Is Harry’s cherished nanny a godparent?
SHE was adored by Princes William and Harry for her practical nature and sense of fun.
And Harry’s former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke proved she is as nononsense as ever as she turned up to Archie’s christening in a red dress from high street store Zara – thought to have cost about £40.
She even appeared to be wearing the same pair of pearl earrings and four-string choker – albeit with a different clasp – that she sported in 1993 when she accompanied Harry to Balmoral.
Tiggy’s attendance in Windsor fuelled speculation that she was among the favoured few selected to be godparents. The former nanny – who now goes by her married name Pettifer – was a pillar of support to the princes as they grew up.
She made the brothers godfathers to her two children and it would be no surprise if Harry has returned the gesture.
Harry introduced Meghan to Tiggy shortly after the couple announced their engagement.
It is thought he was particularly keen for the pair to meet, with a source saying at the time: ‘Harry couldn’t wait to introduce Meghan to Tiggy. Although the two women are very different, they got on famously.’
Tiggy went to the same Swiss finishing school – the Institut Alpin Videmanette in Rougemont – as Princess Diana. She worked for the Royal Family between 1993 and 1999 and was there to help care for the boys when Diana died in 1997.
With a role once described as ‘part servant, part sister and part mother,’ she organised treats for the princes such as fairground rides on summer days at Prince Charles’s Highgrove home.
She would load the boys’ ponies on to trailers for polo and hunting and spent hours with them fishing, climbing, go-karting and shooting rabbits. Their sheer adoration for their nanny would often cause tension when Diana was alive, with Tiggy once referring to Harry and William as ‘my babies’.
Diana believed the nanny held too much influence over Charles and the boys, and was disapproving when Tiggy said of her charges: ‘I give them what they need – fresh air, a rifle and a horse. She [Diana] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’
Tiggy did not always see eye to eye with Charles either – she was reportedly banished to the roof of St James’s Palace to smoke because he hated the smell.
In 1998, Charles was enraged when Tiggy reportedly let Harry and William abseil from a 160ft dam without helmets or safety lines – a technique usually reserved for crack SAS squads. A three-week investigation was launched, but the princes’ adoration of her saved her job. Friends have described her as mix of surrogate mother and boisterous big sister whose only outlook on life was to ‘turn up the fun dial to over-the-top’.
Appointed to the Royal Victorian Order in the New Year’s Honours in 2001, her relationship with Diana’s sons has long outlived her duties as a nanny.
She has attended every important event in their lives, including the brothers’ weddings and Harry’s graduation as a helicopter pilot. Today, Tiggy’s life is far removed from her Royal duties, which saw her skiing with the princes in Klosters, holidaying on yachts and taking Harry on safari in Botswana. Married with two sons and two stepsons, she and her husband Charles Pettifer have converted their home in the Brecon Beacons into an upmarket, £100-a-night guesthouse. Visitors speak highly of the ‘joyful hostess’ and her ‘wonderful homemade cakes’.
She advertises what she calls ‘the Tiggy experience’, writing on her website: ‘Charlie and I have four boys, three dogs and a menagerie of animals here at Ty’r Chanter and if you decide to come and stay you really are part of our family. Our home is your home for as long as you stay. I have no rules and regulations, as they say!’
Born Alexandra, she was nicknamed Tiggy due to her childhood love of Beatrix Potter’s hedgehog Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
Her father was the former Deputy Lieutenant of Powys and her mother a long-standing lady-inwaiting to Princess Anne. Prince Charles knew the family well and would regularly shoot on their estate in Wales.
‘She turned up the fun dial to over-the-top’