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Tim O’Donovan
Late The Life Guards
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Tim O’Donovan, who has died on 23rd October 2025, aged 93, was an insurance broker who devoted his spare time to monitoring the official engagements of the Royal family; for more than 40 years this staunch monarchist published an annual survey each January, the first appearing in 1980.
He pasted the daily Court Circular meticulously into a series of scrapbooks, and then analysed their activities, both at home and abroad. In so doing he revealed how hard the members of the Royal family worked.
He worked out that, in 1990, the Royal family were undertaking twice as many engagements as in 1980, the lion’s share of engagements at that time being undertaken by the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princess Royal and the Duchess of York. He was impressed that Queen Elizabeth undertook 72 engagements during a two-week visit to Malaysia and Singapore and gave 37 audiences to prime ministers at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, that Prince Philip made nine speeches in a six-day visit to the United States and Canada, and that, in her 90th year, the Queen Mother had undertaken 15 engagements in Canada.
By 1991, by revealing how hard they worked, O’Donovan was being described as ‘an unpaid and unofficial auxiliary to the Buckingham Palace press relations staff’, fielding questions from the media about the workload of the Royal family. O’Donovan always stressed that the surveys should not be treated as ‘a league table of royal endeavour’, but inevitably they were.
His work was not wholly popular in the Royal Household, some private secretaries considering that it introduced an unhelpful spirit of competitiveness between family members. Nor did some members of the Royal family like these lists, but the journalists loved them; O’Donovan was profiled by The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The New York Times, while The Guardian, in an attempt to expose ‘the cost of the Crown’, commissioned a machine-learning program to analyse O’Donovan’s archives.
Timothy Charles Melville O’Donovan, the son of Major JCM O’Donovan, was born on 10 February 1932. He was educated at Marlborough and undertook National Service with the Life Guards. He was a director of Common Cause Ltd from 1964 to 1995, chairman of Eckersley Hicks, the Lloyd’s brokers, from 1979 to 1984, and director of public affairs at Bain Clarkson from 1987 to 1991. He was also politically active, including serving as an executive of the National Fellowship, the Right-wing political party chaired by Lord Moynihan, in 1963.
Living in Datchet, he was drawn to the world of Windsor. In 1976 he worked with the Commemorative Collectors Society on an exhibition to mark the Queen’s 50th birthday at the Guildhall in Windsor.
Meeting Hugo Vickers, a Lay Steward of St George’s Chapel, he was encouraged to put his name forward. Friends were entertained to overhear the then Captain, Alec Naylor, offering him a drink after a Windsor Festival concert, while he was being vetted. Diplomatically, O’Donovan asked for a glass of dry sherry, when whisky was surely his preferred tipple.
He was duly appointed a Lay Steward of St George’s Chapel in 1978 and served as Captain from 2010 to 2014. For 10 years, between 1992 and 2002, he was an inspired Secretary of the Friends of St George’s, launching the successful Millennium Appeal to restore the chapel organ and, quick on its heels, the Golden Jubilee appeal. He arranged residential weekends, a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, trips as far afield as St Petersburg and Madrid, and one from Prague to Colditz Castle, Coburg and Darmstadt.
He was Festival Marshal of the Windsor Festival from 1980 to 1995, and supported Windsor life in many other ways, being involved with the local Macmillan Cancer Support, the Royal Windsor division of St John’s Ambulance, Thames Hospice, and as the Berkshire representative of the Art Fund.
He staged numerous exhibitions in Windsor, variously in the dungeons of the Castle, the Dean’s Cloisters or the Guildhall. These celebrated milestones in the lives of the late Queen, the Queen Mother and Prince Philip. Ninety Memorable Years (1990) in the Guildhall was visited by both the late Queen and the Queen Mother on different days. He amassed an impressive collection of royal memorabilia, his house becoming something of a museum, and he was a voracious reader of biographies and memoirs.
O’Donovan was never given an honour (which many felt he deserved), but he was proud to be chosen as the recipient of Royal Maundy Money from the Queen in St George’s Chapel in 2016. He was a regular worshipper in the Royal Chapel, which gave him the chance for exchanges with Queen Elizabeth II after Matins. In 2014 he told her that, being 81, he had reached the age to step down as Captain of the Lay Stewards. He enjoyed her look of disapproval at one quitting at such a young age.
Tim O’Donovan married Veronica White in 1958. She died in 2021 and he is survived by their two sons.
With thanks to The Daily Telegraph. |
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