A Brief History of the House of Windsor (27 page)

This was not, in any sense, an ordinary school. It was not an ancient foundation, having been set up in London only five years before the heir to the throne went there in November 1956. It was founded by an English couple living abroad, Colonel and Mrs Townend. (The Colonel would serve as headmaster for fifty-one years until his death, at which point his son took over.) The school’s distinctive – some would say hideous – uniform of mustard yellow jersey and rust-coloured corduroy knee-breeches was adapted from Colonel Townend’s mountaineering clothes. Mrs Townend believed that, as she put it, ‘a grey uniform produces grey minds’. The connection with mountaineering was not coincidental, for the school had been founded in Switzerland and has retained premises there to this day, teaching in two countries simultaneously. This expresses its founder’s commitment to promoting an international, cosmopolitan outlook. Whatever the idealism that launched it, its setting in a very upmarket part of London ensured that it was as associated with the socially privileged as a major public school. Charles was photographed, looking somewhat frightened, in the flat cap and blazer that was the school’s more formal dress.

From Hill House he passed to a country prep school, Cheam, that had educated Prince Philip before him. This was
a far more traditional English establishment, situated on the border between Hampshire and Berkshire, and with a pedigree – extremely unusual for a prep school, since most are Victorian – that went back to 1645. Here he encountered for the first time the bullying that would follow him throughout his schooldays. Boys would be unkind to him to ensure that they were not seen to be toadying, and anyone who was seen being pleasant would be subjected to a sucking sound. Charles was also now in direct competition with his father, who had excelled at the school. While Philip had had a natural ability to play cricket, Charles had neither a flair for the game nor any great interest in it.

From Cheam he went to face an even harsher test. Gordonstoun School is in the north-east of Scotland, not an old foundation at the time but as spartan a place as its bleak surroundings might suggest. It was considered a democratic place because Charles’s fellow pupils came from a wider variety of backgrounds than would have been the case at a more traditional public school. He would, it was assumed, be sharing a classroom with the sons of shopkeepers and farmers as well as members of the gentry. This proved to be less the case than had been expected – it was still a very expensive private school, after all. It was, for several reasons, entirely the wrong place for Charles, though it had the single advantage that it was far removed from Fleet Street and the attentions of journalists. Prince Philip, who had been a star cricketer and had become Keeper – the school’s term for its head boy – had loved it. Gordonstoun had perfectly suited his extrovert and uncomplicated temperament. He knew that Charles had a very different nature from his own, but believed his son needed the toughening that the school would provide – an escape from the somewhat feminine atmosphere in which the boy had been living at home.

Gordonstoun is housed in a former country house. This, and its outbuildings, form the nucleus of the establishment. Comfort was not a priority when arranging the pupils’
accommodation, and the dormitories were unheated. There were compulsory early-morning runs in the depths of the Scottish winter, and a great deal of emphasis placed on sport, sailing and the outdoors, as would be expected of a school whose major asset was its surrounding landscape and the adjacent North Sea. Because the founder had believed the school should be fully involved in the local area, the boys were responsible for running units of the Fire Brigade and mountain rescue, and for lifesaving on the nearby coast. There was no tradition of academic endeavour and significantly Philip, its archetypal successful pupil, had not gone to university. Charles was expected to respond to the environment by becoming less thoughtful and sensitive, yet also by doing well enough academically to gain more-or-less plausible admission to an elite university (Trinity College, Cambridge was chosen on the recommendation of Robin Woods, who was at that time Dean of Windsor and had been there).

