A belated Happy Birthday to Prince Philip!

Yesterday marked the 98th birthday for HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Prince Philip is Queen Elizabeth II’s husband and is known to be a real character.  He makes what is known as “Prince Philip gaffes” and, whether he does it to “break the ice” or for any other reason is up for grabs.  We want to think the best of him and believe that he is doing it to make people feel at ease.

Here are some of his best known ones:

1. “British women can’t cook,” he told the Scottish Womens’ Institute in 1961. Lovely.

2. “It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons,” he muttered while being shown Ethiopian art in 1965.

3. “I would like to go to Russia very much, although the bastards murdered half my family,” at a very heated period of history in 1967.

4. “What do you gargle with? Pebbles?” he told singer Tom Jones at the 1969 Royal Variety Performance. Later he added: “It’s difficult to see how it’s possible to become immensely valuable by singing what are the most hideous songs.”

5. “We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves,” he told journalists in Canada in 1976.

6. “You are a woman, aren’t you?” he said to a Kenyan woman, who was presenting him with a small gift in 1984.

7. “If you stay here much longer you will all be slitty-eyed,” the Prince told British exchange students who lived in Xian in 1986.   When asked on his opinion of Beijing, he replied: “Ghastly.”

8. “If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has two wings and flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” Again with the Chinese insults, when he addressed a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

9. “I don’t think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing,” when dismissing claims those who slaughter for meat have greater moral authority than those who partake in blood sports in 1988.

10. “Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease,” when asked if he wanted to pet a koala in Australia back in 1992.

Many many happy returns to Prince Philip!