LINDSAY CAMPBELL FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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Prince Philip is now quite elderly, and his obituary is presumably ready in newspaper computers. The former German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, cruelly characterized him in a recent book with the memorable phrase "… der Edinburgh ist ein dummkopf …"
As a loyal subject of the Crown, I offer here a rebuttal in the vain hope I may qualify for one of the awards in the Queen's honours list (I really like the phrase Order of the British Empire).
In 1952, I was a student at the University of Aberdeen. Summer jobs were difficult to find, so I was glad to get an offer of employment as a "beater" on the Cowdray estate near the headwaters of the River Don for the astonishing wage of one pound sterling per day.
We began on Aug. 12, the "glorious 12th," when landowners are legally permitted to start the massacre of red grouse, a small, plump game bird of the Scottish Highlands.
Viscount Cowdray's title, and estates for all I knew, derived from a grateful government during the First World War, when his father established the largest munitions factory in Western Europe. He employed several hundred people on his estate, not least about 20 gamekeepers, who were responsible for cultivating the indigenous game such as salmon, trout, deer, pheasant and especially grouse.
As a teenager, I realized there were marked differences in wealth distribution from class to class, but I had no idea how big they were.
After the Second World War, the return of the social whirl to London society included travelling north for several weeks of shooting and fishing in late summer and fall. Grouse shooting provided major entertainment, and it was the custom for landowners to invite their neighbours to join them for a shoot. They would then be invited back to the other estate until all the grouse in Scotland were at risk for imminent death.
As an introduction to the social classes in postwar Britain, we beaters were strictly segregated from the shooting party. We lived in a leaky cottage about six kilometres from the ugly, granite pseudo-castle by the river. Liquor and good food were in abundance for the guests, but the beaters cooked their own miserable meal each evening, and in true Dickensian fashion were rewarded with a daily ration of one bottle of weak beer.
We were a motley bunch of local schoolchildren and students from Aberdeen. A young gamekeeper would designate the area where the birds would be roused, and equip us all with a white flag tied to an alder branch.
The unfortunate red grouse will only fly when flushed. Because of its poor aeronautical ability, it flies fast and low around its mountainous habitat, presumably to avoid losing altitude, which it would find difficult to recover.
Suitably segregated from the shooting party, we set off an hour or two earlier and spread out in a long line down one side of a steep hill, where heather was assiduously cultivated for the grouse's survival.
The gentlemen were driven by Land Rover to a line of turf walls spread down the other side of the grouse moor, each accompanied by two loaders carrying an assortment of shotguns, and dogs that would retrieve wounded and dying birds.
At a signal, the line of beaters advanced through the vegetation, shouting and waving our flags to encourage the grouse to panic and fly for their lives. After a few minutes we would hear the first shots as the birds hurtled over the line of guns.
This working vacation provided my one and only personal encounter with royalty. Prince Philip was in residence at Balmoral, the Royal Family's Scottish retreat. That morning, the gamekeeper had warned us our behaviour had to be exemplary as the Prince had joined the Cowdray party.
As we approached the line of guns, we waved our white flags vigorously, knowing well that the odd beater was seriously injured each year by enthusiastic sportsmen handling 12-bore shotguns. When there were no more birds to flush, we'd help recover the fallen game, pat the dogs and slowly regroup for the next beat.
I saw a tall, fair-haired young man striding from behind a turf wall, his gun broken into the safety position, with an enthusiastic yellow retriever running beneath his feet.
As I drew nearer, he shouted: "Roy, Roy, come here – come here at once!"
Conscious of my social status, I ran over and said: "Yes, sir, I'm here."
He whirled around, and dismissed me immediately by saying in an irritated voice: "Not you, you fool, I'm calling my dog."
Several years later, our family acquired our first dog, a beautiful male black Labrador, which the children in their racial innocence decided to call Benson after a character on a U.S. television program.
If I took Benson for a walk by myself, I would throw sticks for him to fetch. When he retrieved one, I would shout: "Philip, come here – come here, Philip." I think sometimes the dog looked a little confused.
Roy Preshaw lives on Vancouver Island.