
The surprising reason why Prince William 'annoys' his aunt Princess Anne is revealed
But perhaps their work goals differ ever-so slightly - as several sources claiming to be close to the Princess Royal, 74, told The Sunday Times that the King's sister would like to see her nephew do more 'bread-and-butter' royal engagements.
For instance, only the monarch, Princess Anne and Prince William perform the investitures, the formal ceremonies where those who have been awarded a royal honour receive their insignia.
Many of these take place at Windsor Castle, near the Prince of Wales' home of Adelaide Cottage.
A source close to Princess Anne told the publication: 'She's still doing most of the investitures [at Windsor] even though William lives there. It annoys her.'
The Royal Family's official website notes that around 30 Investitures are held each year, with over sixty recipients attending each ceremony, either in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace, or in the Grand Reception Room at Windsor Castle.
'Investitures also happen occasionally at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, or overseas during State or Royal visits,' adds the site. 'Investitures are hosted by The King, The Princess Royal and The Prince of Wales.'
Elsewhere in The Sunday Times article, published ahead of the royal's 75th birthday, it was revealed that Princess Anne's injuries after suffering a concussion last year were 'much worse' than the public knew at the time.
The Princess Royal was admitted to intensive care last June with concussion and head injuries after reportedly being kicked by a horse at her Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire.
She was taken to Southmead Hospital in Bristol for tests, treatment and observation, before returning to duties that July.
Now, a source said to know Anne well has told The Sunday Times that her accident was 'so much worse' than initially revealed at the time.
They said: 'Her accident was so much worse than anyone let on and it took quite a while for her to feel herself again.'
Following her accident, Anne was forced to miss at least nine engagements, including a trip to Canada and a banquet for the Japanese State Visit in London.
When Anne returned to work in July, she was seen sporting a black eye.
Prince William and Kate shared a rare personal message on X/Twitter, writing: 'Super trooper! So great to see you back so soon. W&C x.'
The royal, a skilled horsewoman who competed in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, was going for a walk when the incident occurred.
The Princess Royal is often regarded as the 'hardest working' member of the royal family. Last year, Anne clocked up 474 engagements, with King Charles completing 372.
She has been a cornerstone in the King's slimmed-down working monarchy, and has played a big role by stepping up in support of Charles amid his cancer diagnosis.
The Princess is known for her no-nonsense approach and her commitment to royal duty, and the King made a point of making public his 'fondest love and well-wishes' for his sister after her accident.
Anne was understood at the time to have been taking an evening stroll on her estate with horses nearby when she was hurt.
The Princess was left with minor wounds to the head. Her medical team are understood to believe the injuries were consistent with a potential impact from a horse's head or legs.
In January, speaking out about the accident for the first time, Anne said she remembers 'nothing' about it.
Talking at the Grand Military Cup Day at Sandown Park Racecourse in Esher, Surrey, after a whirlwind trip to South Africa, Anne revealed that she was on the way to see chickens on her estate when the accident happened.
When questioned whether the last thing she recalled was walking into a field, Anne said: 'No, I don't even remember that.
'I know where I thought I was going and that was to go to the chickens, no, nothing to do with horses.'
She added that seeing the chickens was 'my regular visit, I don't have any idea what I was doing in the field, because I never normally went that way.
'It just... shows you - you never quite know, something [happens], and you might not recover.'
Anne spent five nights in hospital after the accident on June 23 and did not return to public royal duties until almost three weeks later.
Asked about any lasting ill effects, she lightened the mood and joked: 'Apparently not, at least I don't think so. As far as I know, nobody else thinks so - they haven't been honest enough to tell me yet. So far so good.'
She added: 'You are sharply reminded that every day is a bonus really.'
Interviewed after a whirlwind two-day tour of Cape Town, Anne also discussed her future and was asked whether retirement was an option, she replied: 'It really isn't written in, no. It isn't really an option, no, I don't think so.'
Her father, the late Duke of Edinburgh, did retire from royal duties in 2017, but he was 96 when he took the decision and had supported Queen Elizabeth II for more than 65 years at the time.
Anne is known for her busy work schedule, and as she approaches her 75th birthday in August, the royal will continue to lead the monarchy in various engagements.
She carried out her first public engagement in 1969 aged 18 when she opened an educational and training centre in Shropshire, and a year later, she began her longest association with a charity, becoming president of Save the Children and later patron.
Anne has two children - Peter Phillips, 47, and Zara Tindall, 44 - from her first marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, before their divorce in 1992. She has been married to Sir Timothy Laurence since December that year.
Anne said: 'I don't think there's a retirement programme on this particular life. You're jolly lucky... if you can continue to be more or less compos mentis and last summer I was very close to not being.'
She added: 'Take each day as it comes, they say.'
