45 YEARS PHOTOGRAPHING the ROYALS

Derby Day 2005 "Her Majesty adored racing and I just love the look of delight on her face here. She's seen something on the ground and it's really made her laugh. I don't know what it was because the photo was taken with a long lens. But it's a beautiful picture."

- JULIET RIEDEN

Arthur Edwards is an original Eastender, raised in Stepney, East London, his dad a lorry driver – also called Arthur – his beloved mum Dorothy running the family home. He left school at 15 and when Arthur senior died a year later and Dorothy went to work as an office cleaner to put food on the table, she made an inspired purchase that would transform her son’s life. “She didn’t want me to end up working in the docks like most of my schoolmates, so she saved up to buy me a £46 Rolleiflex camera. That was a fortune to her; I don’t know how she did it,” recalls Arthur junior, now 82 years old and celebrating five decades as a royal photographer.

 Windsor Estate, 1984

“The Windsor Horse Show was the Queen’s favourite event. She turned out every day and, of course, she was a very keen rider. She rode most mornings, right up until her 90s and never wore a helmet. Instead, she wore beautiful Hermes headscarves. She looks so young in this photo and yet she wasn’t really. One of those magic moments.”

Arthur never dreamed he would spend his life photographing the monarchy, hanging out in palaces and castles and travelling to the most fascinating corners of the world (including regularly to Australia and New Zealand). It was a career that picked him, he says. As a teenager Arthur worked his way up from film-processing in a darkroom to assisting a top fashion photographer and then, in 1975, landed the job that made his career as a staff photographer for Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper. He was thrilled. “I loved its cocky attitude and brash humour,” he laughs.