier after King Constantine, his uncle, was forced to abdicate and his father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was banished from the country by a revolutionary court. John Vaughan-Russell, the British consul at the time, is believed to have taken possession of the dining room furniture for around 28,000 drachma and moved it to the consulate in Patras, before it later went into storage. There it remained until 1977, when Mr Vaughan-Russell’s son, who was working in Hong Kong at Jardine Matheson, the trading company, asked a friend if he wanted to buy it. “My father always used to say that Prince Philip was born on this table,” Mr Vaughan-Russell was said to have told the friend, a director at the shipbrokers Howe Robinson. The company duly bought the large dining room table - along with 12 chairs, a sideboard, a carving table and the original receipts - only to discover it was too big to fit in their office.
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