Both Charles and Andrew were sent to Gordonstoun, a tough boarding school on the remote, windswept north coast of Scotland that their father, Prince Philip, had been to.
, had been to. For Charles, it was another attempt to toughen him up so that he would be fit to be heir to the throne.
‘Charles was a very polite, sweet boy — always incredibly thoughtful and kind, interested in art and music,’ the Queen’s cousin and confidante Margaret Rhodes said. ‘But his father interpreted this as weakness, and the Queen believed he knew what was best. ‘Gordonstoun was supposed to “make a man out of him”, although I never really understood what that meant.’
His tormentors left him hanging there, naked and shivering, for half an hour until a staff member heard his plaintive cries. At night he would be pummelled in the darkness with pillows, shoes and fists until he dreaded going to bed. Gordonstoun was supposed to draw him out of his shy and reticent disposition. He would become more self-assertive. And, of course, Philip had been happy there
‘Most boys tend to fight shy of friendship with Charles. The result is that he is very lonely. It is this loneliness, rather than the school’s toughness, which must be hardest on him.’ Another contemporary said: ‘Charles was crushingly lonely for most of his time there. The wonder is that he survived with his sanity intact.’
A family friend, Sir Iain Tennant, and his wife Lady Margaret had an estate near by and invited him over to play the cello, which he had been learning. He was fairly awful and it was embarrassing for all concerned, but these visits gave him some respite from the school. Even so, the Tennants heard him sobbing his heart out in his room at night.
There was nothing Charles could do to please his father. When, aged 13, Charles proudly announced that he had killed his first stag, Philip upbraided him in front of guests at lunch for some minor infraction Another accused Philip of ‘belittling’ his son, perceiving that the Duke thought his son was ‘a bit of a wimp, and Charles realised what his father thought, and it hurt him deeply’. Asked how Charles felt about his father, a senior courtier said: ‘He was frightened of him.’
So for six months, Charles was sent to Timbertop, the wilderness survival programme run by Geelong Church of England Grammar School in the hills near Melbourne. ‘It will put some steel in him,’ Philip said, ‘or I simply give up.’ Charles had no say in the matter. The Duke had given him his first polo pony before he went to Gordonstoun, though constantly criticised his performance. ‘He was just brutal,’ a teammate said, ‘singling Prince Charles out at every turn.’
Like Charles, Andrew did not shine academically and said of his alma mater: ‘The beds are hard and it’s all straw mattresses, bread and water — just like a prison.’ But Andrew was made of sterner stuff. Besides, the regime had loosened considerably since Charles’s time. The early morning run was now more of a saunter and there were hot showers as well as cold.
Andrew was gifted with a thick skin. His sense of humour and easy charm soon made him friends. Rather than be a loner like Charles, he joined in and became the leader of the pack. He took a three-week school trip to France to brush up his French under the name Andrew Edwards. Charles would never have got away with such anonymity. Even Andrew’s tutor at a Jesuit College in Toulouse didn’t know who he was. Asked about his parents, he said: ‘My father’s a gentleman farmer and my mother does not work.’
The girl concerned was 16-year-old Amanda Knatchbull, granddaughter of Lord Mountbatten. That is, his cousin. Andrew returned to Canada at the beginning of 1977 to attend a school near Toronto. When he arrived, dozens of young girls turned out at the airport. They screamed, blew kisses and chanted: ‘We want Andy.’ But the Press took against him, calling him ‘boorish and a snob’ after he asked: ‘Do you do Shakespeare here?’
On the ski slopes, he managed to ditch his protection officer, a Mountie, so he could spend time alone with Sandi. She said: ‘We talked about seeing each other again and it was left that he should write first. He’s absolutely great and we get on together fabulously.’ Everywhere he went, Andrew was besieged by teenage girls. America’s People magazine put him in its list of the ten best-looking men, and the American Bachelor Women’s Society named him one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, alongside Warren Beatty, John Travolta, John McEnroe and Woody Allen — possibly a bad choice, in retrospect. The society’s president said: ‘He’s much better looking than Prince Charles.
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