Why is the pool at Buckingham Palace a secret? (classic)

22:41Ashley, a person more intimate with the palace and its residents than most, he understood why we'd become curious about the palace interiors. Unlike its closest American relative, the White House, Buckingham Palace just feels inherently more shrouded. I mean, the interesting thing about the White House, in a way, is the amount that you see it in movies and on TV. Yes. I mean, that Oval Office. I mean, I feel like I've lived there, don't you? I do, and I feel like... I mean, literally, I know how to get to the secretary's room. I know how to get to the West Wing. Whereas Buckingham Palace, generally speaking, people have got no idea.

23:18There's very little of it that gets seen. I mean, you can buy a ticket and go around and look at it. But then you don't see very many rooms. Of course, Ashley has seen many more of these interior rooms than most of us. In 2018, the Royal Collection Trust enlisted Ashley to document the formal spaces of the palace. the grand hall, the throne room, the royal closet. And what was it like to photograph it? Well, it was great fun, you know. It was slightly, you know, every time I wanted to move an object or move a chair or something, there were shrieks of horror, you know. Somebody would have to come scuttling along with a pair of white gloves for me to put on.

24:00Then I was told, oh, don't lift a chair by its arms, you know, all this kind of thing. How many of the 775 rooms were you allowed to photograph? Oh, I don't know. Are there 30, something like that? Are there really 775? Maybe there are. That's what I've been told. Maybe there are. You can hear me, I think, cautiously approaching the object of our interest here. I didn't want to scare off a royal relative. But I moved the conversation to one specific page in this book, the page on which our quarry had appeared. I have your book here, and I have it dog-eared. On page 90, you have this beautiful exterior shot of, it's taken from the back gardens.

24:43Exactly. And so then on the left side of the photo, there's this building that it sort of resembles the Parthenon with windows. Yeah. Is that the pool house? I think that is the pool. Have you been inside? No, no, I haven't. And are you curious about it? Not especially. So far as I know, it's a fairly ordinary swimming pool. But maybe it's magnificent. Who knows? Maybe it's worthy of your president-elect. Maybe it's entirely gold. I don't know. Who knows?

25:20Even the photographer who was allowed to photograph, to move ever so slightly, the most precious furniture of the palace, the photographer who is the grandson of Lord Mountbatten himself, even this man had not seen the pool. When a secret is kept for long enough and no reason is given, lesser minds become deranged. They start to believe in conspiracy theories. They talk about adrenochrome, 5G, inside jobs, the Freemasons. I was not there. Yet. But spring of 2024, months into this question, nowhere nearer its answer, a strange pattern began to occur. We had, by then, reached out to so many people.

26:03Several royal biographers, any royal affiliate, no matter how extended, who'd been quoted in a news article and who seemed promising. The childhood friend of King Charles who'd sailed boats with him in the pool. And usually, we'd get no response. Sometimes, we'd get one helpful email back. But then, immediately after, the line would go dead. This was the exact feeling you get when you're reporting on a celebrity, and they're telling their network to give you the cold shoulder. Did the pool see us coming? All I knew was we kept bumping into this invisible, sturdy, royal wall. A force field I knew we couldn't quite understand, but which I was sure was there.

26:45And then my editor Shruti got this idea, which actually occurred to her while listening to a podcast. The podcast was called The Runaway Princesses. This incredible story about a royal family in Dubai. The story of alleged abuse of two of the princesses there. It was dark. It was fascinating. But the thing that struck Struthi was the reporting. An investigative reporter had managed to crack into a much more impenetrable wall of silence. Not the British royals, but the Dubai ones, who owned several fancy, extremely private residences in the UK. this reporter was the person we needed to talk to.

27:22Yeah, the only thing I should warn you is I live by the sea, and so there may be some unavoidable seagull noise, but we can try and avoid it. That sounds bucolic. It sounds relaxing. I feel like... It's not. They're so rowdy. It's really deeply irritating after a while.

27:43Chapter 3. The investigative reporter by the sea. Heidi Blake is a writer for The New Yorker, host of the podcast Runaway Princesses. We spoke this past April. I'd emailed her with my predicament, and she generously agreed to talk, despite the profound triviality of our investigation. You have a history of reporting on one of the harder areas of reporting, which is extremely powerful, extremely secretive families, like oligarchs, royal families. Why is this the kind of story you find yourself drawn to? That is a great question and something I often ask myself. I kind of constantly try to find a story that is slightly less unwieldy and then get drawn into these knotty morasses and think, why do I do this to myself?

