‘Paparazzo’ targeted the Royal Family
I OFTEN ASK, ‘WHY WERE MY BROTHERS AND SISTER SHOT?’ WHY WAS MY SISTER INJECTED WITH PETROL? WAS I MEANT TO BE HERE TO TELL THIS STORY TO PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T KNOW? PERHAPS GOD GUIDED ME, PUT ME UNDER HIS WING. — HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR AND AUTHOR GENA TURGEL
Ray Bellisario was described as “London’s first paparazzo” and became a fixture at royal events and non-events from the 1950s to the early 1970s, taking candid and usually unwelcome shots of the Queen and her family.
There was little love lost between predator and prey.
The Duke of Edinburgh once suggested sending him to the Tower; Princess Margaret referred to him as “that bloody Bellisario.”
Their feelings were reciprocated. A lifelong socialist, Bellisario referred to the Queen as “that damn woman” and described her husband as an “arrogant, self-opinionated and insulting royal Mr. Mouth.”
Bellisario began his career as a royal photographer almost by accident when, aged 18, he happened on the Queen sheltering under an umbrella. The photos he took were snapped up by newspapers. Bellisario realized he was on to a good thing.
At first he was accepted as a member of the press pack, but his relationship with the Palace seems to have gone sour when the Queen’s press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, cancelled his accreditation to accompany the monarch on a foreign tour, forcing him to let down the magazines who had hired him for the trip.
“I think he thought I was a nasty foreigner,” Bellisario recalled. “I decided if I couldn’t work with them, I’d work without them.”
So he began a crusade to get pictures the Royals did not want seen. “The Queen’s detective once told me they had even looked at deporting me,” Bellisario recalled. “I think they would have, too, if they hadn’t discovered I’d got a British passport.”
The youngest 13, Ray Bellisario was born in Yorkshire in 1936 to Italian immigrants who eked a living selling ice cream from a hand-cart.
He captured thousands of images of Royal family members, including the Queen in the gardens of Buckingham Palace with her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, who had come to London in 1965 for eye surgery — palace officials had denied there had been any contact between the pair.
Bellisario had taken the photo from the 19th floor of the Hilton, and he would go to considerable lengths to get his scoops, popping up behind bushes at Sandringham and staking out Balmoral, where he was once accosted by a furious Prince Philip: “What are you doing here? I know the way you operate. I saw you myself climbing in the trees. You’re always in trees and bushes.”