Footage reveals Prince Philip had crash in 1964 while driving Queen
As Norfolk police continue to investigate the Duke of Edinburgh’s serious collision near Sandringham, archive footage relating to a previous car crash involving Prince Philip in 1964, who had been driving the Queen at the time, has been unearthed.
The ITV footage shows a bemused driver – named Mr Cooper – explaining how he was forced to swerve after seeing Philip driving “straight at me” as he pulled into the road in the Berkshire village of Holyport.
Cooper, standing next to his badly damaged vehicle at the scene, said: “I pulled over, as you can see the tyre marks, and he swerved and he caught me offside. He pushed me over, right across this road into here.
“The duke got out first and just says, ‘How are you?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ve just grazed my knee, sir’. He said, ‘Oh, that’s good’, and he went back to the Queen.”
A Mrs Clarke in the nearby Rising Sun pub tells the interviewer she went to help a woman out of the car: “[I] kind of got hold of her arm and helped her out. And she said, ‘Oh yes, I’m all right, thank you. How’s the other chap?’” the woman said.
“Then somebody said to me, ‘That’s the Queen’. And I jumped six foot back and left it at that. Then the detective came in to ring from the pub, and I said: ‘Would the Queen like a drink of tea, or maybe something stronger?’ And he said: ‘They seem to be perfectly all right now. They’re waiting for a car to pick them up.’”
The footage emerged a week after Philip, 97, escaped injury after his Land Rover Freelander was in collision with a Kia carrying two women and a nine-month-old baby boy. Emma Fairweather, 45, a passenger in the Kia who sustained a broken wrist, has called for Philip to be prosecuted if found to be at fault. The 28-year-old female driver sustained cuts to her knees, while the baby was unhurt.
Philip was back behind the wheel less than 48 hours later, and was pictured driving without a seatbelt on a public road on Saturday near Sandringham in his replacement Land Rover Freelander.
