Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Writing to the Royals Q&A - January (2019)

As always post your questions about Writing to the Royal, and we will get to them as soon as possible. If you have questions about the royals in general check out our main site.

Question 1:  I love to sketch dresses and fashion outfits. I have made some sketches of dresses I imagined for Kate. Would it be appropriate to show her my sketches by attaching them with a letter? 

Answer: Yes, it would be perfectly fine to send your sketches to Kate. 

Question 2: When you write to Prince Philip, do you write on the envelope "The Duke of Edinburgh's Office" or just "Buckingham Palace ... etc."?

Answer: You need to have something on the first line of the envelope to denote which office at Buckingham Palace this should be sent to. You can either write "Duke of Edinburgh," "HRH Prince Philip," etc. 

You only need to include "Office" when you are sending a letter to a royal office, but it's not for that royal. For example, letters to Princess Beatrice & Princess Eugenie should be sent to The Duke of York's office. So, you would write something like: 

HRH Princess Beatrice
Duke of York's Office
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA
UNITED KINGDOM


Question 3: Do you know if anyone has received the Sussexs's pregnancy reply yet?

Answer: I haven't seen anyone get their reply yet. But I know Clarence House is very busy right now. I saw someone get their wedding reply earlier this week so they are months behind. I'm waiting on at least 6 replies from them. 

Question 4: What do royals do with the database in which are ones who write to them?

Answer: I know for certain UK, Denmark,  Monaco, & Netherlands do, as they have all sent me replies using my old address. You can find out a bit more about this if you read the privacy policy on their official website. But my guess is more of the monarchies do. It's fairly standard practice. 

Question 5: Do you know if Prince Joachim of Denmark and his wife send replies for Christmas and for their and their children's birthday?

Answer: No. I 've never gotten a reply from the couple and I don't think I've ever seen anyone else get one either. 

Why does Clarence House keep sending out the Sussex Christmas reply if they haven't even started to reply to their pregnancy news? 

Question 6: Why does Clarence House keep sending out the Sussex Christmas reply if they haven't even started to reply to their pregnancy news? 

Answer: Who really knows... But Clarence House doesn't always reply in the order that events happen. It is definitely odd that nobody has gotten their reply yet. But, I can't imagine Clarence House not sending one. I know they are very behind, still sending out replies for Sussex wedding and summer events. I'm waiting on 5 or 6 replies from them. 

I think the delay has to do with Clarence House's decision to redesigned their photocards, which we are seeing for the 1st time this Christmas. And I think they waited in creating the pregnancy reply so that it could use the new design. 

And I think Clarence House decided to do Christmas first as they had to get the Wales/Cambridge/Sussex personal Christmas cards out in a timely fashion, so they also designed and printed the Christmas cards for wellwishers at the same time.

But hopefully they will start getting them out soon, or else the little Sussex baby will arrive before they finish.  

Question 7a: Do you keep your stationary always the same or you redesign it occasionally? 

Answer: I don't have any pre-printed stationery. I just have some nice ivory colored paper, and template on my computer. I've changed the template a few times over the years. But I like to keep it basically the same.  I don't know to what degree the staff learns to recognize people who write each year. But using the same stationery would certainly help. And if you think about for Birthdays and Christmas alone, I must send over 10 letters a year to Clarence House. 

Question 7b: Related to stationaries, which programme do you use for a template?


Answer: I just use Pages on my Mac and then looked at their letter templates. I modified it slightly.