One good thing about Gordonstoun, at least, was that its pupils – dressed in casual pullovers, and bare-kneed in shorts or kilts – were not as instantly recognizable as privileged individuals as were the inmates of Eton, for instance, whose tailcoats so infuriate the proponents of equality. The choice of Gordonstoun could be seen as a gesture toward the new, more egalitarian era into which society had supposedly progressed. It was a brilliant, inspired deflection of any criticism that the royals enjoyed a pampered existence. At the time Charles entered the school, in 1962, it received a good deal of coverage in the media. Though Morayshire is a tranquil and beautiful place, and though the Gordonstoun buildings are gracious, television images made it look as bleak and remote as Dartmoor Prison. Few young people of his age, as they trudged to their comprehensives, would have wanted to change places with Charles, or considered him to be wallowing in privilege.

The expectations placed on him were a very tall order and Charles was, from the first, unhappy at the school. It is remembered that he was always reluctant to return there at
the start of term, just as countless public schoolboys have been before and since. When the car was due to leave he would often be difficult to find, and would delay his departure with lengthy farewells for as long as he could. He found it difficult to make friends and suffered, as he already had at his prep school, from bullying. He was especially vulnerable on the rugby field, where others could knock him down and get away with it. His father would not have been sympathetic to any complaint and his mother, who of course adored her husband, trusted his judgement and regarded the notion of Charles being formed into a second Philip as a happy – and perhaps necessary – outcome.

In the midst of this, Charles found temporary refuge in Australia. He was sent to Geelong Grammar School for two terms, to sample education in a Commonwealth country. The school was a relaxed place and the climate was naturally less rigorous than that of Morayshire. The attitude of his schoolmates was also far more sympathetic. He was reputedly almost at once called a ‘pommy bastard’, which can be seen as a token of familiarity and affection. The boys – and Geelong, like all his schools, was entirely male – were curious about him but also friendly. Australians are a talkative people who automatically assume a sense of equality with whoever they meet. To Charles this must have been a godsend. He delighted in the lack of protocol, just as he appreciated the chance to ‘be himself’ without the need to compete with his father’s or with a host of other expectations. He was also to a large extent left alone by the press. Small wonder that he was to retain very happy associations with Australia and to enjoy his future visits there. Small wonder, too, that the experiment was to be repeated, after a fashion, with his two younger brothers – Andrew would go for a term to Lakefield College in Canada while Edward, seen for some years as the most academic of the queen’s children, would spend a term not as a pupil but as an assistant master at a highly prestigious boys’ school in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Returning to Gordonstoun, Charles had some share in the glory that often comes to those who are at the top of a school. Like his father, he took part in a production of
Macbeth
and played the title role. Like Philip, he too became Keeper. Unlike his father, he would not be an enthusiastic old boy and he certainly never considered sending his own sons to the school – he later referred to it as ‘Colditz in kilts’ – although Prince Harry would undoubtedly have thrived there in the atmosphere of high spirits, athletic competition and more modest academic expectations. Andrew and Edward seemed to have had far happier experiences of Gordonstoun than their brother did, though by the time the youngest of the boys arrived there were not only heated rooms but female pupils. The family connection did not die when this generation had passed through the school, for Princess Anne – always her father’s daughter – sent her own children there.

Charles went to Cambridge, in the autumn of 1967, not through personal choice and certainly not through having demonstrated the requisite academic ability (he achieved two A-levels: a B in history and a C in French). He read history, archeology and anthropology. His education was planned by a committee, chaired by his mother and including Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was, however, a good choice. It gave him the chance to live in a civilized academic community and, for the first time, to make his own friends – or so it seemed. One contemporary recalled that: ‘He was very nice but his friends were chosen for him – and they were not [nice].’ This time, it seems that his colleagues were not afraid to be seen speaking to him, and one of his neighbours interested him in joining the University Labour Club (courtiers advised him not to). He lived in ordinary rooms in college and not, as his grandfather and other forebears had done, isolated in a distant building with only tutors for company. In fact, when asked for his impressions of living in Trinity, he mentioned the novelty of being awoken in the mornings by the arrival of the dust cart. At the end
of three years he was to graduate with a 2:2, and have the distinction of being the first heir apparent to have earned a university degree. Like all holders of a Cambridge BA, he was entitled to style himself MA six years after completing his first term.

