Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, at 60: ‘I don’t know how I got here’

The Duchess of Edinburgh has a big birthday on Monday. It is best not to mention the number too loudly.

“I’m 21!” she protests, laughing, before being reminded that it is her 60th. “Ooh that’s so mean, you shouldn’t say things like that! It’s a very large number.”

She is joking, mostly, but seems to be telling the truth when she adds: “I don’t know how I got there.”

She may well ask. From ordinary roots to being regularly hailed as the late Queen’s favourite daughter-in-law and the monarchy’s secret weapon, the Duchess has been on quite a public journey. Articulate, charming, and tactile in person, she is quick to laugh and even quicker to spot the quiet person most in need of her attention in a room full of strangers.

Having carved a royal career from scratch, giving up a job in PR to join Prince Edward in a life of public duty, her causes are broad and interests sometimes unexpected. From the deeply traumatic – she is a regular envoy to war zones to meet survivors of sexual assault – to the small, unsung charities that keep Britain afloat, Sophie has been hailed as keeping the royal show on the road in a year beset by illness among those slimmed-down ranks of the monarchy.

Clocking up 257 engagements at home and overseas in 2024, she is a respectable fourth in the unofficial league tables and, her team says, always keen to help fill the gaps in their reach. And to mark her landmark birthday, The Telegraph joined her for a day to gain an insight into her working life.

It is a cliché to say that royal engagements are “wide-ranging”, but in this case it is true.

In a matter of hours, she has tackled topics from war to religion, marvelled at the variety of tinned beans on offer at a community shop, and welled up talking about the moment she “held her breath” watching her two children stand vigil beside the coffin of their late grandmother, Elizabeth II.

From her personal tastes (“Call the Midwife? I love it!”) to how she built her professional life by trying to find topics other royals had not already covered; the Duchess is open, warm with the public, and ready to roll up her sleeves to dish up lunch in a canteen.

She is the only member of the Royal family I have seen casually accept directions from a photographer, pretending to be outraged but playing along in shifting to a better position to win the charity more coverage.

As her own children become increasingly independent (“I really miss that little limpet feel,” she tells one young mother cradling her sleeping toddler. “Enjoy it because they get really big!”), she is on the lookout for what else she can do to help.

Hearing about the specific challenges of people with learning difficulties in conflict zones, she mentions that she hasn’t read anything about that yet and mentally jots it down.

“It’s been educating for me,” she says of her working life, particularly in the disability sector. “It’s been mostly utterly joyous. I never know what to expect, I never know who I’m going to meet, and I never know what I’m going to learn.

“And the old adage ‘Every day’s a school day’ is absolutely true.”

The Duchess of Edinburgh, formerly the Countess of Wessex, was born Sophie Rhys Jones, the second child of Christopher Bournes Rhys-Jones, director of a tyre importing company, and Mary Rhys-Jones, a secretary. After school, she worked in PR and opened her own agency, before meeting Prince Edward at a real tennis event in 1993. They married in 1999.

Not everything has been smooth sailing. The couple lost a much-wanted baby to ectopic pregnancy in 2001, with Prince Edward describing it as “quite the most painful thing that anyone can undergo”, and Sophie survived a subsequent traumatic birth with Lady Louise. They have also come in for their share of embarrassment at the hands of the tabloid press, not least a front-page story in the News of the World by its infamous Fake Sheikh.

Years of subsequent quiet, diligent work saw The Telegraph name them the “monarchy’s most underappreciated troopers” and the Duchess’s close relationship with the late Queen is undisputed.

In Nov, she was the one member of the family to accompany the Princess of Wales on the balcony above the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, seen to put a supportive hand on her back.

She is “universally liked” at the palace, says a source, and will inevitably play a more prominent public-facing role in the reign of William, as younger – and at 60 she IS younger in royal terms – members of the family need to take on more of the load.

