As if there wasn't enough negative press surrounding Prince Andrew, his former maid also spoke out about something utterly bizarre.
Charlotte Briggs worked at Buckingham Palace in the 1990s, and she's opening up about one of the strangest parts of her job. She says it was having to spend an hour every day arranging the royal's collection of 72 teddy bears.
Um. Feels like a little bit of a red flag.
If it sounds like Charlotte was a bit of a neat freak, that's not the case. It was actually deemed to be an important task by the prince himself. She told The Sun that she was taught how to meticulously place the bears in the proper spot each day.
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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 said. "I even had a day's training. Everything had to be just right. It was so peculiar."
Peculiar is correct. While everyone has their quirks, how much emphasis was placed on the teddy bears is certainly odd. Charlotte noted that there were 72 teddy bears in total from all around the globe. Many of them, she says, were dressed in sailor outfits.
Charlotte was even so kind as to detail the precise way she was instructed to set up the bears. She says that each day she lined the bears up on the bed. She was to put the biggest teddy bears in the back, then place the rest in order of size to the smallest at the front. At night, however, the placement required a little more precision.
In the evenings, she or another maid had to use a diagram in order to make sure the bears made it to their correct locations. Yes, a diagram. The small bears were meticulously stacked in an unused fireplace. The prince's favorite teddies were placed on mahogany thrones next to his bed.
Bears were clearly his most beloved stuffed treasures. But he had other important stuffed animals, too, Charlotte says. There were two hippos and a black panther called "Daddy," "Ducks," and "Prince" who all had specific destinations each night, as well.
It did not escape the former maid just how weird the stuffed animal fetish was. "It was so odd," she said. "After all, he was a grown man who had served in the Falklands. But he absolutely loved the teddies and was very clear about how he wanted them arranged."
It's not the first time the bears have been brought up publicly. A former royal police officer spoke about them in the new documentary, Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Pedophile.
"It had about 50 or 60 stuffed toys positioned on the bed and basically there was a card the inspector showed us in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears all in situ," he said, according to The Sun.
"The reason for the laminated picture was if those bears weren't put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream."
Surprising. Yet also … not.
