Prince Philip: Thursday Club was for letting off steam

Prince Philip surrounded himself with male friends whose rakishness would bring him to the edge of scandal.

The Duke of Edinburgh pictured with Lord Mountbatten and some naval friends. Picture: AAP

In the early days of his marriage, when the Duke of Edinburgh was having to contend with the snobbery and entrenched attitudes of the stuffier elements of the royal household, he surrounded himself with a group of male friends whose exuberance and rakishness would, on more than one occasion, bring him to the edge of scandal.

He became a member of the Thursday Club, a group that would meet in a room above Wheeler’s fish restaurant in Soho, where they could talk, tell dirty jokes and generally let off steam in all-male company.

Its members included a photographer called Baron Nahum - always known as Baron - the harmonica player Larry Adler, the actor James Robertson Justice, Peter Ustinov, David Niven, the artist Feliks Topolski, the editors of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, David Milford Haven, the duke’s best man, and Mike Parker, his equerry.

English actor David Niven was a member of the Thursday Club. Picture: Getty Images

Stephen Ward, of Profumo notoriety, was an occasional guest, and Kim Philby, who was yet to be unmasked as a spy, turned up once; apparently he was the dullest man in attendance.

Although their meetings were not the wild parties of popular imagination, they did not meet with everyone’s approval. “No dancing girls,” according to one of the starchier courtiers of the day, quoted in Tim Heald’s biography of the duke, “but quite lewd talk. Quite lewd.”

Adler once gave the author John Parker a taste of the conversation. “I was arguing with Philip one day about the British public school system, which I considered to be virtual factories for manufacturing homosexuals,” he said.

“God, Adler,” roared Robertson Justice. “Are you on that dreary hobbyhorse of yours again? Look, I was buggered in my first week [at public school]. Did it do me any harm?”

Adler retorted (allegedly): “I suppose everyone had to watch - so that Justice was not only done, but seen to be done.”

It was the affair of the cuckoo clock that perhaps shed the most light on the boisterous, even schoolboyish atmosphere of the club. They had bet Baron that he could not photograph the cuckoo clock in the room at the precise moment that the cuckoo came out to strike the hour.

On one occasion Prince Philip brough Dutch Prince Bernhard to dinner as a guest.

With Baron set up to take his picture, just as the moment came, Philip and the others set off a number of thunder-flashes, including one in the chimney. There was a bang, a lot of smoke, and Prince Philip was blackened with soot from the chimney.

Adler said that the police heard the explosions in the street and came to investigate the commotion. “It took a lot of explaining, and even more diplomacy, to keep the incident out of the papers,” he later recalled.

On another occasion the duke brought Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to dinner as a guest, prompting a conversation that shed light on Philip’s attitude to palace life and the reason why he would consort with such a raffish crowd.

According to Adler, he told Prince Bernhard: “You can go where you like, see who you like and even have affairs and no one knows, whereas I am known everywhere and I am constantly being trailed by secret servicemen.”