Charles was never intended to be an ordinary undergraduate, or to have to the full the experience his contemporaries were enjoying. He had other perspectives and priorities. His studies in archeology were a personal hobby (and one which he still maintains) but, while he had no future to worry about and no career to plan or to compete for, he still had a good deal to do. He undertook flying lessons with the Cambridge University Air Training Squadron, and left Cambridge for a term during his second year to attend the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, taking a crash course in Welsh and Welsh history. This was the first time that any part of a Prince of Wales’s training had been undertaken in Wales. He was, of course, to be formally initiated as Prince of Wales, and it would be a politic gesture to say some words in the Welsh language. (Nationalists, needless to say, resented his status as an imposed and alien presence in the Principality.)

Charles did not look like an undergraduate of his generation. With his short hair, ties and tweed jackets, and his beetle-crusher shoes, he seemed more like an old-fashioned prep school master than a product of the sixties. At Cambridge, a traditional university, there were other young men who dressed in this manner, and doubtless this was true at Aberystwyth too, but the sheer neatness of the prince and those around him made them stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. His police detectives were especially conspicuous. When his protection officers tried to behave like students their police footwear, as well as their bearing and manner and – in this small town – their unfamiliar faces, gave them away at once in pubs and cafes, and they would often be greeted with mocking exclamations of ‘Evening, officer!’

Charles’s stay in Wales did nothing to endear him to the
more extreme nationalists, but it did please many others among the Welsh. Older people, in particular ladies, would look out for him in the streets and the tea shops, and would go home delighted if they had seen him. He did not make any close friends at Aberystwyth, though to be fair there was little opportunity to do so, but as a self-confessed ‘incurable romantic’ he was highly susceptible to the beauty of the language and the strength of the Welsh national identity. He takes seriously his connection with Wales. He has bought a property in Carmarthenshire, which is rented out when he is not using it, and he employs a personal harpist whose instrument can be seen by visitors to Clarence House.

He had held the title Prince of Wales since 1958, but was not officially invested until he had come of age. The outdoor ceremony, held at Caernarfon Castle in July 1969, was a triumph. It brought worldwide attention to Wales, boosted the local economy, and proved to be the usual happy hunting ground for the manufacturers of souvenirs. The setting was almost too romantic – the looming grey walls of the medieval fortress brightened by banners and uniforms, the dais designed by Lord Snowdon with its slate thrones and slanting, transparent canopy, the beautiful, specially designed princely crown which his mother placed upon his head. Instead of the pseudo-Elizabethan foppery that had so appalled his great-uncle David at the same ceremony in 1911, Charles was dressed in the dark blue uniform of the Royal Regiment of Wales – the first of many colonelcies he would hold and of the numerous military uniforms he would wear. His speech was partly in Welsh. This was the royal event of the decade, a spectacle not to be surpassed until his mother’s Silver Jubilee some eight years later, and it was a successful beginning to his public life.

Anne, meanwhile, had had an unremarkable school career at Benenden, a top-drawer girls’ boarding school in Kent. Untroubled by academic concerns, she spent her schooldays happily, developing the interest in equestrian sports that was to take her, ultimately, to the Olympics and to marriage
with a fellow eventer. Charles, too, had hopes of competing in the Olympics, but failed to make selection for the British polo team, just as he had failed to get a Blue in the sport at Cambridge. Despite these disappointments he was a devoted player until the nineties, when advancing age obliged him to participate less often. He still does so occasionally if irregularly. Inheriting the passion from his father and great-uncle, he has passed on this enthusiasm in turn to both his sons.

He was typically described, in his early twenties, as ‘dreamy and artistic’. He played the cello, and painted in watercolours. The public had an impression of him as serious, earnest, yet with a sense of humour that was schoolboyish and inoffensive. The fact that he liked The Goons and The Goodies, and could recite sketches by the former, endeared him to many.