During a royal tour of the Daily Mirror offices in the 1960s, legendary editor Felicity Green OBE recalled meeting Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, a sprightly man with a famously saucy sense of humor.
Though he may wear a hearing aid these days, those who speak with Prince Philip say the man hasn’t changed a bit through the years.
Green, who was one of the only women on Fleet Street back in the 60s, just released Sex, Sense and Nonsense, a book recounting her days as a journalist and newspaper executive. Green was all to happy to embrace the changing of the times, which pushed sexual boundaries and promoted women’s liberation.
Instead of the traditional feminine touches readers and executives were used to seeing, Green instead went for miniskirts, skimpy bikini bottoms and the like, a decision that pleased one royal in particular.
“He was naughty,” Greene said of the Duke during a royal visit to the Daily Mirror‘s offices. “He said to me, ‘Do you choose the pictures of those pretty girls in the Mirror?’
‘He liked the pretty girls in the Mirror, Oh yes, and out of the Mirror!'”
The Queen, on the other hand, wasn’t in the mood.
“We were told not to speak to her,” Green recalled. “But no one came to take her away after she was introduced to me and we were both stood there, dead silent.
“So I said, ‘Your Majesty, this is your fourth newspaper today – you must be quite tired?’ And she said, ‘No’. That was all she said.”
Tough crowd.
Though some have dismissed Prince Philip as a playboy, he is far from it. A brilliant and involved man, Philip is patron and/or president of several hundred societies and organizations, and ranked very high in the Navy before stepping down to support the Queen as consort.
It’s been said that though the Queen wears the crown as head of state, she defers to Philip when it comes to family matters.
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