According to a former palace maid, Prince Andrew’s beloved collection of teddy bears was so large that it required a full day of training for new staff to care for them — and an hour each day to arrange them for the adult royal.
Charlotte Briggs told The Sun that the most surprising aspect of working for the “demanding and entitled” Prince Andrew at Buckingham Palace was his collection of 72 soft toys.
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“As soon as I got the job, I was told about the teddies and it was drilled into me how he wanted them,” she told the UK paper of just after Andrew divorced Sarah Ferguson in 1996 when he was 36.
“He absolutely loved the teddies and was very clear about how he wanted them arranged,” she said, calling it “so peculiar.”
Briggs, who was only 21 at the time, said she “even had a day’s training” because the newly divorced prince was so particular about how things were set up in his palace apartment.
According to the former maid, Andrew, a former Royal Navy helicopter pilot who flew in the Falkland War, mostly collected bears dressed as sailors in uniforms and caps.
“The teddies had to be in a particular order on his four-poster bed, from the biggest at the back, down to the smallest at the front,” she said, with the prince’s two favorite bears on “thrones” either side of the bed.
“It took me half an hour to arrange them,” she insisted, calling it the “most bizarre thing to be paid for.”
The strange collection was revealed this week after a former palace guard told a UK TV documentary that Andrew would “scream and scream” if the soft toys were not placed correctly.
Briggs told The Sun that Andrew’s angry outbursts had left her in tears, claiming that when she left a gap after closing his curtains, he screamed, “Can’t you f—ing do anything right?”
She said, “I was thinking, ‘You want to shut your own curtains’ but you can’t say anything. You have to absorb it. It was awful and he brought me to tears.”
According to the former maid, the “spoiled brat” would even make her run up four flights of stairs to close the curtains — even when he was sitting right next to them.
“This man fought for his country in the Falklands but couldn’t stand up to close his own curtains,” she told the media.
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“It was utterly ridiculous but spoke volumes about him … He thinks he’s above everyone,” she insisted of Prince Andrew who has since been stripped of his royal titles.
She explained that she got the job caring for Andrew because no one else wanted it “because of his reputation for tantrums and sweary outbursts.”