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Edinburgh University's ‘skull room' highlights its complicated history with racist science
Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets. Most carry faded, peeling labels, some bear painted catalogue numbers; one has gold teeth; and the occasional one still carries its skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's 'skull room'. Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others came from executed Scottish murderers; some Indigenous people's skulls were brought to Scotland by military officers on expeditions or conquest missions. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist science of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character. Among them are the skulls of two brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not recorded in the skull room catalogue, but cross-referencing of matriculation and death records suggests they were George Richards, a 21-year-old medic who died of smallpox in 1832, and his younger brother, Robert Bruce, 18, a divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833. Exactly how the Richards brothers' skulls came to be separated from their bodies, recorded as interned in the South Leith parish church cemetery, is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial difference. Researchers believe their case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which, it has now emerged, played a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference from the late 1700s onwards – ideas taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who dispersed across the British empire. University records studied by Dr Simon Buck suggest the brothers were of mixed African and European descent, born in Barbados to George Richards, an Edinburgh-educated doctor who practised medicine on sugar plantations and who owned enslaved people – possibly including George and Robert Bruce's mother. Edinburgh Phrenological Society's 1858 catalogue records the skulls (listed as No 1 and No 2) as having belonged to 'mulatto' students of divinity and medicine. 'It can be assumed that the racialisation of these two individuals as 'mulatto' – a hybrid racial category that both fascinated and bewildered phrenologists – is what aroused interest among members of the society in the skulls of these two students,' Edinburgh's decolonisation report concludes. The brothers' skulls are among the roughly 400 amassed by the society and later absorbed into the anatomical museum's collection, which now contains about 1,500 skulls. These are held in the Skull Room, to which The Guardian was granted rare access. Many of these ancestral remains, the report states, 'were taken, without consent, from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields', with others 'having been stolen and exported from the British empire's colonies', often gifted by a global network of Edinburgh alumni. 'We can't escape the fact that some of [the skulls] will have been collected with the absolute express purpose of saying, 'This is a person from a specific race, and aren't they inferior to the white man',' said Prof Tom Gillingwater, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, who now oversees the anatomical collection. 'We can't get away from that.' The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by George Combe, a lawyer, and his younger brother, Andrew, a doctor, with roughly a third of its early members being physicians. Both were students at the university, and some Edinburgh professors were active members. Through its acquisition of skulls from across the globe, the society played a central role in turning the 'science' of phrenology, which claimed to decode an individual's intellect and moral character from bumps and grooves on the skull, into a tool of racial categorisation that placed the white European man at the top of a supposed hierarchy. George Combe's book, The Constitution of Man, was a 19th-century international bestseller and the Combe Trust (founded with money made from books and lecture tours promoting phrenology) endowed Edinburgh's first professorship in psychology in 1906 and continues to fund annual Combe Trust fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Phrenology was criticised by some of Edinburgh's medical elite for its unscientific approach. But some of its most vocal critics were nonetheless persuaded that immutable biological differences in intelligence and temperament existed between populations, a study by Dr Ian Stewart for the university's decolonisation report reveals. These included Alexander Monro III, an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh medical school, who lectured 'that the Negro skull, and consequently the brain, is smaller than that of the European', and Robert Jameson, a regius professor of natural history, whose lectures at the university in the 1810s included a hierarchical racial diagram of brain size and intelligence. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh, and its accuracy was heavily contested by Edinburgh academics, the skull room, which is closed to the public, was built partly to house its collection by the then professor of anatomy Sir William Turner, when he helped oversee the construction of its new medical school in the 1880s. Among its reparatory justice recommendations of Edinburgh's investigation is that the university provide more support for the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities. This, Gillingwater suggested, possibly underplays the complexities involved – even for cases such as the Richards brothers. He regards the circumstantial evidence in their case as 'strong' but says it does not meet the forensic threshold required for conclusive identification. 'From a legal perspective, it wouldn't be watertight,' said Gillingwater. 'I would never dream of returning remains to a family when I didn't know who they definitely were.' Active engagement surrounding repatriation is taking place in relation to several of the skulls from the phrenology collection; more than 100 have already been repatriated to their places of origin. But each case takes time building trust with communities and in some cases navigating geopolitical tensions over which descendent community has the strongest claim to the remains. 'To look at perhaps repatriation, burials, or whatever, it's literally years of work almost for each individual case,' said Gillingwater. 'And what I found is that every individual culture you deal with wants things done completely differently.' Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'That is something that keeps me awake at night,' said Gillingwater. 'For some of our skulls, I know that whatever we do, we're never going to end up with an answer.' 'All I can offer at the minute is that we just continue to care for them,' he added. 'They've been with us, many of them, for a couple of hundred years. So we can look after them. We can care for them. We can treat them with that dignity and respect they all deserve individually.'