28:30but I don't know I just there's something that sort of activates in me where I feel like there is a kind of concentration of power in the hands of a person or people who are abusing it I don't know it just I kind of reach a certain level of outrage and it spurs me on to really want to get to the bottom of something but also this is so fun because this is kind of not an outrageous thing this is just like a this is just an intriguing like why the hell don't we know what this pool looks like. Come on, guys. Like, what are they hiding? What is so secret about this pool? This is crazy. Heidi was the first British person I spoke to who seemed able to see the invisible wall, who didn't tell me that this was going to be easy before ghosting me for the rest of time.

29:13Heidi both appreciated the strange complexity of her question and had suggestions about how to get it answered. With the reporting I did on the Dubai royal family, they've just had hundreds and hundreds of people pass through their employment And actually that means it's not very difficult to find some people among them, especially, you know, if you make it a numbers game and you just approach a ton of people, some of them are going to feel like talking to you. And do you like, I mean, when you're doing one of your investigations and you're like, okay, I want chauffeurs for the royal family in this time period.

29:49Is it just like, I mean, I assume you're not going on LinkedIn. I am literally going on LinkedIn. That is literally what I'm doing. Yeah. LinkedIn is amazing. And I feel like this is one of those things where like, you know, magicians should never reveal their secrets because like it's LinkedIn. That's the secret. It's unbelievably good. Yeah, because what you can do is, I mean, this is obviously like a totally unintended consequence of LinkedIn, but everybody is on LinkedIn and everybody has put their whole professional history on LinkedIn. So you can go on there and you can say, show me everybody who has previously worked at Buckingham Palace and it will give you hundreds and hundreds of results.

30:25and then you can filter those. So I took the liberty of like doing this. Oh my God. Just to see what we would find. Thank you. No, I mean, you know, you guys could do it yourself. It's kind of amazingly easy, but so you can put in Buckingham Palace or the other way they describe it is the Royal Household. I was following along on my side on the computer and it was amazing to see Royal Household enter and then this wall of humans. It wasn't that we hadn't been trying to reach former employees. but our methods had been relatively haphazard. Now we had this well-organized database, this surveillance system that people had volunteered for.

31:05Heidi filtered her search to just show ex-employees, the people most likely to talk. And if you do that, you have like hundreds of results. You have a summer warden, a sous chef, butlers, junior footman, a building surveyor. There's a guy who was the marshal of the diplomatic corps. But then, this is when I got excited. Then if you add the search term swimming pool, there are three people who are specifically talking about having worked in and around that swimming pool. So, like, these guys definitely know. So you have... Wait, so I'm looking... Oh, my God. So, wait, you see... I'm seeing... I've got a...

31:42We're bleeping out the names here, just to respect the privacy of these people. So, was a household electrician at Buckingham Palace from September 1971 to August 1992. and one of his duties is listed as maintenance of swimming pool plant. So like this dude has seen that pool and why would he not tell you? And also, these people all have left the palace a really long time ago. So I just don't think they're going to be feeling that awkward about talking about it.

32:13We went through the details of these former palace employees. And then Heidi told me she had her own theory about the pool. A hypothesis as to why it might be hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Well, I think this is just a hunch, but I bet you it's a really scuzzy, run-down pool. Oh, that's so funny, because my assumption would be they don't want you to see it because it's like... So, in America, the wealthy are constantly trying to make you believe they're upper middle class, and so I was picturing something opulent and golden, and maybe there was an outlaw. elephant there somehow. But you're like, oh, it might just be kind of a crappy pool.

32:54I think so. Because I guess, you know, obviously Buckingham Palace does pomp and grandeur and circumstance and they wear that on their sleeves. But I think that one of the things particularly about the Queen was that actually, you know, rumor always had it that in her private apartments, actually those rooms were really shabby with like threadbare carpet and really old fashioned wallpaper and there was this amazing thing back in 2003 a reporter uh from a tabloid here called the mirror newspaper managed to get a job as a footman at buckingham palace he worked there for two months um and they kind of did it ostensibly as a like this is a massive security breach i could have poisoned the queen thing but actually the thing that everyone remembers from that story is that he got photos of the queen's private breakfast room and it's like i'll send you a picture, but it is like super shabby and she's eating her breakfast out of Tupperware.

33:45Really? Everyone was just like, the queen is eating breakfast out of Tupperware. Like she's eating cornflakes out of Tupperware. And that was the thing, like no one had ever seen that before.

33:59Heidi sent me a link to the story. And in the photos, I could see the weirdly dingy room. There's a plastic princess phone, an FM transistor radio on the table. I have to admit, it gives me a feeling I've never felt towards the royals. A warm feeling? They seem human. The queen here living like a retiree who just needs to make her pension last. Which I think is basically the situation of the monarchy. Like, they actually, you know, their estate is huge and kind of enormously expensive to maintain, and they're having to constantly scrap for taxpayer funding to kind of maintain these state rooms.

