Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth

In this episode of Rosebud, Gyles Brandreth interviews Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former soldier and royal private secretary. The conversati

Key takeaways

• Jamie's mother lived a double life as a cozy Suffolk resident while secretly serving in MI5 during the Cold War.
• His father, known as 'Rumpty,' was a Metropolitan Police Special Branch officer with deep Anglo-Irsih roots.

Main topics

• Royal Household service
• Military career in the SAS and Irish Guards

Notable quotes

Aim at the stars, you hit the bloody moon, you know.

Conclusion

A fascinating exploration of how a life of military and royal service

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hello again. I'm so glad you've found us, because we think of this as our own enchanted place, somewhere very special. It's the world of Rosebud, and it's wonderful that you're here. Welcome. Let's cue the music. Speaker 2 (0:35) Hello, I'm Giles Brandreth, and this is another episode of Rosebud. If you're listening to this on the day that we drop it onto the world, it's the 25th of September, 2026. And this week, I'm sure you've noticed, there's been a lot of royal coverage in the news, much of it triggered by the publication of a book by Earl Spencer, Charles Spencer, about his sister Diana, the late Princess of Wales. Actually, if you're intrigued by Earl Spencer, you can see and hear him. in the round on an earlier episode of Rosebud, one we recorded earlier this year. They're easy to find, the old episodes. You can go to our archive via our website. That's rosebudpodcast.co.uk. Or you can check it out on YouTube. We have a lot of our interviews now on YouTube. You simply go to YouTube, look for the Rosebud channel, and there we are. It's fascinating, actually, in many ways, the Earl Spencer conversation. not least because in it he talks about the challenges and traumas of his own childhood and how they've affected the rest of his life, including his quite complicated love life. Prince Harry has been in the news this week, now back living in England, and Prince William and Catherine, of course, they've also been out and about and getting coverage on their, doing their royal duty. William and Harry, they crop up in today's episode of Rosebud because my guest is a man called Jamie. Lowther Pinkerton, a sometimes soldier, now a novelist, who until 2013 was William and Harry's first principal private secretary. I asked him in for this week really quite by coincidence because I've been reading a novel that he's written called Beyond the Edge of Light. And it's beautifully written. It's a Second World War novel. It's about forbidden love, Bletchley Park. But what intrigued me is that it was inspired by his own mother. and I wanted to discover more about her and about him. In some ways, you might think his story is predictable. You know, he was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and he became a soldier, Irish Guards, then he joined the SAS. But he's not quite as predictable as the biography might suggest. He spent a fascinating couple of years as a query to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in the 1980s, and our conversation has lots of fun stories about her. And I think it was when he was working with her that he will first have met Prince Charles, as he then was the Prince of Wales, because he was very close to his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth. And I think that encounter with Prince Charles, now King Charles III, is what led to him becoming the first principal private secretary to William and Harry, helping them prepare for their role as royals, helping them set up their offices for the first time. And he was with them, I think, until 2013. I know he also helped with the arrangements surrounding William and Catherine's wedding, and then he became one of Prince George's godfathers, you know, the future King George VII. So, actually, the conversation you're about to hear includes some fascinating advice, wise advice, I think, that Jamie gave to the young princes, which you might find useful for your own life. Anyway, he doesn't normally talk about his time in the SAS. all about William and Harry, but he does here. So this is an exceptional episode of Rosebud with an unusual man, with an unusual story to tell. I think you'll find this quite fascinating. This is Rosebud with Jamie Lowther-Pingerton. Cue the music. Now, my guest today has got quite a name, Anthony James Moxon Lowther-Pingerton. Well, some would say this is ridiculous. Where do all these names come Speaker 1 (4:35) from? Well, Moxon is my maternal great-grandmother who was still alive when I was a little boy, so I think it was because of that. And then the Lowther and the Pinkerton bits joined up about three generations ago, both are Anglo-Irish families. So I was lumped with this thing from the word go. And Anthony, because my father... talk about in a minute, but he was very keen on tradition, and tradition extended to having two previous Antony's, and so I got lumped with that, and they called me Jamie since birth, so it's caused untold carnage. Speaker 2 (5:14) We are thinking of you as Jamie Lowther Pinkerton. Forgot this right, born on the 28th September 1960. That's it. Good. Right man, right date of birth. Jamie, what