Behind Palace Doors - My Service as the Queen Mother's Equerry by Major Colin Burgess

Author:Major Colin Burgess [Burgess, Major Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Discoveries, Expeditions, Historical, Military, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, Royalty
ISBN: 1844544443
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2007-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

It was the Queen Mother who interested Charles in homoeopathic medicine. She was very keen on alternative treatments and I remember coming in with a bruise on my arm one day and she gave me a bottle of cream that you would never find at a chemist for me to rub on it. I still have the bottle with her seal on it. She was very keen on these herbal remedies and gave me lots of things like that so I can fully understand why Prince Charles was influenced by her. If your grandmother is nearly 100 years old and says to you, this is how I like to keep healthy, then you’re going to listen to her rather than some fifty-year-old doctor, and Charles constantly took her advice and acted on it.

Above all, Charles was incredibly polite and nice in the way he addressed people. He would never be rude, except to some members of his own staff, which I will talk of later. Generally, he was just very gentle and quite calm. He was a typical example of a gentleman, as in a ‘gentle man’. Add to this his self-deprecating nature and you have a pretty potent mix. He really could charm the socks of virtually everyone he met. And this calm, polite and very pleasant character was far removed from the public’s perception of him. I saw people who met him be totally absorbed by his whole character and personality. Others recognised him from the television news and photographs and felt as if they knew him intimately and that he almost belonged to them, in the same way that people do about celebrities when they see them constantly on television. One of his best traits was his storytelling, most of which was against himself. I remember one story he told me, one of his favourites, in which he said, ‘Colin, people don’t like characters who fudge around the issues and I like people who come straight to the point.’ He added:

My groundskeeper was getting rid of some of the heather once from some Birkhall land and I had just planted thousands of young saplings in this area. So my groundsman goes out and gets rid of the heather and when he’d finished just comes straight up to me in my office and says, ‘Your Royal Highness, you know those saplings you planted?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I’ve burnt the bloody lot!’

‘And I was just so shocked. I couldn’t be angry, because he hadn’t given me any time to be angry. Instead, he’d been so upfront about it and so aggressive in the way he said it that I just could not be annoyed with him. I just told him, ‘Oh, okay, well, erm, what happened then?’ and he explained and that was that.

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