34:32And so the queen was notoriously frugal, you know, with her own sort of stuff. And so that's my hunt. I reckon this pool is run down and embarrassing, and they don't want anyone to see it for that reason. But I mean, I could be completely wrong. Maybe there is an elephant.

34:50Our listener Chris had imagined that because the pool was hidden, it had to be fabulous. Perhaps there's an American bias that expects that anything hidden must be special, exciting, better than what's here. Heidi's view was that, like many backstages, Buckingham palaces could be less glamorous than what the public got to see.

35:12In any event, we had another path to try. We're going to take a short break, and when we return, search engine crosses an ocean.

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37:40Welcome back to the show. Okay, I think you're like super off mic or else I'm on. I'm probably off mic. I also can't hear myself at all. Chapter 4. Search Engine's Royal Correspondent, Garrett Graham. Hey, PJ. Hey, Garrett. How's it going? You know, another day in paradise. Yeah? Yeah. I am here to tell you about some digging that I've done. I need to be honest here. I've been using the royal we in this episode a lot. We researched. We investigated. the royal wee for most of these months was Garrett. On this journey, Garrett didn't just ingest historic newspaper archives and royal biographies.

38:21Honestly, by this point, he knew more about the palace than many of the experts we were talking to. The pool question had bit him the same way as it bit our listener, Chris. Garrett had gone from a person who didn't care about the royals to someone who deeply wanted to see their pool. And more than anything, he wanted to know why it was the pool would be a state secret. So when reporter Heidi Blake had surfaced these new leads, Garrett jumped on them. So walking out of that conversation with Heidi, it felt like she had mapped out this like crazy wall of suspects connected to the palace by like red string.

38:57And all that was left for us to do was like trace that red string until we found a suspect who would talk and like flip somebody. Are they convicted of a crime? They're convicted of having seen the swimming pool of Buckingham Palace and not telling us about it yet. In the world of podcasting, holding on to narratively interesting information is a crime. It is a crime, and they're found guilty. So the first person that I reached out to was the tabloid guy that Heidi told us about, like the mirror reporter who had snuck into the palace and snapped a photo of the queen's cornflakes or whatever. But it turned out that the tabloid had dealt with some legal action after this piece came out, and so they had actually agreed not to publish any more information from their reporting.

39:39which meant that the tabloid guy was out. Yeah. But the next step that I took was just to start reaching out to the people on LinkedIn. Mm-hmm. And as reporter Heidi Blake mentioned, there's basically three people who had mentioned the swimming pool on their profile. There's a 20-something project manager. There's a retired electrician. And there is a maintenance officer turned aromatherapist, all of whom were one-time employees of Buckingham Palace but are no longer. A maintenance officer turned aromatherapist? That is right. Life has so many chapters. It does. That's not a chapter you expect to find in a book about Buckingham Palace, but it's one that I was pretty charmed to find.

40:18So, okay, so you're poking around. So, yeah, the first guy I decided to reach out to is the 20-something project manager. He worked at the palace just a few years ago, and the clue on his profile that he might have the goods that we're looking for is that he was involved with realizing, quote, substantial carbon-saving opportunities for the on-site swimming pool plant operation. Okay, that feels like him. It feels promising. It feels like this guy would have seen the pool, right? A neon sign. So I, like, slew this guy out on the internet. I learned pretty quickly that he's ex-military and also happened to share the name of a 14th century Earl of Pembroke, which to me, those are two details that kind of suggest, like, this guy might have some sympathies towards the royals and maybe he won't be willing to break the privacy for the sake of an American podcast.

40:59It's so funny how producing a podcast is kind of like online dating, where like you're cold approaching someone and you're looking at their little footprint and you're just like, are they going to like me? Are they going to talk to me? Like it's sort of the same like drawing a painting from a couple dots type of thing. Yeah, and I reach out several times actually. No response. Totally fine. We have more suspects. I move on to the next one. Okay. The next person I reach out to is the retired electrician. He worked there from the 70s to the 90s, which on the one hand it means like it's been a while since this guy's seen the pool.

41:31But on the other hand, it means like he was definitely there before the indie era. And so maybe he's more keen to chat with us about it. I reach out LinkedIn and on Facebook. Again, zero response. Okay, so then what? I go to the final person on LinkedIn. And honestly, this is the one that I'm kind of the most optimistic about because again, this is the maintenance officer turned aromatherapist. Oh, okay, yeah. Their LinkedIn bio just reads, quote, using aromas to support positive mental health, which like not only is this a person who is in a totally different field of work now, but this is like a decidedly non-royal line of work.

