# Royal photographer Arthur Edwards: ‘I’ve had some storming rows with the King’ **By:** Hannah Furness **Published:** 2026-10-26T06:01Z **Source:** [The Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2026/10/26/royal-photographer-arthur-edwards-king-charles) --- The press-pack titan reflects on a 50-year career among princes, popes and presidents that has given him a ringside seat to history ‘It’s been a great and interesting life, and never boring’: Arthur Edwards Credit: Owen Harvey Hannah has been writing about the Royal family for a decade: interviewing, analysing, and reporting on the monarchy's biggest moments When the King meets popes and presidents, he is never alone. Sometimes the Queen is by his side, sometimes a private secretary, always a policeman. And then there is Arthur Edwards. “This man,” the King will say, pointing to Fleet Street’s longest-serving royal photographer, “has been following me around for 50 years.” Which is true. When they met in 1976, as the King himself puts it, Edwards was “crawling about in the undergrowth” all over the world in hot pursuit of members of the Royal family: to find them, photograph them, and leap on a yacht or a Learjet to the next assignment. Back then, he was a familiar face and something of a thorn in their sides. There were naughty jokes with Diana, Princess of Wales, and a few memorable rows with her husband. At one point, in 1980, Edwards ended an argument by shouting, “At least I’ve got a job!” at Prince Charles, as he galloped away from him at Highgrove. “It’s amazing how life changes!” the same man, now Charles III, said in a speech honouring Edwards in 2018. “He’s a very good photographer, a jolly good bloke and a very special person.” Now 86, after 50 years of photographing the British Royal family for The Sun, Edwards has written his memoir. It is called Cup of Tea, Arthur?: the question the King, and countless others, have asked him on the road, on planes, and at royal engagements the length and breadth of Britain. It tracks half a century of royal photography and royal history: the exhilarating highs, heartbreaking lows, and countless front-page pictures – the feeling of which he still likens to “winning the pools”. When Elizabeth II invested him with his MBE at Buckingham Palace in 2003, she told him “I can’t believe I’m giving you this”. When the then-Prince Andrew tried to test him on what it stood for, he fired back: “Much Bigger Expenses.” Edwards with Elizabeth II on a royal walkabout in 2003, not long after she had presented him with his MBE Credit: Michael Lloyd Diana, Princess of Wales, teased him mercilessly with a twinkle in her eye, and Sarah Ferguson gave him socks for Christmas with “No comment” embroidered on them. In later life, Edwards sent Elizabeth II some of his photos each year – and she would paste them into her diaries over her Balmoral summer holidays. Queen Camilla told him that his kind words about her husband had moved her to tears. He has had a ringside seat to history – and created it too. In 1980, The Sun won the Fleet Street-wide race to reveal the identity of Prince Charles’s girlfriend – one Lady Diana Spencer. When they announced their engagement, Edwards sent a telegram of congratulations. The future King replied, wiring back to joke about the end of that particular royal mystery: “I trust you won’t be made redundant.” In a modern media landscape now dominated by social-media videos and fact-free opinion, Edwards is a walking library. He is fond of Prince William, who tells his children to “look at Arthur” as a friendly face among the photographers, and is quietly pleased that Prince Harry – who once put a purple paint handprint on his head during a royal engagement and roared with laughter – is back in Britain. Edwards is a titan of the industry, known among the press pack as much for his catchphrases (more on which later) as his relentless optimism that the next great picture is always just around the corner. He is something of a star in his own right among diehard royal fans. On tours overseas, and engagements around Britain, he will invariably be stopped by monarchists who want their own photo with “Arfur”. On RAF Voyager Vespina, travelling with the King and Queen, Edwards sits at the front of the press section – cup of tea in hand – and they will make a beeline for him to catch up. I have known Arthur for a decade, travelling with him all over the world as part of the royal rota: the now-infamous merry band of press authorised to document the working lives of the King and his family. “It’s been a great life,” he tells me. “A great and interesting life, and never boring.” I’ll say. At his home in Brentwood, Essex, where he has lived for 55 years, every wall and surface is lined with photographs, trinkets and memorabilia: family pictures of his beloved