On Monday, the Duchess will spend her actual birthday in private, at the Bagshot Park home she shares with the Duke of Edinburgh, university student Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, the 17-year-old Earl of Wessex (known to her as James), Mole the cocker spaniel, black labradors Teal and Teasel, and a tortoise called Marmite.

She will have a day off from engagements, returning the following morning to visit charity Dogs for Autism and a school for children with physical disabilities.

On the day The Telegraph meets her, her final work day at the age of 59, she is at L’Arche - a south London community of “friends and equals” made up of people with learning disabilities and their supporters – and Community Shop Lambeth, a “social supermarket”.

Although she often drives herself, the London traffic has necessitated a small police escort and she emerges from the back seat in slim high-heeled boots, carrying her handbag.

She is not the patron of L’Arche, but was invited by Richard Keagan-Bull, a campaigner for people with learning disabilities and the author of an autobiography entitled Don’t Put Us Away, who saw her dancing at a Mencap event last year and wrote to her.

She is given a tour, joins in a candle-making session, and sits down for a “Power Cuppa” session with tea, cake (“It would be rude not to”) and a show-and-tell from residents keen to share their favourite books, hobbies, and best-loved cuddly toy.

The Duchess, like her husband, occupies a curious role in the Royal family: senior enough that everyone wants to talk to them, but accessible enough that conversation is often quite free.

So it proves here. Sophie, who pulls up a chair for a series of frank questions from community members that few journalists would think to ask, gamely takes on topics – from her favourite football team (Sunderland, because of their Foundation of Light charity), to how many castles she has.

“I personally don’t have any castles sadly,” she replies. “But there are a few castles. They don’t really belong to the family, they belong to everybody really – they belong to the nation.”

Describing how people can tell whether the King is in by whether the Royal Standard flag is flying, she confides: “When I was a child and I came up to London, I always loved driving past to see if the Queen was in.” After she got married, she jokes, she “started going in just to check.”

Upstairs, she seems delighted when Amy Catton, 33, gently takes her hand to compare rings (Sophie’s diamond is quite a bit bigger), and admires the contents of her sparkly bag: a collection of lipsticks they go through patiently one-by-one.

Asked why she chose this sector to champion, the Duchess gives a thoughtful answer. “It goes back to when I first started to get involved with taking on patronages and engagements,” she says, of her early days in the Royal family. “I was trying to find, not a unique thing for myself, but a direction of travel I suppose.

“And, of course, inevitably every time I went down a route, I found a member of the family working very hard doing something and I retreated a bit and thought, ‘No not there, treading on toes.’ And I suddenly thought, ‘What have I been doing up until this point and could shape what potentially could be the next move?’

“Because I’d been involved in public relations and communications all of my working life, I thought, ‘Well, so much of that is to do with people.’”

The concept of how people interact differently, and the problem of how to raise their profile, drew her to organisations concentrating on disability, she says. “We’re all different, but just because we’re different doesn’t mean that we don’t bring something to the party.”

The conversation veers from the importance of how those different perspectives can help the public in general (signage and helpers introduced into hospitals for disabled people can actually help anyone who is feeling anxious about going in, she says) to the need to find the right up-to-date language to describe disability.

Before the Duchess leaves, Keagan-Bull asks her about the moment she watched her two children, along with their adult cousins including Princes William and Harry, stand vigil in Westminster Hall, around the coffin of their grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.

Unflappable, she thinks a moment before answering. It was, she says, “incredibly moving”, leaving her “just so proud of them” – “all of the cousins” – for the way they listened to instructions. “I suppose there was a part of me initially that thought, ‘Would it be appropriate for James, perhaps, to do it?’ because he was younger than the others, but he was really keen to do it. And I think it was really important for him to do it, and obviously for Louise as well.

“But they did it so well, each and every one of them. I was slightly holding my breath, wanting them to feel that they’d done it well more than anything else. I wasn’t worried about anything happening; it was more that I wanted them to feel that they’d done their bit for their grandmother.

“It was incredibly moving, and lovely to see her surrounded by them.”