The Independent
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- The Independent
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Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
Paramedic and circus star, 30, is handed a shock diagnosis just weeks before a dream trip - after seeking help for one common niggling symptom
Paramedic and circus performer Paige Footner faces daunting situations every day - but she experienced an entirely new kind of fear when her world was turned upside down in June. She was meant to be jetting off on the trip of a lifetime, a whirlwind international adventure that would take the Adelaide-based star to the glittering stages of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the training halls of Quebec's elite circus schools. Instead, the 30-year-old now finds herself facing a different journey - one of brain scans, hospital beds and the terrifying unknown. Just weeks before she was set to board a plane to Scotland, Paige was dealt a devastating blow after doctors discovered a four-centimetre tumour growing inside her brain. 'I'd paid for everything on my credit card already,' Paige told FEMAIL. 'I have $13,000 to pay off from it - and I hadn't brought my travel insurance yet.' Thinking she had a full bill of health, Paige was beyond excited to jet off on June 27 and participate in paid shows at her favourite performing arts showcase in Scotland. 'I was supposed to be there right now performing, then we found the brain tumour.' Paige had been training hard too, working two shifts per week as a paramedic and honing her talents as one of Australia's best Cyr wheel performers the rest of the time. 'The circus is more than a full-time job,' she said. 'And because I'm 30, I'm considered old in circus, so I'm really trying to make it, and I just give it all I have.' However, after gruelling long hours perfecting her talents, Paige felt something wasn't right. It wasn't physical signs of distress that we're affecting her though. Paige had been living with a persistent sound in her ear, a condition known as tinnitus, for four years. It was frustrating, but not alarming, and in her line of work as both a circus artist and paramedic, a few knocks to the head weren't unusual. 'I had unilateral pulsatile tinnitus in one ear. It wasn't ringing, it was more of a whooshing and pulsing in my ear,' she explained. 'I mentioned it to my GP, because it can be a sinister sign of something, and then they referred me to an ENT. Eventually it showed I had some damage to the nerves on the left side.' Doctors suspected it was linked to a minor head injury during training. But out of caution, Paige finally booked an MRI scan on June 6. That scan revealed something entirely unexpected: a brain tumour, sitting in her posterior right frontal lobe. And what's more unsettling, the tumour had absolutely nothing to do with her ear symptoms. 'It was a completely incidental finding,' she said. 'The tumour was in the wrong spot to cause the tinnitus. 'Both neurosurgeons said I was so lucky, because the tumour isn't causing me any symptoms. So in a way, circus saved my life.' Paige's tumour appears slow-growing, but its atypical structure had doctors concerned. 'Next I had PET scan, and they found no other tumors, but there still is now a question mark over what it is because of these atypical findings,' she said. With some of the features looking irregular, there's a possibility it could be more serious than a standard meningioma. Surgery for Paige is essential, and the full nature of the tumour - whether it's benign or malignant - won't be known until it's removed and biopsied. 'Meningiomas are benign. But there are three different grades of meningiomas, and you don't know the grade until it goes to the lab. That is better than a cancerous tumour though,' she explained. From all if this, Paige's world shifted in an instant. Her shows were cancelled. Her flights, scheduled for Jun 27th, were immediately called off. And her dreams of spinning across a global stage this year vanished overnight. After her impending brain surgery, Paige won't be able to drive for six months, which means that she won't be able to work as a paramedic - a significant portion of her income. 'To lose that for six months is a huge stress, as well as losing my performing income and then having to pay back all of my overseas trip, and medical bills,' she said. Initially, she didn't want anyone to know of her diagnosis. 'I felt vulnerable and scared and weak, and that's so far from how I normally see myself,' she said. 'In circus, I'm known for being incredibly brave. When you're facing scary tricks, you can overcome them with mental grit and determination. But this was different. There was nothing I could do to change the diagnosis, and that left me feeling so powerless.' Paige told only her boss, asking him to keep the real reason for her absence private. However, he knew that sharing it would bring support and he convinced her to open up. Going public with her diagnosis turned out to be a turning point. What began as a deeply isolating experience soon transformed into a moment of overwhelming connection and meaning. 'Before I told anyone, I was crying myself to sleep because I didn't know how I was going to survive the next six months financially. I was so stressed. And I was having really dark thoughts,' she said. One of the most painful, she confessed, was realising how much of life she feared she might never get to experience. 'My first thought when they told me was, "I'm going to die, and I've never been in love". I've never had a boyfriend. Every little girl dreams of finding true love, and I just thought… that might never happen for me,' she said. But the outpouring of love and support from her community helped Paige reframe the journey ahead. 'I didn't know how much of a difference I'd made in people's lives until now,' she said. 'For me, life is about being part of a community and making a positive impact in other people's lives. And I had no idea that I'd done that until I until this. 'I guess I've achieved my purpose in life.'