is your very first memory? Speaker 1 (5:28) My first memory is judging the knobbly knees competition at Bognor Regis Butlins when I was about five or six. And I'd been taken there by the wonderful Suffolk lady called Sibby, who used to look after my mother. And my parents went to Ireland, and that was the first holiday I'd ever been on. And it remains one of the best, because I was allowed to stay up until 10 o'clock at night judging. Nobile Unis competitions. Well, Speaker 2 (5:59) we've got to hear about Sibi and your parents. Who are your parents and what is the Irish connection? Speaker 1 (6:04) My father was an Anglo-Irishman. He was called Rumpty, now the Pinkerton, actually because, christened Rumpty by Sir Henry Irving's widow, actually, who came to tea with my... great-great-grandmother. This is a great Victorian actor. Yes. Who Speaker 2 (6:20) didn't like his Speaker 1 (6:21) wife. No. And I heard your episode on that and I did wonder where she fitted in. But she said he looked like the Bishop of Rumpty Foo and Rumpty stuck. And Rumpty Foo Speaker 2 (6:32) is a character in some... Speaker 1 (6:34) In Gilbert and Sullivan. Ah. So it's good sort of Victorian stuff or Edwardian stuff and it just stuck and he was Rumpty all his life. So your dad was known as Rumpty. Yeah. What did you call him? I called him Dad. Fine. Speaker 2 (6:47) But everyone else called him Rumpty. Speaker 1 (6:49) Everybody else called him Rumpty, including all my friends, yeah. And what was he? He was an interesting man because he was one of those sort of people whose family had frankly been, probably quite rightly, dispossessed about six generations ago. But they could never let go of the Irish connection. Speaker 1 (7:12) So he was a great sort of wanderer, like a lot of Anglo-Irish people. When you say Speaker 2 (7:16) dispossessed, his lands were confiscated? Well, the Speaker 1 (7:19) family, I mean, you know, they had absolutely been part of the ascendancy in Ireland, which was... which was not a great thing, perhaps, to have been all the time. But they were burnt out in 1798. So this is an English family. An English family in Ireland. In Ireland. And Speaker 2 (7:37) part of the ascendancy, meaning we are the ascendant people. Absolutely, yeah. You are the Irish peasants. And the Irish peasants said, we've had enough. Speaker 1 (7:44) They said we've had enough. And what particular year was this? 1798. 1798. They torch your forebear's home. They do. And so they are then dispossessed. And in some ways, who can blame them, frankly? But that's when it all started. And it sort of kind of went downhill from there. But the thing I admire about him and his mother and father was that they never sort of let go. And they never allowed themselves to sort of plunge off a cliff. They maintained the most ridiculous sort of standards over these generations, really, when it wasn't warranted. But as a result, he was quite a wanderer, my father. He was an adventurous Anglo-Irish exile, basically. And when you were born Speaker 2 (8:33) that year, 1960, what was he doing? How was he living? Where was he living? Speaker 1 (8:37) I was born in London, but we moved to East Suffolk within about six months. But my father had been in the southern Rhodesian. Speaker 1 (8:48) police after the war. He was mad about horses and that was one of the places you could still ride horses. So he went off there and I think that was one of the great moments of his life. But he then came unstuck on a horse and transferred into the Met and he was in the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. You Speaker 2 (9:06) clearly speak a language that is particular. When somebody's house is burnt down, you call it being dispossessed, and he has a little trouble with a horse, meaning Speaker 1 (9:15) what? Meaning he fell off and the thing rolled on top of him. Wow. And he was wonderful on a horse, but he wasn't that day, obviously, and the horse rolled over on top of him. He was never really able to sit on a horse for more than about 15 minutes after that in his life, but he was not the sort of person to be defeated by that sort of thing, and he sort of ploughed on. met police special branch for a while and that sort of ended about the time when when i was born so Speaker 2 (9:44) he was a senior police officer not Speaker 1 (9:46) very no he he was only in his sort of i suppose what was he then he was about 30 so he did his time and when i used to go backwards and forwards to school when i was in my teens he used to take me to his patch in the east end of london off the mile end road and show me where he had had all these contacts and the sort of communist versus fascist all that sort of stuff side of the house and we'd have our lunch in the Blind Beggar on the way back and he would sort of tell me the stories of what happened in the East. The Blind Speaker 2 (10:14) Beggars were the Kray twins. Absolutely. That was their manner. But explain to me about the Communists and what's going on there. Speaker 1 (10:20) Because that was his job was sort of counter-extremism, or at least intelligence on extremism in the East End. So it was an overhang of, do you remember those times in the 1930s when the fascists and the communists were having a go at each other? And I suppose that was his manner. Speaker 2 (10:39) So here is