Royals

Prince Charles is revealed as the hardest-working royal in 2019

The future King is certainly out and about doing his bit.

With 2019 about to close, figures showing who the hardest-working royals were this year have been revealed – and top of the list is Prince Charles.

The Prince of Wales has emerged as the royal family’s hardest-working family member in 2019, having attended an impressive 521 engagements. He is just ahead of last year’s ‘winner’, the ever-active Anne, Princess Royal, who clocked up an impressive 506 engagements in 2019.

Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex (308) and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York (274 until his enforced retirement) also undertook their fair share of royal duties.

And despite talk of the Queen making moves to scale back her activity, at 93 Her Majesty still managed to undertake 295 engagements.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge attended 220 and 126 respectively. The Duke of Duchess of Sussex attended 201 and 83 respectively.

The royal family attended an overall total of 3,567 engagements.

The statistics are compiled by Tom Donovan, an 87-year-old royal fan who first began monitoring the royal family’s public activity in 1979.

He does it by using the Court Circular — the official daily list of royal engagements.

Tom told the Daily Mail that he keeps track by compiling a tally of every single duty undertaken by each member of the family, be it the Queen opening Parliament or the Duchess of Gloucester at an exhibition of basket-weaving.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex during their royal tour of New Zealand.

He notes them all down and produces a quarterly total then an annual table of results at the end of the year, which he sends to the editor of The Times.

Tom told the publication he came up with the idea in 1978 after seeing a letter in a newspaper from someone who had added up all the names in all the birth announcements that year to compile a list of the most popular ones.

“The thought just occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to do the same with royal engagements,” he says.

In his first year, 1979, he found that the Queen and Prince Philip undertook the most engagements (325 and 242 respectively).

In 1982, Tom received a ‘friendly’ letter from the Queen’s press secretary, noting that his figures had been taken out of context by some papers.

Tom argued that the Court Circular was misleading because it omitted most individual overseas engagements. Buckingham Palace duly agreed to include them in the Circular, too and the resulting effect was that the overall number of royal engagements increased.

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