"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son

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Being the second son of a monarch is a difficult career, because you cease to be of use to the family firm – assuming your older brother has healthy children – when you are still young.

Here's Jonathan Parry writing about Victoria's second son in the London Review of Books in 2020:

The monarch’s younger sons in each generation are fated to follow the same trajectory. Few now remember Prince Alfred – except tourists visiting the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town who assume that its name is a misprint for ‘Albert’. 

In the 1860s Alfred, Victoria’s second son, named after the founder of the English monarchy and, as a naval cadet, the first official imperial tourist, became a global superstar. Aged 14 he visited the Holy Land, a year later he conquered South Africa, and before he was 20 he was seriously proposed as king of Greece. Polkas were written for him. At 23 he toured Australia and survived an Irish assassination attempt; soon afterwards he was fêted in New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. 

But his glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice, he married a haughty Russian princess, and he ended in forced exile presiding over his father’s German duchy.

Discuss with relation to the careers of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Harry (as indeed Parry does).

For World Monkey Day: The death of King Alexander of Greece

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Today is World Monkey Day and to mark it here's the sad story of King Alexander of Greece.

Alexander came to the throne in 1917 after his father (Constantine I) and elder brother (Crown Prince George) were deposed by the Entente Powers and the Liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos. Alexander became a puppet king under the control of Venizelos, and Greece continued to fight the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

In 1919 Alexander married Aspasia Manos, a commoner. This became a major scandal. and the couple were forced to leave Greece for several months. 

Soon after their return to Greece, Alexander tried to separate his dog from a tame Barbary macaque with which it was scuffling. In the process, he was bitten by the monkey and died of sepsis a few days later aged 27.

Wikipedia spells out what his death led to:

Under the restored King Constantine I, whose return was endorsed overwhelmingly in a referendum, Greece went on to lose the Greco–Turkish War with heavy military and civilian casualties. The territory gained on the Turkish mainland during Alexander's reign was lost. 

Alexander's death in the midst of an election campaign helped destabilize the Venizelos regime, and the resultant loss of Allied support contributed to the failure of Greece's territorial ambitions. Winston Churchill wrote, "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite".

The Rest is History podcast once chose the greatest 10 monkeys in history and unaccountably left this one out. I have never quite trusted it since.

Desmond Morris, surrealism, The Naked Ape and Richard Jefferies

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The Rest is History podcast on history's greatest monkeys was a disappointment in that there was no mention of the Barbary ape that bit King Alexander of Greece in 1920 and caused his death - perhaps it didn't go to the right school? - but it was invaluable for another reason.

Because it mentioned that Desmond Morris is still alive and living in Ireland at the age of 96. This led me to look at Morris's remarkable career and discover that his grandfather was a school friend of Richard Jefferies, about whom I wrote my Masters dissertation many years ago.

Morris's book The Naked Ape was a bestseller, and a scandal to some, in the Sixties. It sought to explain human behaviour as the result of the conditions under which we evolved, annoying both the religious right and the cultural left.

His qualifications for writing the book were that he had a doctorate in zoology and had worked for the Zoological Society of London in various capacities for some years. He was also, alongside David Attenborough, a well-known presenter of natural history programmes on the BBC.

But before all that he had enjoyed a radically different career. In his early twenties Morris was one of Britain's foremost surrealist painters.

All of which explains Getty's caption for the photo above:

16th December 1966: English zoologist Dr Desmond Morris at home. Morris, who has been the curator of mammals at London Zoo since 1959, leaves in the new year to take up an appointment as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Morris is a keen artist himself and the walls of his home are decorated with many of his own contemporary paintings. 

There is a full chronology of Desmond Morris's life on his website.

Morris came from Swindon - if you saw him in the Seventies it was often on a chat show where he was paired with the town's most famous daughter, Diana Dors.

Desmond Morris's great grandfather was William Morris (not that William Morris), who founded Swindon's first newspaper and was an importance influence on the young Richard Jefferies.

Walter Besant wrote in The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies:

His chief literary adviser in those days was Mr. William Morris, of Swindon, proprietor and editor of the North Wilts Advertiser. Mr. Morris is himself the author of several works, among others a "History of Swindon," and, as becomes a literary man with such surroundings, he is a well-known local antiquary. 

Mr. Morris allowed the boy, who was at school with his own son, the run of his own library; he lent him books, and he talked with him on subjects which, one can easily understand, were not topics of conversation at Coate. 

Afterwards, when Jefferies had already become reporter for the local press, it was the perusal of a descriptive paper by Mr. Morris, on the  "Lakes of Killarney," which decided the lad upon seriously attempting the literary career.

Richard Jefferies died in 1887 at the age of 38. If he had lived to 79, he could have dandled the infant Desmond Morris on his knee.