Prince Andrew Is Very Particular About His Stuffed Animals and Teddy Bears

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One of the strangest parts of Scoop is a shot ofa royal maid meticulously arranging a collection of stuffed animals and teddy bears on Prince Andrew's bed.

As Andrew (Rufus Sewell) watches the maid, he tells her, exasperatedly, "How many times? How many times!?" She replies, "I'm sorry," and Andrew picks up a small kangaroo stuffed animal, and asks her, "Where does he go? A clue: He's a marsupial. Roo, as in Kanga! Put them together. What do you get?" The maid, confused, replies, "Rookanga?" And Andrew shouts at her to go away.

This scene, while bizarre, is rooted in reality. A former Buckingham Palace maid, Charlotte Briggs, told the Sun in 2022 all about Prince Andrew's teddy bear collection. "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."

She added, "It was so odd. 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."

Briggs, who worked for the royal family in the 90s, said, "The teddies had to be in a particular order on his four-poster bed, from the biggest at the back, down to the smallest at the front. All 72 of them. Each had to be carefully positioned. They were old-fashioned teddy bears—the Steiff ones—and nearly all of them had sailor suits on and hats."

She explained it took her half an hour each day to arrange them, and then "at bedtime I had to take all the teddies off and arrange them around the room. They each had a set place. We had to stack the smaller ones in an unused fireplace, again in size order, to make them look pretty. His two favourite bears sat on two thrones either side of the bed. The others would sit at the foot of the bed on the floor."

Briggs isn't the only former royal staffer to speak about Prince Andrew's stuffed animal habits. Former royal protection officer Paul Page said in an ITV documentary that Prince Andrew's bed "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." Page added, "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."

It's not just members of the royal household who have noted Andrew's affection for the stuffed bears; writer Elizabeth Day observed Andrew's teddy bear collection in his Buckingham Palace office, and later wrote about it in the Daily Mail. "It seemed rather strange that a grown man should be so amused by a stuffed toy, but I suppose the English upper classes have a long history with teddy bears used as transitional objects to express emotions they might feel uncomfortable with," she wrote. "I wondered if this was someone who had never really grown up because he had never had to. Here he was, taking up space in his mother’s house, carrying out a made-up job to keep him entertained and still having a teddy bear his ex-wife had given him. It was weird."

And, Prince Andrew himself admitted in 2010: "I've always collected teddy bears. Everywhere I went in the Navy I used to buy a little teddy bear, so I’ve got a collection from all over the world of one sort or another."

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