42:05Yeah, okay. And so I'm like, we found our person. I just need to get this person to see the note that I send. And so I reach out on every single platform I could find her on. And this one actually turned out kind of interesting. She said, nothing. So wait, what was interesting? Not a single word of reply. There was nothing interesting about it. It was just a failed attempt at a joke. I see, I see. But anyway, the point of all this is just to say that LinkedIn was kind of a bust. There were other people that I reached out to who didn't want to talk to us. But I want to tell you the story of one person who would talk to us.

42:40Please. In the world of royal servants, there are few more controversial figures than Paul Burrell. I think Paul is a fascinating character. As Diana's butler and footman to the queen, he served the royal family for over 20 years. Only one man in history. Chapter 5, The Chatty Butler. Paul Burrell spent 20 years working alongside the royals. He started as a footman to the queen before becoming Princess Diana's butler, regularly crossing paths with Prince Philip. So this is a person that came up in multiple conversations that we had, but on and off the record. And it's a guy who's kind of infamous in British tabloids.

43:23He was Diana's former butler. And after her death, he kind of presumably sees an opportunity and kind of cashes in on his access to the royal family when the entire world is obsessed with Diana and the circumstances surrounding her death. And so he writes a book about his time working on staff for Diana, which he did without royal approval, which I think is a big no-no. And so, you know, even now, like 30 years removed from Diana's death or however long it is, like he's still taking like lots of media opportunities to talk about his time in the royal household. And in interviews, he speaks with this kind of like high school theater drama.

44:00I feel her presence, and she's often in my dreams. I don't live in a mausoleum to Diana. I live in this world, and my life has changed as well. But you can never forget the people who touched your heart. All this to say, he seems like the perfect candidate to tell us what the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace looks like. So you reach out, John. So shout out an email. Well, and after a couple of weeks, an agent got back to us, which is kind of unusual for a search engine booking request. Like, we're not used to dealing with agents. Like, it's a podcast. But let me just read you the message that the agent sent me.

44:35Please. Hi, Garrett. I hope you're well. Many thanks for your inquiry, spelled with an E, and apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Can you please let me know what fee you have for the recording? Many thanks. Of course. And, of course, by fee, that agent means that we need to pay money to do an interview with the butler. And at Search Engine, I think most journalists in the U.S., we don't pay for information, meaning we don't pay sources to talk to us. It's like a generally accepted norm. There's exceptions. There's people who either just do it. Like, I think tabloids will do it. And actually, in a lot of documentary film, they won't pay someone for an interview, but they'll, like, pay them a lot of money for their childhood photos and then ask them to also be interviewed, which is kind of a workaround.

45:16But like, generally speaking, there's this idea, rightly or wrongly, that you don't pay sources for interviews because the idea is that once you're paying somebody to say something, you both have power over them, which may or may not be a problem. But also, they have an incentive to say what you want to hear. Right. But I should also say, like, there does seem to be like a real non-malicious cultural difference here, which is just like, there are different boundaries in different countries around journalism. And one of those differences in the U.K. is that reporters are a bit more comfortable offering sources, like, some compensation for information.

45:49Like, I found some poll data saying that 53 % of reporters in the U.K. believe paying people for confidential information is justified on occasion compared to 5 % of journalists in the U.S. One can't help but notice that it's – there's very few generally agreed upon ethical rules for journalists in the United States. And one of the few that we all seem to abide by is the one that involves us getting to be cheap. So if you told me that, you know, in the more progressive and sophisticated future, we realized that this rule didn't make a lot of sense, I'd be like, yeah, okay, sure. And on the other, like, this is also just a guy who has sustained an entire career off of selling the information that he does have.

46:24So, like, it shouldn't be totally surprising that he's asking for this. Like, in some ways, it's a perfectly reasonable request. But the agent ends up offering us the butler for 1 ,500 pounds, which is, like, 2 ,000-ish dollars. We politely decline. But actually, it was okay, because this is around the same time that we're about to fly to England.

46:44Chapter 6, American Tourists in London. So we weren't going there to report this story per se. We were going there for another commitment. Like, Shoshan had been invited to speak at a podcast conference, but we'd said yes because we knew that Buckingham Palace was in England. And honestly, like, it's funny that you say it that way because that is kind of the extent that I thought about it. I was just like, oh, it's over there. Like, we'll be closer to the object of our reporting. Derek, is that, what is that little tan building to the right of the palace? I don't think that's the swimming pool.

47:23Oh, Derek. Maybe. Honestly, it's a little embarrassing listening back to this that we just kind of hopped on the tube and went to Buckingham Palace without a reporting plan. I mean, we're walking towards it. but I suppose we'll get more information. But that's not the pool. No, well, the pool has glass on the outside. Oh, right. This looks a little more mausoleum-y. We show up, there is a massive crowd. There's like a royal marching band like playing brass instruments as we walk by.

