Zara gives birth... on bathroom floor
Tindall thrilled as 8lb 4oz Lucas, the Queen’s latest great-grandchild, arrives in a hurry
IT was not the traditional way for a member of the Royal Family to enter the world.
But Zara Tindall’s baby son decided he couldn’t wait for her to reach hospital, so little Lucas was born on the bathroom floor.
The 8lb 4oz arrival was also probably the first royal whose delivery was assisted by a rugby player – his father Mike Tindall.
Zara, 39, went into labour with Lucas, their third child, on Sunday evening at their home on her mother Princess Anne’s Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire.
Tindall, 42, revealed on his podcast The Good, The Bad & The Rugby yesterday that Zara’s best friend Dolly Maude was with them and had realised there was no time to make it to the local
Catch the baby, darling
maternity unit. In the middle of discussing the weekend’s Six Nations rugby, he told his startled co-hosts: ‘Sunday got even better because a little baby boy arrived at my house. Yeah, brilliant. Eight pound four, so very bonny.
‘Arrived very quickly. Didn’t make it to hospital. On the bathroom floor. So yeah, it was running to the gym, get a mat, get into the bathroom, get the mat on the floor, towels down, brace, brace, brace.
‘Fortunately the midwife who was going to meet us at the hospital wasn’t that far away so she drove up just as we had assumed the posit [position] and the second midwife arrived just after the head had arrived.’
Tindall, who had made no secret of his desire for a son to add to daughters, Mia, seven, and Lena, two, admiringly described his wife as a ‘ warrior’ in the podcast, recorded on Monday.
One of his co-presenters joked of Zara, who won an Olympic silver medal as part of Britain’s 2012 equestrian team: ‘Is she up and about, back on a horse?’ Tindall replied: ‘As every man will say, she was a warrior as always.’
The baby has been given the middle name Philip in honour of his great-grandfather the Duke of Edinburgh and of Tindall’s father.
Buckingham Palace said the Queen and Prince Philip were ‘delighted’ at the birth of their tenth great-grandchild and were looking forward to meeting him ‘when circumstances allow’.
Lucas, who is 22nd in line to the throne but will not be an HRH, is thought to be the first royal baby born at home for nearly 60 years.
The Queen delivered her four children at either Buckingham Palace or Clarence House, while Princess
Margaret had daughter Sarah at Kensington Palace in 1964. Tindall said Mia was ‘over the moon’ to have a brother and Lena had declared Lucas was ‘her baby’.
The former England international joked that Lucas would be his final child, saying: ‘Yep, snip, snip, snip.’ Zara had two miscarriages before having Lena.