Remembering a right royal ‘G’day’ welcome to Toowoomba for ‘Phil’

One can only imagine what the Duke of Edinburgh thought of the cheeky teenager who approached his entourage with a hearty ‘G’day!’

Peter Patter cartoon for 16/04/21

IT TOOK the death of Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh to remind me of another royal encounter in my youth.

As reported in this column a few weeks back, I had been on hand when Prince Charles, Lady Di and a young Prince William had taken baby Prince Harry home from St Mary’s Hospital in London back in the 1980s.

My mate Murph and I had been living a block away from St Mary’s at the time and exited our “local” on that Saturday after the BBC announced the Royal family was about to leave the hospital.

However, I had just about forgotten another royal encounter years earlier until Prince Philip passed away last weekend.

I was still at school so it must have been sometime in the 1890s (put that in just for my younger colleagues who regularly ask what I was doing during the First World War).

I recall it was when I was attending St Mary’s Christian Brothers College (as it was then known) so it would have been in the early 1970s when Prince Philip made a brief visit to the Garden City to present some Duke of Edinburgh awards to school kids involved in that activity at the time.

The Duke was only in Toowoomba a matter of hours and must have landed at the Wilsonton Airport.

We had just finished playing rugby league for St Mary’s at Newtown Park, probably against Harristown High School who we used to play there, and my mate Beachy and I were walking home.

We came across people lining Bridge St and, initially, we just assumed they were there to congratulate us on beating Harristown High, which I imagined we did as was usually the case in those days.

No school buses for working class school kids in those days, Beachy and I were walking home in our St Mary’s “butcher’s striped” jerseys, pants and socks – having replaced our studded footy boots for school shoes – when we hit Bridge St and the crowds.

“What’s going on here?” asked Beachy, proving that school kids of 1970s Toowoomba were not really up with local news.

“I don’t know,” I replied, thus confirming the lack of news knowledge of your common Toowoomba teen.

To think, less than a year later I was to join Toowoomba’s only newspaper.

Someone in the crowd told us they were waiting for Prince Philip to drive past on his way from the airport to City Hall.

No sooner had we been informed of this, than the cheers started up as Prince Philip’s entourage approached.

Beachy, oblivious to royal protocol – or security – suddenly raced out into the middle of Bridge St, waltzed up to Prince Philip’s car, waved and yelled into the window: “G’day Phil!”

I’ve never quite known if Beachy was a royalist at heart, a fan of the Duke of Edinburgh in particular, or just a cheeky bugger.

Being a St Mary’s boy of the 1970s, I suspect the latter but I’ve also wondered ever since what Prince Philip thought of the Toowoomba greeting he got that day.