47:52But bad news was like the reason why it was such a madhouse outside of the palace gates, we quickly realized was that we happened to be there and a month when the palace was closed to tourists, which meant for us that we weren't going to be able to get inside of the palace. Okay, we're passing around sort of, would you say this is the back of Buckingham Palace? We're on the, oh gosh, let me get my directions down. So we walk around the perimeter of the palace, literally like looking at my phone's Google Maps to like see how many feet we were away from the indoor pool. As the crow flies, we're 249 feet away.

48:33From the building that supposedly has a swimming pool in it. Google Maps is giving me a route. You'll be very bloody by the time you're there. There's also security. And we were trying to figure out, I think this was your idea, let's, from the exterior, be as close to the pool as we can. I just wanted to know if we could see it, like if there was some gap in the shrubbery that would allow us a glimpse of the building in real life. It was a noble idea. There wasn't. There wasn't. It sounds nice, though. There's nice birds chirping. Oh, yeah, on the other side of the wall, I'm sure life's great.

49:02People are swimming, hanging out. What have you just heard? Somebody yelled with a British accent, cannonball. So that was attempt number one, which was in May. But honestly, I personally left feeling not that disheartened because I knew I was going to be back in London because I had a friend getting married there in August. And so I knew I'd have another shot. And also August happens to be a month that Buckingham Palace is open to tourists. And so I booked not one, but two palace tours while I was going to be over there.

49:42Welcome to Buckingham Palace. Please pay attention whilst we give you some useful information so you can make the most of your visit. And I show back up. Yes. My second time at Buckingham Palace in about two months. And the first tour I had booked was, like, the actual inside of the palace, because much of the interiors that they'll show to visitors. And so I walk up in the side entrance, and I go through what's pretty much airport-style security. Before you pass through our airport-style security, please remove anything metal or electronic from your pockets. There's metal detectors, there's bag screeners, There's an announcement that no photos will be allowed inside the palace.

50:25But I put my iPhone in the front pocket of my shirt so I can, like, talk to myself and take notes as I'm walking through the palace, like, audio diary style. And so I enter the palace. I walk down what's actually kind of like a dingy hallway that's poorly lit that pretty quickly opens up into the fancy part of the palace. Okay, we are officially inside the palace. It's very quiet in here. And the first thing I see is the inner courtyard. which is the first time you get a sense of just how massive this place is. I think it's something like a football field in both length and width. Yeah. And so you get shuffled along from there into what they call the Grand Hall, which is exactly what it sounds like.

51:05And the tour more or less proceeds as you would expect. I mean, you're going through the state rooms, which are the fancy rooms that have historically been open to the public, and they're all filled with, like, impossibly expensive-looking decor. A lot of gold. A lot of gold. and maybe the coolest grandfather clock I've ever seen. Honestly, I had the feeling like I was walking inside of Ashley Hicks' book. It's funny, as you're describing it, I was like, this is exactly my mental image of it. And then I remember like, yes, you have a mental image because you've lifted photos of this. Did you feel like had you walked past a hallway with like a little velvet stanchion in front of it, had that hallway had a door with the word pool on it, you would have been tempted to just book?

51:45I definitely thought on multiple occasions, Like, I think I can outrun some of these guys. There were, like, secret-looking doorways off to the side. I was curious where some of these things went. I think that they mostly just lead to servant corridors where food and other items get ferried through the palace that visitors can't see. So I'm kind of, like, shuffling somewhat quickly through this first tour because the second tour is in the Bat Gardens. And the back gardens is where the building that we're interested in sits. Like the back of the palace is where the swimming pool is. So then I show up to like the sign that says this is where the second tour starts.

52:29And I'm about to start the garden tour, which you won't believe happens to start directly in front of the swimming pool. Seriously? So can you like see through the windows? I was standing on the steps. Obviously, I'm walking directly up to it to try to look in, but it's very opaque two-way glass. Oh. Like, my assumption is you're inside the pool and you can look out on the beautiful back gardens of Buckingham Palace, but from the outside, you cannot see anything. Like, the panes just look like ink-stained squares of glass. Which was honestly so tantalizing. Like a quarter inch of glass is what was separating me from the answer to this question that I had been thinking about for a month.

53:14That's so frustrating. It was so frustrating. And to make matters worse, we start the second tour and the tour guide, who's like this kindly British woman from Essex with long gray hair. And the first thing she says is, if you look to your right, there's the indoor swimming pool. I've actually swum in it. What? The new king has actually turned down the temperature a few degrees. so I'm swimming in it less, but there's the pool house right there. And so for the rest of this 90-minute tour, I'm thinking the whole time, please say more about the swimming pool, please say more about the swimming pool, please say more about the swimming pool.

