His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Lord Mair Excerpts

Monday 12th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mair (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I would like to pay tribute to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh’s enormous and unstinting support for engineering and for Cambridge University, of which he was chancellor for 35 years. Like his predecessor, Prince Albert, His Royal Highness recognised the vital importance of engineering for the country’s economy and the well-being of our society. It was largely his vision that led to the founding in 1976 of the Fellowship of Engineering, the inaugural meeting taking place in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace. It became the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992, and since then it has grown from strength to strength. For many years, His Royal Highness was an extremely active and influential senior fellow of the academy, whose premises in Carlton House Terrace are fittingly named Prince Philip House.

I was fortunate to meet Prince Philip on several occasions in connection with engineering. He was a regular visitor to the engineering department at Cambridge from 1952, when he opened the Baker building, until very recently. He hugely enjoyed discussing projects with the students presenting them, asking many probing, often provocative, questions, always with humour and putting the students at ease. Much to the consternation of officials and organisers, the visits invariably ran over time because Prince Philip always wanted to linger, continue the discussions and ask yet more questions. He was very well informed and knew a great deal about many aspects of technology. He was, at heart, an engineer manqué. He simply loved everything about engineering.

His Royal Highness was a long-serving chancellor of Cambridge University, from 1976 to 2011. He would regularly visit the university, always finding time to talk to the students and researchers as well as discussing university business with the vice-chancellor. We all remember his unbounded enthusiasm and enjoyment in conferring honorary degrees at the grand annual ceremonies and his witty, unscripted speeches following those occasions. At an event celebrating 30 years of his chancellorship, the Duke described how he was prevented from attending university by the Second World War, with the result that he began his university career at, in his words, “the wrong end”— becoming a chancellor without ever having been a student. He clearly relished his role as chancellor and always appeared to be enjoying himself, whether conferring honorary degrees, visiting laboratories and libraries, opening new buildings or meeting staff and students.

My wife and I had the privilege of hosting a dinner for His Royal Highness in the master’s lodge at Jesus College. He was excellent company, in his element talking animatedly with academics from a wide range of disciplines, always interested and always probing, sometimes teasing. After breakfast the following morning, he and I went for a brief walk in the college grounds, in which there were various new sculpture exhibits. He was characteristically forthright in his views on some of these, saying he hoped they were temporary.

In recognition of his outstanding and loyal service, Cambridge created two special professorships in his name: the Prince Philip professorship of ecology and evolutionary biology was to mark the 30th year of his chancellorship, reflecting his extensive involvement in conservation and the natural world, and the Prince Philip professorship of technology to mark his 80th birthday, reflecting his lifelong passionate interest in engineering. Most fittingly, to commemorate his eventual retirement as chancellor, after 35 years, the university established the Regius professorship of engineering. The Duke’s lifelong passion for engineering was perfectly encapsulated by his now famous words in an interview by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for Radio 4’s “Today” programme:

“Everything that wasn’t invented by God was invented by an engineer”.


His Royal Highness will be very fondly remembered for his extraordinary, influential and varied life by so many people, and especially by the engineering profession, for which he did so much. He was greatly admired and will be sorely missed.