London:
Britain’s Prince Philip – the Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, who passed away at the age of 99 on Friday morning, created 3 memorable royal visits to India in his lengthy years of accompanying the 94-year-old monarch throughout her almost 69-year reign.
The UK’s longest-serving royal consort joined the Queen in India in 1961, 1983 and 1997 – throughout which he created rather an impression with his sense of humour, which usually also got him into some controversy.
During his 1961 stop by to India, he was pictured with the Queen and the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur with a dead eight-foot tiger he had shot whilst on a hunt. It occurred to be the identical year he became president of the World Wildlife Fund UK.
He also shot a crocodile and mountain sheep on that trip but it was the photograph of the tiger that triggered ripples about the planet.
Later in life, he went on to reinvent himself as an environmentalist and “champion of the natural world” as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson referred to him in his tribute on Friday.
During Prince Philip’s final stop by to India to mark the 50th anniversary of independence in 1997, he joined the Queen on a stop by to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, exactly where the royals laid a commemorative wreath at the website connected with General Dyer’s orders to open fire on a huge Baisakhi gathering in April 1919.
As somebody identified for his gaffes, amongst his quite a few infamous ones involves his query of the death toll at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
“Two thousand? It wasn’t, was it,” he questioned, as he passed by a plaque at the memorial, which study “This place is saturated with the blood of about two thousand Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were martyred in a non-violent struggle”.
“That’s wrong. I was in the Navy with Dyer’s son. That’s a bit exaggerated… it must include the wounded,” he is reported to have mentioned.
Among his other gaffes incorporated a quip at Indian-origin entrepreneur Atul Patel throughout a Buckingham Palace reception for hundreds of productive British Indians in 2009: “There’s a lot of your family in tonight.”
Ten years earlier, whilst inspecting a factory in Edinburgh and coming across an old-fashioned fuse box, he mentioned: “It looks as if it was put in by an Indian.”
It had turn out to be typical practice for the UK media to frequently compile a list of the Duke”s quite a few gaffes, quite a few of which had been believed to have been created in a light-hearted vein.
Philip was born on June 10, 1921, on the Greek island of Corfu, the youngest youngster and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. That heritage created him a Prince of Greece and Denmark, but the following year the loved ones was expelled from Greece right after a coup and a British warship carried them to security in Italy with infant Philip.
His childhood was turbulent and in 1930, when he was eight years old, his mother was committed to a safe psychiatric centre right after suffering a nervous breakdown, a story most lately covered in the Netflix series “The Crown”.
When Philip left college in Scotland, Britain was on the verge of war with Germany and he joined the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, the UK’s naval academy. He went on to serve with distinction in World War II, seeing military action for the very first time in the Indian Ocean.
When King George VI paid an official stop by to the naval academy in July 1939, Philip was charged with entertaining his young daughters, Princesses Elizabeth – later to be Queen – and Margaret. He created an impression on the then 13-year-old Elizabeth and the couple had been to later get married right after a courtship by means of letters.
The erstwhile Prince of Greece and Denmark became a naturalised British topic, formally joined the Church of England and gave up his foreign titles. On his wedding day, November 20, 1947, he was created Duke of Edinburgh, aged 26. The couple’s marriage was to final 73 years, throughout which the Queen described him as her “strength and stay”, and they had 4 kids – the eldest and heir to the throne Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward. He is also survived by eight grandchildren and 10 good-grandchildren.
As the Queen’s consort, his main function was to help his wife and he accompanied her extensively alongside his personal royal charities and patronages till his retirement from royal duties in 2017.
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