King Charles apparently carried a teddy bear around with him everywhere, according to Prince Harry writing in his new book, Spare.
Remembering seeing his father with the teddy while he was growing up, Harry said the bear was “pitiful” with “broken arms and dangly threads”.
It’s believed the bear was from Charles’ days at boarding school Gordonstoun in Scotland, where he was badly bullied, but it’s unknown if he still takes the toy around with him.
Writing in the new book, Harry said: “Teddy went everywhere with Pa. It was a pitiful object, with broken arms and dangly threads, holes patched up here and there. It looked, I imagined, like Pa might have after the bullies had finished with him.”
Harry believed the teddy bear expressed his father’s loneliness in childhood better than words ever could.
He said the toy “expressed eloquently, better than Pa ever could, the essential loneliness of his childhood.”
Harry said, as boys, it was he and William’s sadness over seeing their father lonely with the bear that encouraged them to welcome Camilla into the family.
Their one condition, Harry claims, was “just don’t marry her”.
A royal author also recently claimed King Charles travels with a teddy bear, as well as his own toilet seat.
Christopher Andersen, who has written the new bookThe King: The Life of Charles III, told Entertainment Tonight in November that Charles is “one of the most eccentric sovereigns Great Britain has ever had”.
He said, when he’s away from home, King Charles “still travels with a childhood teddy bear”.
He added that the only person who is allowed to mend the bear if it breaks is Mabel Anderson, Charles’ childhood nanny, “who he remains very close to”.
In addition to his childhood teddy bear, Andersen also claimed that Charles “travels with a custom-made toilet seat”. The claim is not entirely new, as author and former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown previously suggested the same in her book The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor.
