CHARLES, THE PLAYFUL PRINCE
Up for auction, unseen photos capturing happy 50s childhood of future king
THESE days he may be lauded for his commitment to such weighty causes as climate change and organic farming but, as these pictures from his childhood show, there has always been a carefree, playful side to Prince Charles.
The photographs show the young king-inwaiting larking about with his family during holiday get-togethers in the mid-1950s.
They are part of an incredible trove of previously unseen images and letters providing an intimate insight into life in the royal household.
Being auctioned next month, they include paintings and sketches by the young Charles and his sister Princess Anne and decades of private correspondence from the Queen and Charles to a trusted aide.
Many of the images of the prince are from Christmas holidays with the royals at Sandringham and Windsor.
Taken by the aide, they show the prince using the castle as a playground, clambering on the parapets and posing for laughs.
In one, an eight-year-old Charles tries out his destiny as a future king in an oversized bowler hat and jacket – and giveaway child’s sandals.
As well as the photographs, there are examples of the prince’s homework in a test on British history and a painting of a ‘Teady’ bear by Anne.
In letters from the archive, which has a pre-sale estimate of £50,000 to £80,000, the Queen addresses subjects including the death of King George VI and the birth of her children.
Charles’s letters cover the death of his former headmistress to Christmas at Windsor in 1984.
The missives – written at Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Balmoral and Sandringham from the 1940s to 1980s –were addressed to Michael Farebrother, a former Grenadier Guard who patrolled Windsor during the Second World War and later became Charles’s private tutor. The
Queen talks of her unbearable ‘emptiness and loneliness’ after the death of her father in February 1952. She also wrote in 1948 about the recent birth of Charles, saying it was ‘hard to believe sometimes that I am married and have a baby of my own’.
A 1984 letter from Charles referred to a memorial service for the former headmistress of Hill House School in Knightsbridge, west London, where he was a pupil from 1956 to 1958.
He wrote: ‘I shall never forget those acid drops – nor, for that matter, the gym mistress who had large thighs and shouted “Commence!” very loudly at the start of each exercise.’
Charles also described the ‘jolly’ Christmas at Windsor where ‘William had a wonderful time pursuing all the other children until he was purple in the face’.
The mementoes, kept by Mr Farebrother in a clothbound album until his death in 1987 aged 67, are being sold by a relative on December 7 through Gorringe’s Auctioneers of Lewes, East Sussex.