How Charles took the crown for acting in his ‘horrid’ school days
‘Someone joked to Prince Charles, “Oh, they’re playing your tune!” and then we were told that the Queen would be coming for a performance’
PICTURES showing a teenage Prince Charles on stage have been released by the Scottish boarding school he attended on the 60th anniversary of his first day.
The Prince of Wales spent five years at Gordonstoun in his formative years, a school near Elgin in Moray, which was also attended by his brothers, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.
A previously unseen image released by the school to mark the anniversary shows a 13-year-old Prince Charles alongside his fellow cast members for the musical Patience, while in another he is pictured playing the Duke of Exeter in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
The young prince was said to excel at drama. After watching his performance in Macbeth, Donald Mclachlan, Scottish journalist and founding editor of The Sunday Telegraph, reportedly described Charles as “the best actor in the school”.
Gordonstoun was not co-educational at the time, but a handful of girls from the local state school were drafted in for some of the parts.
Among them was Alison Chambers from Elgin Academy.
Now 71, she has fond memories of Prince Charles, describing him as “kind, courteous and fun”.
Recalling the Queen attending a performance of Pirates of Penzance, in which Charles played a leading role, Ms Chambers said: “We had rehearsals separately to begin with, and always in the spring term.
“About six weeks before the performance we would come out to Gordonstoun on Sunday afternoons to rehearse in the services centre.
“We came back on one of those last rehearsals and the orchestra was playing God Save the Queen.
“Someone joked to Prince Charles, ‘Oh, they’re playing your tune!’ and then we were told that the Queen would be coming for a performance.
“So, the Queen came, huddled in her fur coat, to a private performance for her and friends of the school. We had to cross in front of the Queen to get up onto the stage but it really was great fun. We were very fortunate.”
While he may have enjoyed his time on the stage at Gordonstoun, Prince Charles was certainly no fan of the school itself.
He reportedly described it as “Colditz in kilts” and is said to have been bullied during his time there.
In a letter home in 1963 he said it felt like a “prison sentence”, he wrote: “The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness, they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul.”
The school even featured in an episode of The Crown, showing Charles struggling to keep up with the physical fitness aspect of his education as well as his difficulties adapting to life away from home.
Despite his apparently unhappy Gordonstoun days, in a speech in 1975, the Prince said: “It was only tough in the sense that it demanded more of you than most other schools did.”