late wife, Ann, their three children and four granddaughters mixing with personal letters and cards from members of the Royal family and photographs of Edwards with princes and popes alike. Meeting with Pope Francis during a royal visit to Vatican City in 2017 Credit: Getty/Tim Rooke He still photographs the Royal family, although he picks up assignments on his own terms now he is in his ninth decade. Edwards is reflective, recording his memoir for posterity after much nagging from friends. He was finally persuaded, he says, over lunch with old colleagues – and spent seven weeks taping his recollections every evening with 50 years’ worth of photographs to jog his memory. Most of his praise, other than that for Ann, is reserved for Charles III. From a rocky start (“He’s very forgiving, you know… In those early days, my God, I was aggressive,” Edwards says now), the men have mutual respect and more. “He calls me Arthur, and I call him Sir. It’s a good arrangement. And that’s the way it will be until the day I die.” Nevertheless, he can’t sing the King’s praises enough. “He’s an extraordinary man, and one of the reasons I’m still working is because I like working with him, and I think he’s pleased to see me when I turn up as well,” says Edwards. “He’s a very humble man and you can’t praise him. I once said to him why can’t you take a compliment? “I think he does embrace the job better than anybody, any of the others. He’s tireless. He’s like the Duracell bunny: he just never stops. I’m a kid from east London who didn’t do too well at school, and he’s given me a great life. And I suppose in return, he’s got a fan for life, and that’s me. He’s a decent, decent man.” ‘He calls me Arthur, and I call him Sir,’ says Edwards of his relationship with the King (pictured together in 2018) Credit: Getty Images/Eamonn M McCormack Edwards, born in 1940 in Epping, in a prison that had been converted into a maternity hospital during the Second World War, is one of a dwindling number of an extraordinary generation. The son of a lorry driver, he was evacuated during the Blitz, seeing his father only twice and his mother not at all for several years. “I had a key on a piece of string, left through the letterbox – no one robbed it because it was nothing to steal,” he says. “Nothing.” There were scant resources but plenty of grit. Edwards sold splintered wood from bomb sites for kindling. There was an uncle who occasionally brought a sixpence and eventually photographer mentors who taught him “discipline”. His mother scraped together money for a camera and, he says, “I never looked back.” His first foray into the industry came via answering a newspaper advert: “boy” needed for a photographer’s dark room in the West End. He worked briefly shooting fashion models and then football matches, joining The Sun in 1975… and never leaving. Arthur Edwards met Ann through the Catholic Church (he remains devout), and they married shortly before his 21st birthday. In June 1976, Edwards took a photograph of Charles feeding a Polo mint to his polo pony (“Still one of the best pictures I took of him”) and was hooked. In 1977 he incited royal wrath by accidentally taking the first picture of the Prince’s bald patch (but “he’s a good-natured bloke who never stays in a bad mood for long”, Edwards writes now). There have been “storming rows” with Prince Charles over the years “where he’s screaming at me”, Edwards says, “but those were a long time ago”. On official engagements, he says, the Prince understood what the press needed to get coverage in the next day’s newspapers. Along with The Sun’s royal editor of the day – Harry Arnold, in his heyday – Edwards travelled the world in pursuit of scoops. Attending the Badminton Horse Trials in 1982 Credit: Getty Images/Steve Wood/Popperfoto His anecdotes speak to another era. Hours spent in darkrooms; “chartering a Learjet” to Sardinia in pursuit of the Royal Yacht Britannia (commercial flights were fully booked); photographing Princess Diana at five months pregnant on the beach. The latter was published as “Bahama Mama”, Edwards says. “Everybody got upset about that except her.” When Diana later asked him how much money he made from it and he told her it was just his usual salary, she joked: “Oh, pass me the Kleenex.” Princess Diana, he says, was “not just a superstar but a megastar. But she was a nice megastar. She was fun.” They came to tease each other: him attempting to offer her fashion advice, her poking him back. “Are you wearing that hat for a bet, Arthur?” she wondered in 1991, catching sight of his tweed flat cap in the rain. The secret to his success, Edwards says now, is good manners. “I always ask politely, you know,” Edwards says of how he got many of his photographs. “The first time I ever saw her, I said: ‘Excuse me, are you Lady Diana? Can I take