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According to one of his former employees, working for Prince Andrew requires an acute understanding of the very specific way the royal likes his enormous collection of teddy bears laid out.

Charlotte Briggs, who claims to have worked as a maid at Buckingham Palace in the ’90s, told The Sun that one of her daily tasks was to strategically place Andrew’s 72 stuffed animals around his room. “As soon as I got the job, I was told about the teddies and it was drilled into me how he wanted them,” she said. “I even had a day’s training. Everything had to be just right. It was so peculiar.” She added that the bears were collected from all over the world and many were dressed up like sailors.

Briggs explained that every day she would organize the collection so all of the largest bears were in the back and the rest were placed in descending order according to size. At night, Briggs or another maid would then have to use a diagram to place the bears in their designated spots throughout the bedroom. She said that the smaller bears would usually be stacked in an unused fireplace, while some of his more beloved stuffed toys, such as two hippos and a black panther named “Daddy,” “Ducks,” and “Prince,” were placed on his bed or around the room. But Andrew’s two favorite teddy bears were always placed in mahogany thrones by his bedside. “It was so odd,” Briggs said. “After all, he was a grown man who had served in the Falklands. But he absolutely loved the teddies and was very clear about how he wanted them arranged.”

This former maid isn’t the only person claiming to have seen this massive collection of royal bears. According to The Sun, in ITV’s new documentary, Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Pedophile, former royal cop Paul Page confirms, “It had about 50 or 60 stuffed toys positioned on the bed and basically there was a card the inspector showed us in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears all in situ.” He continued, “The reason for the laminated picture was if those bears weren’t put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream.”

In a 2019 You Magazine article, reporter Elizabeth Day also wrote about an “oversized teddy bear” in the waiting area outside of Andrew’s apartment when she went there to interview him a decade earlier. She wrote, “When I was ushered in to meet Prince Andrew, I asked him about it. He sniggered and told me it had been a wedding gift from his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. Apparently, he had found the bear waiting for him when he got into the horse-drawn carriage that was to take them from Westminster Abbey to their reception. I remember that he found this extremely funny, even several years after the event.” She added, “It seemed rather strange to me that a grown man should be so amused by the presence of a stuffed toy.”

Andrew, who is currently facing civil trial after a U.S. federal judge rejected his attempt to have Virginia Giuffre’s sexual assault lawsuit against him dismissed, hasn’t commented on his persnickety approach to bear arrangement. But in 2010, he did confess to having a soft spot for the stuffed toys, according to The Sun, saying in an interview, “I’ve always collected teddy bears. Everywhere I went in the Navy I used to buy a little teddy bear, so I’ve got a collection from all over the world of one sort or another.”

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