November 20, 2013

Tuesday, Nov. 19 2013 – London

His Royal Highness began by declaring “how deeply touched, honoured, and, at this point, humbled” he felt by the Award, and by describing the Oscar Nemon bust with which he had been presented as, “without doubt one of the best sixty-fifth birthday presents I could have been given”.

This led him to reflect that “the extraordinary thing about getting older is that suddenly you are presented with a chance to reminisce. Most of our lives when younger consist of sitting listening to older people” and as an historian he had been particularly fascinated in hearing them and asking questions.

He had fond memories of Sir Winston, and remembered seeing him when Churchill had come to visit the Queen at Clarence House “when I was very small”. “I remember him vividly in the hall when he was putting on his coat and hat to go out, with a large cigar”. He also remembered him at Balmoral in the early 1950’s. The tradition then was for a netting of very small trout, each year in August in Loch Muick, and everyone would take part. Sir Winston was sitting on a boulder with Lady Clementine, and he picked up an enormous log and declared that he was “waiting for the Loch Muick monster”! The cine film taken by Her Majesty The Queen had recently reminded him of this occasion, and of how annoying he must have been to Sir Winston at the age of five.

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Of course he had been brought up on countless stories of Sir Winston “particularly from my great uncle Lord Mountbatten, but most of them I cannot possibly repeat on this occasion” though they were “incredibly good and very funny”. He did, however, recount an exchange between his grandfather King George VI and Sir Winston which took place one morning at a very cold airport. The King asked Churchill if he wanted something to warm him. Sir Winston replied that, “when I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.”

The Prince regretted the fact that he had not able to ask about speechmaking – “he was the past master” – noting that “Because I could not ask him I used to sit at the feet of Harold Macmillan, who was another one of those remarkable people”. When the young Prince asked the older statesman if he could give him any hints, MacMillan replied that he could only tell him what Lloyd George had told him (“which is quite a good opener”), namely that if you are addressing a huge gathering you have to use gestures, and should never make them from the elbow, always from the shoulder. The Prince then demonstrated the proposed technique, which he had never forgotten, even though he had never been able to put it into practice.

Macmillan had also supplied him with a reading list, drawn from the library at Chatsworth. It started with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall which the Prince admitted he had never finished, and included John Buchan’s Augustus, which he wholeheartedly recommended. The list demonstrated the scale of classical education – liberal education – in those days, which “enabled them to understand the great sweep of history and the way geography worked”.

The Prince then talked of his great debt to Christopher Soames, who taught him the power of convening. what he had tried to do, over the course of the last thirty seven years, since leaving the Royal Navy, was best summed up by what Sir Winston had said in 1908, “What is the use of living if it not be to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who live in it after we have gone. How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relations with the great verities and constellations of the infinite and the eternal?” In so striving, he had observed the awkward truth of what Winston had said in 1906, that one is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents.

One Churchillian conversation that the Prince had enjoyed, was the lifelong friendship of his grandson Nicholas Soames, whom he thanked for his “undying support, loyalty, and wit”.

He confirmed that he would “treasure the bust”, which would always remind him of “one of the greatest of Englishmen”.

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