Apart from his bombshells about his family, Prince Harry’s Spare also offered people a rare insight into different phases of his life. One such chapter sees the Duke of Sussex detailing his boarding school years, including daily routines that many would find highly unusual. The Prince was just eight years old when he went to boarding school, where even the most basic tasks were managed and controlled by the staff rather than the students. Among the memories that stayed with him were the strange bathing rituals.
Harry started his schooling at Mrs. Mynors Nursery School and then went on to attend Wetherby Prep School. He started his boarding school at Ludgrove School and then proceeded to attend Eton College. Writing about his time at Ludgrove, the Duke penned that younger boys followed a set washing routine several times a week. He recalled how matrons were directly involved in the process, leaving little room for privacy. “Three times a week after dinner, the matrons would assist the youngest boys with a nightly wash,” he wrote. Describing the scene, the Prince noted that he could still see the long row of white baths with each boy “reclining like a little Pharaoh,” eagerly waiting for their “personalized hair wash.”
For the older students, the bathing routine was different, but remained highly structured. Harry recalled, “For older boys who’d reached puberty, there were two tubs in a separate room, behind a yellow door. The matrons came down the row of tubs with stiff brushes, bars of floral soap.” The Duke also added that every boy had their own towel number, with his being ‘116.’
Interestingly, the bathing ritual wasn’t the only strange thing Harry outlined in Spare. The Duke also wrote about how he kept a lock of Princess Diana’s hair on his nightstand while trying to conceive a child with Meghan Markle. Recalling the time when the Duchess took pregnancy tests, he penned, “I only kept a few things there, among them the blue box with my mother’s hair.” Before checking the results, he allegedly thought: “Right, …good. Let’s see what Mummy can do with this situation.” After he discovered that Markle was indeed pregnant at the time, he said, “Oh wow. Well. Well then. We hugged, kissed. I put the wands back on the nightstand. I thought: Thank you, Mummy.”
Harry, in the documentary Prince, Son and Heir: Charles at 70, once also shared that he’s ‘obsessed’ with turning off lights, something that he picked up from his father, King Charles. “He’s a stickler for turning lights off. And that’s now something that I’m obsessed with as well,” the Prince said. Well, royal or not, we all have our quirks.
Not just switching off lights, Harry also used to pick up litter whenever he would see it, which later became a major source of teasing for him at school. “I used to get taken the mickey out of at school for just picking up rubbish,” he said, adding, “Before you know it, somebody [says], ‘What are you doing?’I’ve literally done this because I am programmed to do it because my father did it. And actually, we should all be doing it.”
