Former Royal Family Employee Reveals the Strangest Request He Ever Got Came From Prince Harry
It’s no secret that members of the royal family live a very privileged lifestyle. They have cooks, drivers, assistants, and housekeepers at their disposal and some of those staffers have gotten pretty weird requests from their bosses in the past.
Now, a former royal butler is revealing something Prince Harry asked him for once that he found to be particularly odd because the prince never asked for that before and was never seen doing anything like that previously.
Oddest request was what Prince Harry asked for
Grant Harrold was King Charles’ butler from 2004 to 2011. During his time working for the monarch and Queen Camilla (formerly known as Camilla Parker Bowles), his duties included that of valet, house manager, and driver. Harrold also attended to Prince William and Prince Harry whenever they stayed at their father’s residence. He revealed that one of the weirdest requests he ever got was when Harry asked him for a certain household item.
Speaking in the new video series Lord Ping’s Royal Treatment, Harrold remembered: “I was working with [Harry] in Norfolk and he came into the kitchen one day. He asked for kitchen roll [roll of paper towels] and I gave him some but something didn’t add up. I followed him to ask why he needed it and he told me not to worry.
“But the reason he needed it was because one of his friends’ dogs had decided to do their business upstairs and rather than ask any staff to clean it, he wanted to do it himself. I ended up helping Harry and we cleaned the mess together. I remember thinking how lovely of him and that it showed what a kind guy he was.”
Other royal requests and demands
The Duke of Sussex’s request is nothing compared to some of the strange and over-the-top requests others have gotten from royal family members over the years.
For instance, before he became the monarch and was still the Prince of Wales, King Charles’ staff nicknamed him the “Pampered Prince” because of his daily demands and requests. One claim brought up in Jeremy Paxman’s book On Royalty is that King Charles’ chefs need to cook several eggs a day for him even though he only eats one. That’s because they have to make about six or seven to get one soft-boiled egg that is up to par and just right for him.
Paxman wrote: “Because his staff were never quite sure whether the egg would be precisely to the satisfactory hardness, a series of eggs was cooked and laid out in an ascending row of numbers. If [Charles] felt that number five was too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven.”
The claim was backed by Charles’ former private chef, Mervyn Wycherley, who recalled: “His eggs had to be boiled for exactly four minutes … I always kept three pans boiling — just to be safe.”
And as former butler Paul Burrell explained, the king won’t even grab items himself that are out of his reach and will call his employees from other rooms to retrieve them instead saying: “On one occasion, he rang me from his library and he said, ‘Oh Paul, a letter from the queen seems to have fallen into my wastepaper bin. Would you pick it out?’”
