Prince Philip was a champion of design

Your obituary, editorial and other pages devoted to the Duke of Edinburgh (9 April) omitted his passionate support of design, invention and engineering.

From working as a young engineer in London in the 1960s and seeing the Prince Philip designer’s prize (1959-2011) displayed at the Design Council’s showroom on Haymarket, to his impassioned BBC Radio 4 Today programme statement in 2016 that “everything that wasn’t invented by God is invented by an engineer”, I have seen him consistently champion these crucial parts of our economy. Indeed, he has been followed by other members of the royal family, which I can say, as a beneficiary of a BBC Tomorrow’s World Prince of Wales award for innovation in 1990, greatly helps international licensing of our inventions.

While Harold Wilson was a great advocate of “the white heat of technology”, the need for practical inventions to improve society and the importance of good design have not had better promotion by any public figure than the Duke of Edinburgh over his lifetime.
Roland Hill
Chairman, Contra Vision Ltd

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