an adventurer who has travelled the world, who is nomadic, who loved horses. comes back. This is Rumpty. He's now working in the police, but some of it's a little bit, we don't quite know what's going on. Your recollections of him when you were small, what are they in the 1960s? Picture dad Speaker 1 (11:01) to us. Great big fella. He was either through the ceiling in a sort of joyous way and absolutely the life and soul of the party, which was actually his external projection. So all of my friends used to come back. even when I wasn't there, and stay with him and spin the bar with him. But he could go through the floor. He was one of these up-and-down people. I mean, he was totally gentle and sweet to Sarah, my sister, and I. But he used to go into, I suppose, what Churchill would have called the black dog. What we might call bipolar. I mean, he had highs and lows. Possibly, actually. He was that sort of extreme. We knew when not to poke the bear. because otherwise, but my mother was the great sort of leveller and kept him. And who was she? She was the daughter of an Indian Army general in the 1930s. She grew up in what's now the northwest frontier of Pakistan, so in Peshawar, actually Peshawar during the winter, and then when the plains got too hot in the summer, she would be up in Kashmir. And so she had this very sort of free life with my grandfather and grandmother living in a bungalow in a contunement in the northwest frontier of India. So that was her sort of her young life. And then she inevitably, like a lot of them were, she was sent back to school in England, not least to get her out of the sort of, you know, the very, very high casualty rates for European children in that part of the world. Because of health? Yeah. Yeah, so to get her back. And she went to, I think she went to four boarding schools in about three years where this sort of wild, lovely upbringing she had had just didn't pay off when you had to... She couldn't be contained? Couldn't be contained. So she Speaker 2 (12:49) moved from Cheltenham Ladies' College to Rodin to... Well, they all used to... Was it a bit like that? Speaker 1 (12:53) Well, they used to go to Bexhill-on-Sea. That was the place. And there were these girls' boarding schools all lined up for basically the Daughters of Empire and trade and that sort of thing. all where their parents were around the world. And she got chucked out of four of them, I think. And, you know, I mean, wonderful sort of stuff with sort of her jumping down when they had that traversing camera for the school photograph. Oh, yes. And you could appear twice in the picture. And she was twice in the picture and, you know, got to the stage where all the names were printed, everything, and somebody spotted it. And so my poor grandfather, the general, had to sign his cheque in the North West Frontier. And then I think the last time was when she got into the staff accommodation and borrowed all her friends' dressing gown cords and tied the dressing gown cords around the doorknob so nobody could get out. And so chapel didn't happen, the first lessons of the day didn't happen, and her future education didn't happen. As a result, she was sent home at 15, I think. Speaker 2 (13:53) Gosh, we're Speaker 1 (13:54) going Speaker 2 (13:54) to come back to her because she has inspired you with the novel you've written, hasn't she? She has. She's the main character, basically. Speaker 1 (14:00) How did your parents meet? They met in about 1950. And I'm not 100 % sure, actually, but my father at that stage was in the special branch and my mother was in MI5 at that point. So it might have been some sort of link up with that, something around that time. And when you were a little boy, you had Speaker 2 (14:20) no idea about... her MI5 life? Speaker 1 (14:23) No, we didn't know until I was in my late 20s actually and she had this sort of double life where the first half of it was a life of adventure, Northwest Frontier, ATS during the war, dispatch rider on a motorcycle dispatch rider during the war, military intelligence after the war and then MI5 sort of during the Cold War or at least six or seven years of the Cold War and then the second half was Miss Marple. making jam in Suffolk and knitting cardigans for godchildren. Speaker 2 (14:53) And Speaker 1 (14:53) she was sort of kind of mother to everybody. But Speaker 2 (14:56) was she also being Miss Marple in the sense of doing undercover work? Speaker 1 (14:59) No, no. I think it was sort of, it was a distinctly, you know, it was half and half. So she came, when we went to Suffolk, she became Miss Marple. She Speaker 2 (15:08) was the cosy lady. And then we Speaker 1 (15:09) didn't realise that she had done the first bit until my sister and I were home for Christmas and my father wanted to watch a programme about the fifth man. And the chap doing the documentary said, and of course the other person it could have been was Sir Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5, at which my mother, without even missing a stitch, said, absolute nonsense, he was a great man and a total patriot. And we both looked at her as if she'd gone completely mad. But that was the first we ever knew about it. And the last, practically. How Speaker 2 (15:39) extraordinary. You had a mother who was a secret MI5 operative, but seemed to you to be your