She pauses, putting her hand on her heart and seeming to blink to stop tears falling. “I don’t think I can talk about it any more.”

There is birthday cake to come, and the first of the day’s two renditions of Happy Birthday; then a final check that everyone who wanted a hug or a photo has got one before she leaves.

A short drive away, staff and volunteers at Community Shop Lambeth stand waiting behind the tills for the Duchess, who bursts into laughter as she walks in to see all eight of them in a line and asks whether all customers got the same treatment.

The country’s first social supermarket, it offers surplus food and household essentials at huge discounts, allowing customers to fill their baskets and pay just as they would elsewhere.

“It’s giving people dignity and choice,” Sophie says, walking the biscuit aisle with the managing director. “It doesn’t matter if you’re spending 20p or £20, it’s contributing.”

The Duchess, who volunteers at The Lighthouse charity in Woking and its foodbank, speaks with some knowledge about the wide range of people who find themselves needing help through no fault of their own. “Mistakes happen,” she says, “It’s about being creative and having a ‘can do’ attitude to see what can be done [to help them].”

The Lambeth branch, one of 13 community shops that help some 72,000 families, also runs a hub for activities and a kitchen, which the Duchess tours quickly before literally rolling up her sleeves and washing her hands to pitch in.

She is distracted by toddlers, counting out dumplings for two-year-old Aaliyah and stroking one-year-old Elijah’s cheek before he nods off, and waves tongs as she tells those waiting for her to serve jerk chicken: “This is really cruel! The smell is so good.”

Upstairs, she admires a crafting session where people are creating vision boards of positive slogans and pictures for the new year ahead. “Not everyone wakes up in the morning and says ‘Hurrah!’” she nods. “Sometimes you need to see something to remind you to be positive - everybody has their moments.”

She nudges Jedi, a 20-year-old student who is sitting unassumingly at the end of a table, and congratulates him on his marketing course at university. “It’s so translatable into so many careers. It’s a really good course.”

(Earlier, she quizzed 40-year-old L’Arche resident Jack Ridgman on whether he was a “good cook” and a “tidy flatmate”: the preoccupations of a mum of young adults taking over.)

Her PR and marketing experience can come in unexpectedly handy in the part of royal life that requires shining a light on good causes. As the time comes for the official photograph and volunteers take off their aprons, she stage-whispers and points for them to keep them on to show the logo - “Branding!”

Before she leaves, she is enveloped in a hug and rocked enthusiastically from side to side by Jillian Blackwood, one of the organisation’s mentors, who tells the Duchess she had cold fingers before the women chorus “Cold hands, warm heart!” and laugh.

Her visit “highlights the vital importance of our mission and is a real boost,” says Gary Stott, the executive chairman of Community Shop, afterwards. (John Casson, CEO of L’Arche, says the Duchess’s visit had made people feel “seen and heard” in a way that is rare, and calls her a “kindred spirit”.) One who works with the Duchess said they hope to leave the same impression behind after all her visits.

Sophie’s work will continue after her 60th birthday in exactly the same vein: her key causes, among others, being gender equality, preventing sexual violence in conflict, avoidable blindness, agriculture, and sport.

Dr Heather Melville, who has worked with her for around a decade through the Chartered Management Institute, with a particular focus on women, describes her as “very authentic, very can-do, very clear, funny, open, direct, and people love her. The impact she has on business because of what she does… it’s driving change.”

Tariq Ahmad, Baron Ahmad of Wimbledon, who has travelled widely with the Duchess to areas including the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of their shared role in the campaign to prevent sexual violence in conflict, says she has navigated the most “heartwrenching, heartbreaking” encounters with “phenomenal” sensitivity thanks to “deeply human personal skills”.

“She makes people feel at ease,” he says.

The Duchess’s 60th birthday will be marked by the palace in a low-key fashion on social media, as is the modern way, and then it is back to the day job.

“There is,” as she told her fellow tea-drinkers at L’Arche, “so much to be done.”