your photograph, please?’” And she said yes.” He has a similar story in different circumstances for Queen Camilla, in 1991. “I saw Camilla go to the hairdressers and I said: ‘Excuse me, Mrs Parker Bowles, can I take a picture please? And she said yes.” Moments later, she nearly got a parking ticket and The Sun published the photos under the headline “Illegal Parking Bowles”. He has a vivid memory of Diana, then still working at a nursery, being boxed in by French paparazzi who had placed bins in front of her car. “As Diana tried to move the heavy bins,” he writes in the book, “she burst into tears of frustration and anger. I arrived at that precise moment and rushed over to help. ‘Don’t let them see you cry,’ I warned her. ‘They’d love that.’ I hauled the barrels away and freed her car.” She repaid him tenfold once she had married into the Royal family, playing ball with photographs whenever she could. One of her private secretaries assured Edwards he was her “favourite”. There is no escaping the fact that it was a different era. Newspapers no longer follow the Royal family around the world to photograph them on holiday; there are no tacit agreements in which family members pose for pictures on beaches and ski slopes. The excesses, at the time, seemed “normal”, says Edwards. Edwards (left) among the photographers waiting for Diana, Princess of Wales, at a royal engagement in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1990 Credit: Getty Images/Ken R Goff When Diana died in 1997, Edwards was deployed to Paris to photograph her coffin returning home. He cried seeing it. Later, a French taxi driver – seeing a camera around his neck – told him, “You’re a killer”. Sarah Ferguson later rang him to ask whether he was OK. Edwards, along with the industry, has softened over the years. By Charles’s 50th birthday, Edwards and his compatriots commissioned a paparazzi gnome as a gift, which the Prince placed in the Highgrove gardens and hosted a party for them to view it. It can still be seen there, if you know where to look. In 2004, when Charles Clarke, the education secretary at the time, accused the then-Prince of Wales of being “old-fashioned” and “out of time” after he made private comments about the education system, Edwards wrote a column at the request of his editor defending Prince Charles. Then came Desert Island Discs, where he vouched for Camilla as making Charles “incredibly happy”. She wrote him a letter afterwards to say: “I’m in floods of tears listening to all the wonderful things you said about my husband.” More recently, the King has arranged for Edwards to meet a succession of popes during State visits to the Vatican, something of a personal gift that left him deeply moved. The King is his undisputed favourite now, but he is nearly as enthusiastic about Queen Camilla. “She’s never lost a common touch, which is a great strength,” he says. “She’s in touch with the normal people because she was one for 55 years. And she’s just great.” While Edwards acknowledges the King is his favourite member of the Royal family, the Queen runs a close second Credit: News Group Newspapers Ltd/Arthur Edwards He photographed Prince William as a newborn baby outside St Mary’s Hospital’s Lindo Wing, and all three of his children too. “Since he’s become the Prince of Wales, he’s become very much an established diplomat… He’s a great ambassador for the country now, and he’s grasped that brilliantly,” Edwards asserts. “A long time when he was growing up, I never thought he would, because he hated the media. ‘I hate those ’tographers’, he’d say.” The young Prince Harry, he suspects, “used to love it – he’d poke his tongue out at you”. Edwards, unexpectedly, corroborates Harry’s characterisation of himself as the “Spare” when he was little, as well as a “born comedian and mimic”. On a Norfolk beach in 1986, he remembers, the boys’ nanny “was making a big fuss of William” (“as usual”), leaving a protection officer to tell his two-year-old brother: “Come here, Harry. I’ll build you a sandcastle. It’s the only bleeding castle you’re ever likely to get.” Edwards hates the “vitriol” that he says Harry “poured on his family” in Spare, but recognises that his resentment started a long time ago. As an adult, Harry would “work tirelessly” on tours to make sure he got a good photo. “I’m glad he’s back, and I hope he gets involved,” Edwards says. “He was a great star.” He didn’t finish reading Spare, having watched much of its contents first hand and been irritated by the factual errors. Edwards believes that after six years of self-appointed exile in the United States, Harry will be better off in Britain. “There, he was a celebrity among thousands of celebrities,” he says. “Here, he’s a prince of the realm. He might not be the knight in shining armour at the moment, but knowing him