there are as many versions

[Michael Grove]

of HISTORY... as there are HISTORIANS

SO in the context of Her majesty the Queen's recent revelation that she would NEVER consider stepping down as monarch because 'abdication is a dirty word

in the Palace' • you can just imagine the difficulty that the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin faced, when he attempted to impress upon the king the peril to the integrity of the monarchy caused by the private friendship with a divorcée. Discussions of a morganatic marriage were pursued, but on December 2 Baldwin assured him that this was impracticable. It was doomed by being somewhat hurriedly and forcibly put to the dominions and by the explosion of the whole matter in the press and Parliament on December 3. On the following day the word abdication appeared in the newspapers for the first time.

The king therefore made his final decision and submitted his abdication on December 10, 1936.

[Michael Grove]

Never forgetting of course that while Europe burned in the flames

of the second world war many of its elite maintained a martini 

lifestyle in the Bahamas but the party was interrupted by one of the great, unsolved crimes of the 20^th Century.

When Edward VIII, the former wayward King of Great Britain was sent by the British establishment to see out the war as Governor of the Bahamas, it was hoped that he would refrain from causing any further embarrassment to the Royal family. But in 1943, the mysterious murder of one of the wealthiest men in the British empire, Sir Harry Oakes, sparked a chain of events that have led many to believe that the Duke of Windsor had not learned from his mistakes. An episode of Nazi Murder Mysteries looks at the persistent rumours accusing the Duke of having been complicit in illegal financial schemes involving laundering Nazi money and influencing the outcome of a murder trial.

Sir Harry Oakes, one of the British Empire's richest men (a sterling

billionaire in today's equivalent ) was found murdered in his bed,

his body burnt and covered in feathers - a crime so lurid it knocked

wartime news off the front page and exposed to the rest of the

world Alfred de Marigny's now famous statement to the former

"King of England-to-be" • the Duke of Windsor • that he was a 

pimple on the arsehole of a backwater of the British Empire.

[Michael Grove]

With his death will come reassessment. Because Prince Philip was an extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life; a life intimately connected with the sweeping changes of our turbulent 20th Century, a life of fascinating contrast and contradiction, of service and some degree of solitude. A complex, clever, eternally restless man.

His mother and father met at the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. At a time when all but four of Europe's nations were monarchies, his relatives were scattered through European royalty. Some royal houses were swept away by World War One; but the world into which Philip was born was still one where monarchies were the norm. His grandfather was the King of Greece; his great-aunt Ella was murdered along with the Russian tsar, by the Bolsheviks, at Ekaterinberg; his mother was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

His four older sisters would all marry Germans. While Philip fought for Britain in the Royal Navy, three of his sisters actively supported the Nazi cause; none would be invited to his wedding.

When peace came, and with it eventual economic recovery, Philip would throw himself into the construction of a better Britain, urging the country to adopt scientific methods, embracing the ideas of industrial design, planning, education and training. A decade before Harold Wilson talked of the "white heat of the technological revolution", Philip was urging modernity on the nation in speeches and interviews. And as the country and the world became richer and consumed ever more, Philip warned of the impact on the environment, well before it was even vaguely fashionable.