1. The prince, a descendant of the Danish-German house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, was born on a kitchen table at Mon Repos on the Greek island of Corfu.

2. His mother, Princess Alice, became a nun in later life.

3. Three of his sisters were not allowed to attend his wedding because their husbands had been high-ranking German officers in the war. The fourth, Princess Cecile, was killed in a plane crash in 1937, resulting in this astonishing photo of the prince with his brothers-in-law.

4. Prince Philip served in the Royal Navy during World War II, taking part in the battle of Crete, the Allied invasion of Sicily and the battle of Cape Matapan.

5. Although Princess Alice died in 1969 and had requested burial in Jerusalem, this did not in fact happen until August 3, 1988 - just days after King Hussein of Jordan relinquished his throne's claim to the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

6. After marrying the Queen, he pressed for the Royal family's surname to be changed from Windsor to Mountbatten (an Anglicised version of his own surname, Battenberg). When Churchill vetoed this, he remarked that he was "nothing but a bloody amoeba" and then reputedly withheld sex from the Queen for years, which is held to explain the gap of a decade between the births of Princess Anne and Prince Andrew.

7. In 1994, Prince Philip visited Jerusalem in a private capacity to receive Yad Vashem's medal of honour as one of the Righteous among the Nations on behalf of his mother, who had sheltered a Jewish family on the grounds of the royal palace in Athens during World War II.

8. When his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, married Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine - a granddaughter of Queen Victoria - in 1884, a cake was named in their honour.

Fairfax Media