As people mourn the demise of Queen Elizabeth II, a former bodyguard recounted a story that showed the jovial side of her personality which was rarely seen in public.
Former Royal Protection Officer Richard Griffin shed light on an incident when the Queen played a prank on two American tourists who didn’t recognise her.
At the time, the Queen was out on a picnic near the Scottish castle at Balmoral when two US hikers approached her and one of them engaged in a conversation with her.
“The Queen would always stop and say hello when she met people,” Griffin told Sky News during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations earlier this year.
“It was clear from the moment we first stopped, that they hadn’t recognised the Queen. The American gentleman was telling the Queen where he’d come from, where they were going to next, and where they had been to in Britain.”
When one of the tourists asked her where she lived, she replied ‘London’. And when she told the American that she had been coming up to Balmoral Castle for the past 80 years, the hiker asked if she had ever met Queen Elizabeth.
“Well, I haven’t, but Dick here meets her regularly,” the Queen said, referring to Griffin.
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The American tourist then asked Griffin, “Oh, you’ve met the Queen? What’s she like?”
Griffin then told that Sky News that he decided to play dumb and entertained the hiker’s ignorance.
“Because I was with her a long time, and I knew I could pull her leg, I told them, ‘Oh, she can be very cantankerous at times, but she’s got a lovely sense of humour,”‘ he said.
He then put his shoulder around Griffin, got his camera out, and gave it to the Queen, asking if she could snap a picture of him with the royal protection officer.
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Anyway, we swapped places and I took a picture of them with the Queen and we never let on and we waved goodbye,” Griffin said.
“And Her Majesty said to me, ‘I’d love to be a fly on the wall when he shows those photographs to their friends in America —and hopefully someone tells him who I am.'”