53:44But instead, she's pointing out, like, the rare shrubbery that they have lining the gardens, and she's pointing to the rose garden and the marmalade plants and the tennis courts, which are actually kind of cool, if a little dingier than I would have expected. And at the end of the tour, I'm kind of trying to play it cool, but I go up to her and I ask, like, hey, you mentioned that you had swum in the Buckingham Palace swimming pool? Yeah. Like, I'm so curious, what's it like in there? And she tells me, it's just a normal swimming pool. Four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there are any accidents.

54:17There's a squash court in there as well. And immediately gets drowned out by like hordes of other people on the tour asking her questions about the rose garden and marmalade plants. And that's the only information I get from her. Wait, four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there's accidents? I don't have any, like, decoder ring to interpret these words. These are just the precious few words that I gleaned from this, like, wealth of information before she was cut off from me forever. Okay. So what we had here was, like, I mean, as you said, the mission was to bring the swimming pool, like, one more moat into the light of public view.

54:54I feel like we'd done that. And so I talked to Shruthi, and we were like, yeah, I think we have enough to answer the question. Like, we know enough to answer Chris's specific question. It's just a normal swimming pool, like not some fancy marble swimming pool. But at this point, we still didn't know why it was a secret. Yeah, the world we understand is fundamentally unknowable, but you want to think that, like, some things could be known.

55:21So I went back to LinkedIn. Okay. And this time, instead of just searching for the keywords Buckingham Palace and swimming pool, I searched for the keywords Buckingham Palace and podcast. What? And it turns out there's one former employee of Buckingham Palace who also has a podcast. Of course. Oh my God. Of course. The thing that is wrong with the world, which is that there's too many podcasts, is also the thing that's right with the world, which is that if you have a question, you can find someone who likes to answer questions into a microphone. Of course the suspect we were looking for the whole time was another podcaster.

55:57The worst kind of criminal there is. So we're going to talk to him tomorrow.

56:07Chapter 7, Secrets of the Palace.

56:13Hello. Hi, PJ. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Doing very well. I've never done anything like this before. but it's exciting. I am excited to be talking to you. It's been a long journey to get here. I hear there's a lot that goes into these episodes, but it sounds like you go really deep on really niche topics. I had to look at some and listen to a few since Garrett messaged me. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you are the person at the bottom of our rabbit hole this week. That's usually where people find me, to be honest. This is Hrithik Kharia, host of the podcast Football for Sale, which is actually about soccer, and also a former employee of the royal household.

56:51What did you think about the palace before you worked there? I think you have a really weird relationship with it growing up in the UK. Like you sort of see it as this place that is shrouded in a lot of mystery. And most of the time you see it is just on the TV when the royals are coming in and out of it. I don't think a lot of British people actually do go inside of it because you sort of just walk by it and you're like, oh, that's just there. And when I got the job, I was actually, that was the first time I'd ever been inside. and then as soon as you go inside, you're like, this place is insane.

57:19And how did you end up working there? It was during my first year of university and my dad said you need to get a job over the summer because university holidays are much longer than school holidays. So he was like, you need to get a job. You're 19 years old, do something with your life. So I was like, okay, literally went on Google, searched summer jobs in London and it was the first thing that came up and it was the last day of applications. And so I just... Really? Yeah, yeah. It literally just said, like, retail assistant, Buckingham Palace. And I was like, okay, sure. And so I just put in an application, actually went to the palace for my interview, and then got a call a couple of days later saying, yeah, we want you to come and work here.

58:02So in July of 2019, Rithik showed up for the first day of his royal summer gig. And so what was your official title once you began? It's not glamorous. It was just retail assistant. when Buckingham Palace opens in the summer for guests, they have a shop, like a temporary pop-up shop. I say temporary, it's a massive structure that they put in the garden, but only for those three months. And you go and work in the shop in the garden for three months, sort of just like as a retail assistant, but like quasi tour guide as well, because people still, obviously, you do get a bit of background and people still want to talk to you about it when they're in the shop.

58:37And did it feel like, you know, you described the title as unglamorous. I've worked in retail jobs before, and I didn't find it too exciting. Did you feel more like, I'm working a retail job at Buckingham Palace or did you feel like I'm working a retail job at Buckingham Palace? Like did the specialness of the palace permeate your days? I think you don't see it until you do something else. So that was the first job I'd ever had. And then I went and worked the year later at my local Tesco's, which is like your... Supermarket. Yeah, supermarket. And I was doing like fruit and veg. So I was doing food stuff.

59:12And at that point, I was thinking, I was like, a year ago, I was working in Buckingham Palace, and then it hits you. And you're like, wow, I got a level of access to this place that most people in their lifetime will never get. It's also the thing I can hold over my family members a lot, which is quite fun. And when you started working there, did anyone ever give you a talk about secrecy and privacy? like what you were allowed to say about what you saw and what you weren't, or like what questions you should answer and what you shouldn't? Yeah, so there was a lot about that, right? Because obviously you're working for this institution that a lot of people wouldn't know about.

