THE PRINCESS WHO BROKE THE MOULD As she celebrates her 70th birthday MARION McMULLEN looks at the early years of the Princess Royal
at the boarding school leaving with six O levels and A levels in English, history and politics. University had no appeal and she became a working royal as soon as she left the classroom – although she does hold a honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen. She was 19 when she became a patron for the Riding For The Disabled charity and just 20 when she became president of the Save The Children Fund. She is now involved with more than 300 charities, organisations and military regiment and her no-nonsense approach and her work ethic means she regularly tops the leader board as the royal carrying out the most public engagement each year.
Princess Anne, celebrating her sixth birthday, with her brother Prince Charles in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, on August 15, 1956
Anne is also known to be thrifty and is praised for recycling her outfits, re-wearing some of them up to 40 years after their first outing.
The horse-loving royal was a tom boy growing up and once remarked: “As a young princess I was a huge disappointment to everyone concerned. It’s impractical to go around in life dressed in a long white dress and crown.”
She rode horse Doublet to an individual gold medal at the eventing European Championship at Burghley in 1971 and became the first member of the royal family to complete in the Olympic Games in 1976 when she rode her mother’s horse, Goodwill, at the equestrian three-day event in Montreal.
She took part in a royal tour of Australia with her brother Prince Charles in 1970 and later said in a TV interview with Michael Parkinson in 1980 that it made her realise she had never fitted the traditional image of a princess.
“You know, a princess how they come in fairy tales. Somehow I didn’t fit that. Still don’t.”
Anne, who has held the title Princess Royal since 1987, was also the first child of a monarch to insist her children were called ‘Mr’ and ‘Miss’. She said in a magazine interview this year she would have turned to engineering if she had not been a member of the Royal Family. She now encourages young women to carve out careers in the science fields as patron of Woman Into Science and Engineering.