As King Charles marks his 75th birthday, remembering his big turning point at 65
Next week he will celebrate at home, while a decade ago he was halfway around the world
When King Charles III turns 75 next week, it will be a low-key celebration with friends and family at Clarence House, his London home with Queen Camilla for two decades. On his birthday eve, however, the King and Queen will step out with a tea dance for a group of 75-year-olds on his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, and before his private dinner party, he’ll host 400 nurses and midwives at Buckingham Palace to salute the NHS’s 75th birthday. He will also mark the milestone by launching the Coronation Food Project, an ambitious initiative to reduce the amount of food waste—some 9.5 million tons discarded in the UK every year—a cause he has felt strongly about for years. The sole shadow on the celebrations will be the expected absence of his estranged younger son, Prince Harry, and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
When Charles reached retirement age on November 14, 2013, I watched him celebrate in Sri Lanka, where he was representing Queen Elizabeth II for the first time at the biennial meeting of the leaders of the fifty-three Commonwealth nations. It was a major moment for him—a sort of harmonic convergence--signaling an expanded role as Prince of Wales as he assumed more duties on behalf of his octogenarian mother.
My husband is not one for chilling
By the time Charles and Camilla landed in Colombo after a hectic official tour of India, he had already been feted by staff on his flight to Sri Lanka. Two days before his birthday, the 66-year-old Duchess of Cornwall had given royal reporters a surprisingly candid eight-minute interview—her first since their marriage in 2005—describing their life together.
Her husband could be “exhausting,” she said, because he was always “working, working, working” and was “not going to stop” now that he was a “pensioner” (actually entitled to £110.15 a week, which he pledged to donate to a charity for the elderly). “I am hopping up and down and saying, ‘Darling, do you think we could have a bit of, you know, peace and quiet, enjoy ourselves together?’” she admitted. “But he always has to finish something. He is so in the zone…My husband is not one for chilling.” Recalled Valentine Low, the royal reporter for The Times, “every word was good.”
The prince’s workaholic habits were much in evidence in the three days I observed him. He gave speeches, opened the conference, presided over a formal dinner, navigated a tricky meeting with Sri Lanka’s authoritarian president, had luncheon with a small group of Commonwealth leaders, and traveled by helicopter for a series of fast-paced engagements. I spotted his freshly scrawled notes for his Commonwealth banquet remarks and observed his charmingly well-worn shoes (photos below). Some of my impressions are in my 2017 biography, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, but I have more to share now.
Fresh off the plane on day one, he circulated easily at a reception hosted by John Rankin, Britain’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka. Charles greeted guests with the Namaste prayerful pose and sampled the wares in an “organic market” on the grounds of the British High Commission. He pronounced the mango chutney “fantastic” and the cinnamon to be “the best smell,” even though it made him sneeze.
He does quite like celebrating
It was brutally hot, and Camilla tried to keep cool by sipping an iced drink as she made her rounds. She stood with Charles for the presentation of an organic carrot cake and joined a chorus of children singing “Happy Birthday Dear Your Royal Highness” and cheering “Hip Hip Hooray.” He arched an eyebrow and grimaced slightly, but as the duchess had said in her interview, “Actually, he does quite like celebrating…He likes people giving him a cake, a bit of a sing song.” That evening, he gamely received two more cakes from Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The following night, after he had opened the Commonwealth summit, the prince and his wife stepped into the limelight at a black-tie dinner where the tables gleamed with silver-gilt transported from Britain. With his dinner jacket bristling ten military medals, and her Boucheron diamond tiara that had belonged to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Charles and Camilla looked every inch a future king and queen.
During the pre-dinner reception in the ballroom at the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel in Colombo, they mingled with the Commonwealth leaders, and at Camilla’s urging, they both turned toward the press pen. She smiled readily and often, catching the eye of photographers, who, as it turned out, were big fans.
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