Major Philip Andrew Janson Wright, OBE, late the Grenadier Guards, sometime Deputy Assistant Serjeant-at-Arms, House of Commons, died 4 March, 2025, aged 83.
He was a son of Sir Andrew Barkworth Wright KCMG CBE MC with Bar (1895 – 1971) a colonial administrator and army officer. He served as the Governor of British Cyprus from 1949 to 1954 and as Governor of the Gambia from 1947 to 1949, by his wife Rosemary Barrett, CStJ.
In a Daily Telegraph interview Wright told of a time in 1950 when he was 10 years old and Prince Philip lent him a pair of flippers in a swimming pool in Cyprus. As Philip recalls, Prince Philip ‘... was commanding HMS Magpie ….. and the ship called in on Cyprus as part of the Mediterranean fleet. My father, Sir Andrew Wright, was Governor and Prince Philip visited us in Government House. My father said “any time you want to use the swimming pool, do come and use it”. One night Prince Philip’s evening swim coincided with mine. He had “frog feet” and I’d never seen them before. He said they belonged to his uncle, Lord Mountbatten’. Philip Wright, wearing Prince Philip’s flippers ‘flip flopped up and down the pool’ until a governess appeared and shouted ‘It’s time to get out now, Philip!’ The Prince looked up sharply. ‘I think he thought she was talking to him’.
Philip Wright married 17 June, 1967, Henrietta Elizabeth Hotham (born 3 May, 1944), scion of the Barons Hotham, daughter of Lieutenant-Commander the Hon John David Hotham, RN (1911-1962), and his wife the former Aileen Coates (who died 1 Nov, 2009), and a niece of the 7th Baron Hotham (1899-1967), by whom he had two daughters, Romayne Louise (born 1972), and Melanie Clare (born 1974).
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