Like his mother before him, Charles was taken on educational visits to the museums and, of greater interest, to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, where he gazed at the effigies of the parents he saw less of than he would have wished. To ensure that these outings went off with the minimum of disruption, the Queen’s press secretary, the later knighted Richard Colville, sent a letter to the editors of the Fleet Street newspapers asking them to allow him to enjoy himself without the embarrassment of constant publicity.

It was a vain appeal. Attitudes towards the royal family had changed since the days when his mother could go for open carriage rides around London waving politely to the people. In the still ordered society of the 1930s, royalty was treated with respectful deference. Twenty years later, public interest in this grand family had sharpened. Royal watching was becoming a national sport. The popular newspapers had started pandering to their readers’ interests and wanted to provide them with as much coverage as they could – though by today’s standards, they were still very restrained.

However, the Queen and Prince Philip were determined to give Charles as normal a childhood as they could, and in a break from royal tradition decided to abandon the system of private tutoring. In 1955, the Palace announced that he would be going to Hill House, a pre-prep school five minutes’ drive from Buckingham Palace in Knightsbridge. This, they believed, was the best way to equip him for his future role, and the Queen was encouraged wholeheartedly by her husband. When he went there for the first time, an army of photographers and reporters descended.

‘The Queen and I want Charles to go to school with other boys of his generation and learn to live with other children, and to absorb from childhood the discipline imposed by education with others,’ Philip explained. The academic side was deemed to be of secondary importance, as he told his son: ‘Look, I’m only going to bother if you’re permanently bottom. I really couldn’t care less where you are. Just stay in the middle, that’s all I ask.’

The middle was where Charles stayed for the whole of his school life, except for mathematics where he was permanently rooted near the bottom. That did not particularly concern his father. It was his character that he was interested in and while it was the Queen who authorised this experiment in royal education, it was Philip who had the deciding say in which schools he would attend and, unsurprisingly, he would choose the schools that he himself had attended when Charles reached the age to go boarding.