10 FACTS ABOUT ROYAL BIRTHS

■ A team of 23 medical staff was on hand for the birth of Prince George and Princess Charlotte at the private Lindo Wing. A handful of midwives and others led by a consultant obstetrician were in the delivery room, but obstetricians, gynaecologists, surgeons, haematologists and theatre staff were also waiting in the wings in case of an emergency.

■ After William was born in 1982, the Prince of Wales wrote how he was “so thankful I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time”.

“I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the process of birth,” he added.

■ Diana was induced because she could not bear the pressure from the media any longer – and claimed doctors had to find a date that suited Charles and his polo fixtures.

■ The Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, was given an anaesthetic to help with the pain while in labour with first child Charles in 1948.

■ A restless Duke of Edinburgh occupied himself by playing squash while awaiting the arrival of his firstborn.

■ The Queen had all her four children – Charles, Anne, Andrew and Edward – at home at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House.

■ Princess Elizabeth was born at home by Caesarean section in her grandparents’ house in Mayfair, London. She was breech and it was a difficult birth for her mother the Duchess of York.

■ It used to be the custom that government ministers and other witnesses were present at royal births to ensure no substitute child had been smuggled in in a warming pan or similar receptacle.

■ But Queen Victoria put her foot down when her great-grandchild, the future Edward VIII, was born in 1894 and declared that just one Cabinet minister would be needed, with only the home secretary attending from then on.

■ The birth of the Queen’s cousin Princess Alexandra on Christmas Day in 1936 was the last occasion that a home secretary was present, meaning the Duchess of Cambridge has been spared such an intrusion. Prince Charles’s birth was the first time in centuries that there was not a minister there to witness the arrival of a future heir to the throne.