59:49So obviously I'm not going to sit here and give you like a walkthrough of exactly how many steps it takes to get from one place to one place and exactly what doors that you have to go through to go from one place to another place. Obviously I can't do that. I think also a lot of it was about like journalism and the media because the entrance we go in and out of was obviously known as being the entrance that people who work there will go out of. And they said, like, people will see you, people will know that you work there and they don't care what you do or the fact that you just work in the shop.

1:00:17But don't answer questions. Like, if people want to come and ask you about stuff, go and talk to us. As you may know with the royal family, there's always a story about them in the papers. So, for example, when I was working there, there was one particular scandal that was going on at the time, which I will let you figure out which one it was because it was quite a big one that I think people still talk about today. It involved a man from your homeland. And what time period was this? This was 2019. Okay, you're talking to the most royals dumb person, perhaps in North America. But there was an ongoing scandal that everybody but me knows about.

1:00:56Yeah, there was an ongoing scandal about a man in America who owned an island and one of the particular British royals. Oh, a man who owned an island. Okay, I do know that one. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In case you are as slow as I am, this was a scandal that involved a man whose name rhymes with Efri Jepstein. So we got a big talking to about if anyone, even if they are just like seemingly a customer in the shop, says anything about that, you do not say a word. You're like one of the guards with the fuzzy hats. Yeah, you could do that, but you'd just be like, nothing. and you just move on.

1:01:32Because what people will do is they will say, a royal spokesperson said this. Oh, so if you, 19 years old, working a job that you found off Google, if you were being indiscreet and I were buying a royalty set and I asked you and you were like, I don't know, it sounds pretty messed up though. Then if I worked for a British tabloid, the next day I would say, royal spokesperson says, scandal, pretty messed up. Yeah, that's the risk that you're playing with. It made sense that even an employee as junior as Hrithik had been media trained, because after all, there was treasure hidden in the palace. Information, valuable information, that could be pillaged by traitorous butlers, raiders who left the palace with novel facts about the royals' private lives.

1:02:20An easy way to make a living. Hence these rules. But Hrithik was willing to talk to us, not for money, not for gossip, but because, frankly, he'd sussed us out. And he could tell we legitimately had zero interest in the royals or in their private lives, that we had only ever really wanted to know about one thing. What can you tell me about the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace? The actual question. Yes. And so, yeah, it's weird. Like, there is one.

1:02:55Like, I think that's the main thing. You wouldn't have thought about it. Oh, I've thought about it. Have you seen it? I have seen it. You've seen it with your own eyes? Yeah, well, yeah, because generally when people work in government or in those kind of positions is because you work in such secure sites, a lot of the facilities you need are on site. So it makes sense that the people who work there get access to a swimming pool and a gym, so you don't have to leave the site to go and do it. And I think whoever put this question in may not like this answer, but it's just a swimming pool. Like, it's a tiled surface with a swimming pool in the middle of it.

1:03:30We're changing rooms and a gym attached to it in a building.

1:03:38It took a moment to sink in. That the Parthenon with windows building, where we'd imagined a spacious swimming pool, surrounded by space and light and generously poured poolside Negronis, we'd imagined that as a royal pool. that sometimes the family allowed their staff to swim in. Hrithik was saying, no, this is the staff pool and the attached staff gym with amenities like what you'd find at your local YMCA. That is what was hidden behind the impenetrably dark glass. When you say just a swimming pool, like, I open the door. Yeah. I walk in. Yeah. Just like, what do I see? You are at your local gym with the swimming pool.

1:04:21And are people swimming like on a day where you walk in? Are they just like, there's, so you're saying people work at Buckingham Palace, they're just swimming in the pool? Yeah, if you wanted to, yeah. Did you swim in the pool? No, I didn't join the gym because I wasn't living close enough to the palace to make it make sense. But you could have. I could have, yeah, yeah. That was why we went there because they were like, oh, you can join this gym if you want to. But yeah, I could have done. And is there a diving board? No. Diving boards are very American. There isn't like... Diving boards are American?

1:04:51We fought a war for a diving board. You know those little springy diving boards? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we don't have them. I'd heard the rumor there's a squash court in the house with the pool, which would make sense because of the gym. Is that true? Yeah, yeah. And tell me about the gym. Again, it's a government-funded gym. It's the basics that you need in a gym. It's got your machines. It's got your free weights. It's got your treadmills and other cardio sort of machines. So it's not like this is the leg machine from like King whatever the fourth and it was liberated in this war. It's like that part of the palace breaks the rules of everything is Buckingham Palace in Buckingham Palace.

