Letter from a young King Charles set for auction

When a couple was clearing out their home during Christmas, they weren’t ready for what they discovered in a filing box.

Upon going through the items, a letter, now revealed to have been penned by a six-year-old King Charles in 1955, was found and addressed to his grandmother, the Queen Mother, urging her to get better.

“Dear Granny, I am sorry that you are ill. I hope you will be better soon. Lots of love from Charles,” the letter reads.

The letter is now up for auction for £3,000, along with other prized royal items.

A surprising discovery

The couple who discovered the sentimental piece live on a farm near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The box containing the letter also contained a booklet titled ‘The Words of Her Majesty The Queen, Christmas Day Nineteen Hundred and Fifty-Six’.

Both items will be going to the Hansons Auctioneers, of Etwall, Derbyshire, on March 7.

“We finally had the time to look through a big box file that my mother had given to us,” the farm manager who found the letter said. “It originally belonged to my late grandad, Roland Stockdale.”

Stockdale, as it turns out, worked for the London Metropolitan Police before working for the Queen’s personal protection force in the 1950s.

“[The box] contained lots of royal memorabilia, including a letter from Prince Charles to his grandmother. My wife said ‘wow, look at that’. We were pretty gobsmacked but we weren’t sure whether anyone would be interested in it.”

The letter from King Charles also features a number of childhood doodles and was written on Buckingham Palace headed paper.

“My grandad was a man of few words and never really spoke about his time working with the royal family but he was clearly well thought of. I have absolutely no idea how he came to have the letter written by King Charles when he was a boy.”

What else was in the box?

The box also had royal menus, royal dance invitations for Mr. Stockdale and his wife, notes signed by the Queen Mother, and a George VI Memorial Westminster booklet from October 21, 1955.

“These rare royal finds are remarkable, even more so when you consider the family had no idea they had them in their care for around 40 years,” said an auctioneer from Hansons. “We all hang on to items throughout our life, such as cards and letters. Roland did the same and, like the vast majority of us, never thought to mention them to his family.”

“It has long been normal practice for members of the royal family to give away small keepsakes and personal mementos to valued servants,” he added.