32 THE QUEEN


AND DARTMOUTH By Ginny Farrell


“My grandfather, father, husband and two sons have all undergone training here, and I have had many visits over the years.”


Queen Elizabeth II, Dartmouth 2008


The Queen’s visit to Dartmouth 1972


W


ho would have thought when the 13-year- old Princess Elizabeth stepped ashore at Dartmouth 83 years ago it would be the


start of a relationship that was to define decades of the British Royal Family. Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning and longest living monarch, died at the age of 96 on September 8. The Queen’s relationship with her husband Prince


Philip, a key part of her reign, lasted more than 70 years and began after they met at Britannia Royal Naval College in 1939. The future monarch sailed into the River Dart on


board the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert for an official visit to BRNC with her father King George VI, mother Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) and sister Princess Margaret, By coincidence Prince Philip – then an 18-year-old naval cadet - was at the college at the time. The prince


should have been at sea in HMS Shropshire, but with the outbreak of the Second World War approaching the ship was in refit and so his class of special entry cadets was sent to Dartmouth instead. That the prince was chosen to escort the princesses


around the college was not so much of a coincidence. The King’s aide-de-camp who helped organise the visit, was Lord Louis Mountbatten – Prince Philip’s uncle. A distant cousin, the young princess Elizabeth had met


Prince Philip of Greece - whose family had been exiled when the country became a republic - on several occasions. But he became her first crush at BRNC where he


was charged with entertaining the teenage princess, known as Lilibet, and her nine-year-old sister, Margaret. Tall and handsome, the Queen thought the blond-


haired, blue-eyed prince was ‘drop dead gorgeous’. She was entranced and “never took her eyes off him the whole time,” according to her then governess, Marion Crawford.


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