1:05:37Yes. Our research found that apparently in 1970, Buckingham Palace was registered as a grade one building, a designation meant to preserve buildings of, quote, exceptional architectural, historical, or national significance. The provision would, among other things, prevent some future mad king from tearing out Buckingham's Corinthian columns to make room for a jacuzzi or a nice flat screen. Everything had to be kept more or less as it was, including the swimming pool, which was not very old or beautiful. After the Nazis bombed it, it had been rebuilt sometime in the 1950s. And in 1970, when the grade one listing was issued, it froze in time an unremarkable municipal swimming pool with an attached gym.

1:06:23Like, if you wanted to fancy gym, I'd go down to the Equinox or something. Yeah, we have Equinox here. Yeah, if you wanted to fancy gym, go there. It's so funny, my friend who's so curious about this pool, he has a pool in his apartment building, which I've seen. His pool's probably better than the Buckingham Palace pool. Is it New York, right? Yeah, New York. Like a nice New York apartment building. Yeah, New York. He's probably got a nicer pool than the Buckingham Palace pool, yeah.

1:06:55The invisible wall had fallen. We could finally see what was on the other side. Most human beings begin asking questions at around two years old. But as adults, we learn to be more judicious in our question asking. We learned, for instance, that if we ask a question and get silence in return, we may have crossed a line and that we should consider retreat. Search Engine had spent months asking a simple question and had had to fight and wheedle to get this simple answer. And I still wanted to know the five-year-old's lament. Why? Why was it like that? But wait, okay, here's my, I think this is my last question for you.

1:07:36I still feel like one thing I do not entirely understand. Go for it. Many parts of Buckingham Palace have been photographed, have been shared with the public in some way or another. I still don't get why if the pool at this point in its life is just like a staff pool that would look like the pool I would see at the YMCA, why do you think it's shrouded in as much secrecy as it is? There are no pictures of it online. So there's very strict rules about pictures and people taking pictures. Because when I was inside the palace, you're not allowed to take a picture. You're not allowed to send a Snapchat to your mates.

1:08:12You're not allowed to record something funny that happens at lunch with your colleagues. You're not allowed to pick up a FaceTime call. So that's probably the reason why I'd say. I think part of it is if there's no reason for there to be a picture of it, there isn't going to be one. And I don't think that there is a reason for there to be a picture of it. There was another thing, a less neutral, less polite reason we'd been blocked. And it had less to do with the question and more to do with who it was asking it. Okay, there's not really a nice answer here. I will go back to my time in the palace.

1:08:50And it's like, whenever there were Americans in the shop, I was sort of just like, no, not this again. like it's just it's just so much like talking it's like sharp like i don't care like like i i think this is where it gets a bit like funny where you guys may not take this one there is a level of like you assume that they have a level of like superiority i say mine's a confusing situation because i'm obviously you know ethnically not british i think you can probably tell but like growing up here you still get that of like oh we left you and do you know how many times i heard that on a daily basis really at the palace of of america yeah oh we left you and like haha like oh look at this tea we threw it in the harbor and i'm like i don't care like i honestly don't care i was like if i hadn't opened my mouth you would have thought i was just an indian guy so now that you found out i'm british suddenly you're going to talk to me about throwing tea in a harbor mate i don't honestly don't care um so i think that's probably where that comes from especially around the royals because i think the british are very protective or even if you don't like them.

1:09:54A lot of British people are very protective about conversations of the royals should only occur between British people.

1:10:06So this was the answer. Why had the pool been kept a secret from me? Perhaps because I was a loud American, and the legions of British people who we'd emailed likely held in their hearts a prejudice about my ilk. They thought that we only asked questions about the royals because we thought their royals were kind of dumb. Our national identity, after all, began with the idea that monarchy was stupid, that a taxpayer-funded palace might represent a civilization unevolved. We might ask questions, but the Brits suspected we did not seek to understand. We were here to tease, maybe as a way of feeling better about the faults in our own system, with its nepotism, its corruption, its occasional January riot.

1:10:51America had broken up with England, two and a half centuries ago. We had a country of our own. Why were we still bothering them with our childish questions?

1:11:05I think your question was, it was a really interesting question, but I don't, like, I think you guys were, like, maybe expecting, like, this really sort of extravagant answer, and it was literally probably the most boring answer that you could have got to a question about, like, what's the pool like? It's like, it's just a pool, mate.

1:11:51subscription at searchengine.show for our incognito mode tier. You get ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and discounts on our upcoming new merchandise. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnamanani. This episode was produced by Garrett Graham. Fact-checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Noah John and Sean Merchant. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

1:12:28Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode.

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