he’ll bounce back. People have got short memories. “I think, hopefully, if he just stops writing books and Meghan stops making horrible jam, and they start working a bit for the family, I think things could change.” Edwards did not approve of “those things” Harry said about William and Camilla in the book, and he does not enjoy the Sussexes’ habit of sharing photographs of their children with their faces turned away. “I do hope to get to see their faces one day before I die,” he says, only partially joking. He describes Archie and Lilibet as “a Prince and Princess of the House of Windsor” and wonders, “What were they doing in Montecito going to an American school, when they should be here playing with their cousins?” He continues: “They should be getting to run around Balmoral and Windsor, and they should get royal protection, because if they were kidnapped, there would be uproar.” Diana, he thinks, “would have moved Heaven and Earth to end the rift between her sons”. At 86, after 50 years of photographing the British Royal family for The Sun, Edwards has written his memoir Credit: Owen Harvey Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor gets short shrift now. “He was totally arrogant; that was his problem,” Edwards says. When the then-Prince Andrew, comparing the press and the Royal family, once told him,“It’s all right for you lot – you can retire, we can’t,” an incredulous Edwards replied: “If I had a chauffeur to take me everywhere and never had to worry about parking or buying petrol, I wouldn’t want to retire either.” He remains fond of and loyal to Sarah Ferguson, who he says was “always very nice to me” and “made me look brilliant in the eyes of the editor” with a string of exclusive photographs she happily posed for. Edwards has spoken to her recently, he says, and she is “very upset” about things. “I can’t pour grief on her; I won’t do that.” Edwards remembers the photos he has taken, and the ones he hasn’t. When Ferguson, on an engagement as the Duchess of York, once fell off her chair, her dress flying up, he put his camera down, knowing “if someone had done it to my wife, I would’ve killed them – why would I do it to her?” When Diana’s sisters travelled to Paris after her death, he decided against sending a photograph of them with “grief etched all over their faces” into the paper. When Prince Harry’s “face cracked” looking at flowers at Kensington Palace days later, “I couldn’t bring myself to take the picture of a 12-year-old boy in tears – it was incredibly sad.” Edwards has some regrets, some missed photos he still kicks himself over. Mostly, he suspects he worked too hard. Ann, a devoted wife and nurse, who kept the home fires burning for their three children while he was overseas, once met him at Heathrow “with a suitcase and a quick kiss” between his work trips. “Without her, none of it would have been possible,” he says. She died four years ago, and their home is filled with photographs of her, and of them together. Two of his children, John and Paul, followed in his footsteps as press photographers and, now in their 60s, have part-retired before him. Edwards met his wife, Ann, through the Catholic Church and they married in 1961 Credit: John Lee Edwards is optimistic about the current state of the Royal family, and a little more circumspect about its future. “Hopefully our King’s going to be there for years yet,” he says. “I think he’s determined that he doesn’t want to be known as a sick monarch. But his legacy will be as our king: a brilliant speech in Washington, the fact that he’s still campaigning to stop climate change and many other great causes which he’s passionate about and will never stop.” Of the next generation, he says William and Catherine “are just perfect for the role” of king and queen, and George is on his path now. “I imagine when he’s the king it’ll be a very different monarchy here than it is today. I think there’ll be no Buckingham Palace as we know it – the gold coaches and everything might have gone, who knows.” Of being a Royal, Edwards tells me: “You wouldn’t want to do it, not in a million years would you want to change places with them. It’s a job that you have no choice in, that you’re born into.” Nowadays, he picks and chooses the royal engagements he wants to cover. He attends Mass every morning and a 6am gym session three days a week. He hopes to join the King on a State visit close to home next year. “I like being Arthur Edwards,” he says. “I realised early on that whatever I did in life I wanted to enjoy it, and it’s been a joy. “I told my children: if you don’t want to go to work on a Monday, get another job. Because Monday is a great day if you love what you do.” Cup of Tea, Arthur? My Extraordinary 50 Years Photographing the Royal Family by Arthur Edwards (£25, HarperCollins) is published on Nov 5