So, the other weekend, I was clearing out my grandpa’s old stuff from the attic. Found this dusty box full of old magazines, mostly from the 60s and 70s.
Flipping through one, I landed on this picture. It was Prince Charles, but man, he looked so different. Really young, obviously, but the whole vibe was just… not what you see now. Got me thinking, you know?
I got curious. Like, properly curious. I wanted to see more pictures like that, the less formal ones, not just the stiff official portraits. So, I figured, easy peasy, I’ll just search online.
Well, let me tell you, it wasn’t that simple. I started typing stuff into search engines, you know, ‘young prince charles candid’, ‘prince charles 1960s casual’, that sort of thing. Sure, loads of pictures came up. But they were mostly the same ones you always see. The polo playing, the university shots, the investiture. All very… expected.
Finding those really natural, off-guard moments? Much tougher. It felt like digging for needles in a haystack. I even tried looking through online newspaper archives, thinking maybe old news reports would have different photos. Spent a good few hours clicking through grainy scans. Found some interesting articles, but the photos were mostly the official kind again.
Digging Deeper
It made me realise something. Back then, the media machine wasn’t quite the same. Maybe fewer cameras around all the time? Or maybe the palace had a tighter grip on the images that got out. What you mostly find now are the carefully chosen moments.
- Official events
- Approved photo ops
- Portraits
The everyday stuff, the truly ‘young’ and maybe awkward moments, seem much rarer, or at least harder to unearth easily from your sofa.
My takeaway? It’s funny how history gets packaged. You think you can just look up ‘king charles young’ and see the whole story, but what’s easily available is often just one version of it. The curated version. That whole afternoon digging around really showed me how much context can get lost, or how selective the public record can be, even for someone so famous. It wasn’t quite the quick look-up I expected, more like a mini-history project gone sideways. Ended up learning more about old magazines and online archives than I planned!
