The man behind The Queen's Reading Room podcast
How Camilla's worldly and witty father, Bruce Shand, instilled her with a passion for books
Queen Camilla has called her late father, Bruce Shand, “probably the best-read man I’ve come across anywhere. He devoured books. He read to us as children. He chose the books. We listened. I think the love of books is ingrained in us. It was there from such an early age.”
That passion for books led to Camilla’s active role in charities promoting literacy. In 2010 she became patron of the National Literacy Trust and rode a double decker bus around London with children’s book authors and a group of kids who happily listened to their stories. For the same charity she promoted “Books Unlocked,” which takes authors into prisons to talk about their books. Among her other literacy enterprises are First Story, which teaches children writing skills, and Coram Beanstalk, which sends volunteers into schools to read with students.
“The first book club I ever joined”
In January 2021, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, Camilla started The Reading Room on Instagram. It was, she said, “the first book club I ever joined.” Her mission was to highlight her favorite books and authors and encourage reading at every age. Last year she inaugurated a literary festival at Hampton Court Palace, and at the beginning of this year she launched her first podcast, The Queen’s Reading Room.
Her literary tastes, much like her father’s, are not highbrow. Christopher Bland, a former chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a board member of First Story, told me when I met him in 2013 that Camilla “would be the first to suggest that Shakespeare is not at the top of her list of favorite things.” But, he added, “she is very bookish, and a keen reader. She likes what I like, middle of the road, literary but not too literary a focus.” She has read The Cazalet Chronicles, a multi-generational five- volume series by Elizabeth Jane Howard, three times. It “takes you out of your world,” Camilla has said. “If you are depressed, go to The Cazalet Chronicles, and someone is having a worse time than you. It is a relief to dig into it and do it again.”
“A gifted writer of style and erudition”
While Camilla has credited her father with inspiring her love of literature, she has said little about his own reading habits, much less his talent with words. He wrote Previous Engagements, a memoir about his experiences in the Second World War, prompting the acclaimed military historian Sir John Keegan to call him “a gifted writer of style and erudition.” For nearly fifteen years, Shand contributed to Country Life magazine as a book reviewer. I have read all thirty-seven of his reviews, the last of which he wrote two years before his death at age eighty-nine in 2006. Combined with his memoir, these succinct essays offer a fascinating window into the character, intellect, and personality of the man who, according to his close friends, significantly shaped his elder daughter, the future queen.
“Rather indolent, self-conscious, and invertebrate”
Educated at Rugby and Sandhurst, Bruce Shand had an unstable upbringing in what he called a “rather strange” family. His father, Philip Morton Shand, an architecture critic and expert on food and wine, married four times. Philip’s first wife was Bruce’s mother, from whom he was divorced after three years, leaving their son to be raised by his Shand grandmother. In 1946, Bruce married Rosalind Cubitt, the daughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe, whose family had made a vast fortune building on prime real estate in London. Camilla’s father went on to become a well-regarded London wine merchant.
When I think of Bruce Shand, the image that springs to mind is of a twenty-four-year-old army officer arriving in Libya in September 1941 with everything he needed for battle—along with a tea chest filled with books. In his memoir, he described himself as a “rather indolent, self-conscious, and invertebrate” boy who had been transformed by becoming an “omnivorous reader.”
By the time he reached North Africa, Captain Bruce Shand had already been decorated with a Military Cross for his “skill and great daring” a year earlier during the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk under heavy German fire. Back in action against the Germans in the Egyptian desert, he earned another MC in the Second Battle of El Alamein as a cavalry leader of “the first order” and was promoted to major. In November 1942, he was subsequently wounded and taken prisoner. At that point, he had to abandon his tea chest.
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