cosy mother. Absolutely. Married to Rumpty. Married to Rumpty. Rumpty, did he know what was going on? Yeah, he did. He burst Speaker 1 (15:50) into fits of laughter when we sort of looked all sort of slack Speaker 2 (15:54) -jawed about it. And were they good together? Speaker 1 (15:56) They were very good together. I mean, she managed to sort of guide him through these... Ups and downs. And my classic sort of story of that was when we were having Sunday lunch and he was in a real mood down the other end of the dining room table. Sarah and I were opposite each other. And my mum, it's the only time I've ever really saw her snap, but she used to make these very, very sharp roast potatoes. And because she had grown up in the North West Frontier with an older brother, she knew how to bowl a cricket ball and to throw a cricket ball and things. And she picked up one of these. roast potatoes and she flew it flat arm like you would trying to hit the top of the stumps. It hit my father clean between the eyes and just went crack and spread out across his forehead. Sarah and I just looked at our plates and didn't dare look down the other and when we did look he was crying with laughter. Oh great. And so she just knew and she had got on with her lunch. So you know she was a pretty cool woman actually. Speaker 2 (16:57) What did you think of your parents when you were small boy before you were teenager. Speaker 1 (17:03) What did you make of them? I adored them. It was an idyllic childhood. I mean I have you know there's no dusty corners there. Describe a day Speaker 2 (17:11) in your idyllic childhood. Speaker 1 (17:13) Well we lived just on the edge of the marshes which go across to the North Sea. So last bit of sort of dry land in the middle of nowhere in a tiny little village on a peninsula that sticks out into the North Sea. So my day, you know, lovely breakfast which mum would cook and it would be anything from kidneys and bacon to scrambled eggs and bacon and whatever. And then we would head out. And when I was a boy, before I went away to school, you know, my mates were all the... were all the other guys in the village, and we would just head out onto the marshes. And they were incredibly, you know, it's quite a dodgy place. You know, there are these very deep dikes and things all over the place, but it never seemed to bother them. And off we would go, and we were given a time when we had to come back for not even lunch necessarily, but sort of supper or whatever it was. And if we didn't come back in time, my mother would give us a roasting. My father was always... Too gentle, actually, to be the one administering the discipline. It was mum. So it was a life of complete freedom. And, you know, I went to day school in Suffolk. So, you know, it was an uninterrupted heavenly period, actually. Speaker 2 (18:26) You mention his black dogs, his depressions. You were aware of them. He mustn't touch, leave dad alone. Did it worry you or just take it for granted? No, I took Speaker 1 (18:36) it for granted. And to a degree, I've got the same thing. I go... very, very sort of up and down, actually. Not in... I hasten to add, I'm not claiming that I have any mental health issues, but I have that same sort of character. And luckily, I've got the same sort of wife who knows how to sort of pull me out of it, actually. How does she pull you out? How do you pull yourself out of it? I think you have to be... You have to have your space, actually. I think you have to go off and... I remember my mother used to do the same thing as Susie. You know, just go off and... and do whatever you're going to do, go for a walk, take the dogs for a walk, and you come back and you're right as rain. But it's a funny sort of up and down, and we both, my father and I, had the unbelievable good fortune of marrying these amazing women who knew how to deal with us. Speaker 2 (19:22) And did their marriage last and be happy? Absolutely, yeah. He died Speaker 1 (19:25) very young. She was 30 years a widow, and he died when he was 64. Yeah, just a heart attack went straight away, which... My sister, who's ever the pragmatist, said, I mean, the only thing we need to be really thankful for is he didn't get to the stage where he's burning his trousers. You know, he just went like that. Bon vivant, full of fun, down he went. I love your Speaker 2 (19:52) turns of phrase. Forget the age, you start burning Speaker 1 (19:55) your trousers. Well, I mean, you know what I mean. I know exactly what you mean. It's a very evocative phrase. Speaker 2 (20:00) I'm dreading it happening to me. Anyway, so you are this little boy leading this idyllic. Childhood. Happy with your sister? You and she are best friends? Best friends. And why did your parents aspire to send you to Eton? Speaker 1 (20:14) This was my father, and it's all part and parcel of that sort of not lowering the... The standards. Not lowering the expectation, the standards, even though... To be brutally honest with you, Giles, it was long, long ago that it would have warranted that. But they never let go, and I rather admire them for that. And did he meet Eton himself? He went to Bradfield. Speaker 2 (20:35) And is Eton what makes you the person you are? What makes you the person you are? I think it Speaker 1 (20:40) does in a way. I mean, I was pretty overawed by it, actually,