- The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary.
- The royal couple was married in 1972 at St. Andrews church in Northamptonshire.
- Birgitte, Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin, was a secretary at the Danish embassy.
Prince Richard and Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester, who appeared on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Platinum Jubilee, are now commemorating their 50th wedding anniversary with a new fficial image that was released on palace social media on Friday. The picture of the duke and duchess was shot earlier this week in front of their Kensington Palace residence. It depicts them posing in a garden with a tree and birdhouse in the background.
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Both Birgitte and Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin, are active members of the royal family who promote the monarchy through appearances and patronage all throughout the nation. While the duchess has funded organizations that assist the arts, children’s welfare, health, and sports, the duke is the president of the Scottish Society of the Architect-Artists and is a supporter of other causes linked to architectural heritage, humanitarian concerns, and war veterans. They have three grown children: Alexander Windsor, Earl of Ulster, Lady Davina Windsor, and Lady Rose Gilman, who live with them in a modest house next to the Kensington Palace stables.
In 1965, while the Duke of Gloucester, was a Cambridge architecture student, he met Birgitte van Deurs, a Danish-born student at the university’s Bell School of Languages. On July 8, 1972, they were married in a small ceremony at St. Andrews church in the Northamptonshire village of Barnwell. Initially, neither the Duke of Gloucester nor the Duchess of Gloucester intended to take up royal duties full-time; instead, he was employed as an architect in London and Birgitte was a secretary at the Danish embassy. But when their older brother Prince William died in an airplane crash eight weeks after their wedding, the Duke of Gloucester was made a duke. This meant that the couple had to take on royal duties.
Helen Cathcart, a royal authority, wrote on their adaptation to palace life for the magazine Chatelaine in 1975. She called the Duchess of Gloucester’s “rock of strength” in the wake of the catastrophe. “Until then it had seemed that there would be plenty of time for the Danish bride to get used to royal protocol. Instead, she was pitched in headfirst. “Today, the whole London diplomatic community commends the new Gloucesters as a fresh and dynamic element in the younger age group around the queen.”
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