Welcome to Dan Snow's history in Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, died this week at the

age of 99. He was the longest serving consort of a reigning British monarch in history and

the oldest ever male member of the British royal family. Since becoming a royal consort

in 1952, he completed over 22,000 solo royal engagements and thousands more alongside his wife,

Green Elizabeth II. This podcast is about his life. He escapes a revolution as a baby. He served

aboard British warships in conflict during the Second World War. He helped to found the worldwide

fund for wildlife and a patron of many charities in a sponsor of world famous British engineers and

designers. He's portrayed in the crown, which people have watched recently, as insensitive and cold,

and he is famous for his fairly bizarre quips. So I want to talk to two people who knew him well

to tell us more about the man himself. A biographer, Sally Bettle Smith, and a friend of his

Charles Brandrath, joined me on this podcast to discuss his life, legacy, and the impact of his death

on that institution, the British crown. Prince Philip was born royal, but following the First World

War and its attendant revolutions and upheavals, June 1921 was a bad time to be blue-blooded. His father

was a younger son of the Greek king, but 18 months after Philip was born in Corfu, a war against

Turkey was going disastrously and the military staged a coup. Sally Bettle Smith, written best-selling

biographies of several members of the British royal family. The Greek royal family was expelled

in a coup and his father, who was an army officer, was almost killed by the military coup, but the

British government intervened and they all escaped and went to Paris, he and his four older sisters,

and his mother, Princess Alice, who was related to the British royal family. Her grandmother was

Queen Victoria. We have to remember that Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II are third cousins,

so they share the same great grandmother, Queen Victoria. Nevertheless, he was a homeless,

stateless young man, living in Paris, living off the generosity of their more wealthy relatives,

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