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There was a moment in 2013 when otherwise sane, employed adults were glued to a livestream of a traffic cone. The world’s media were camped outside the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital in London, and the “Great Kate Wait” – as it became known – was underway.
The then-Duchess of Cambridge was in labour inside the hospital, having lived through what one excitable television commentator called “the people’s pregnancy”. At 4.24pm on July 22, a newborn boy entered the world weighing 8lb 6oz and with, his father said, a “good pair of lungs”. That baby was Prince George, and history was made.
Queen Elizabeth was “delighted”, new grandfather Prince Charles “overjoyed”, and David Cameron, then prime minister, declared it “an important moment in the life of our nation”.
For his parents, William and Catherine, his birth brought the steepest learning curve of their lives: thrusting them into the world of sleep-deprivation and nappies like any young family (William changed the first one), but under the glare of the public eye.
“He’s a little bit of a rascal,” said William, bursting with pride.
Thirteen years on, and that little boy has become a young man. Nearly as tall as his mother, often wearing a suit in public, Prince George is on the cusp of a new era. A new school, Eton, beckons, and the teenage future king will take another steady step towards his destiny.
He is “incredibly down to earth”, say friends of the family, while inevitably being “aware of his future”. He is a sporting all-rounder, a surprisingly good artist, and is still getting used to the meet-and-greet walkabouts that will be part of his working life stretching ahead.
Most of his weekends are spent at sports fixtures and with friends, occasionally interrupted for a carriage ride or Buckingham Palace balcony appearance in the line of royal duty.
“It only feels like yesterday that they were this tiny,” the Princess of Wales said, as she held up a babygrow during an engagement not long ago. “They do grow so quickly.”
In some senses, Prince George is walking a well-trodden path towards the throne. School, university or the military, a little time to find himself and then on with the same life of duty, service and leadership that his ancestors have led.
And yet it is not the same at all. He will be the first heir to navigate his teenage years in an era of social media and cameraphones, the first whose privacy is at risk of being infringed upon not just by the press but by the public. He is the first growing up with WhatsApp groups rather than handwritten letters (although his parents have a strict policy on mobile phones), and the first with the unwelcome ability to read appalling conspiracy theories about his own family the moment he logs on to social media.
Where Prince William’s face once adorned posters on dormitory walls across Britain’s girls’ schools, Prince George’s will be seen through the glow of a smartphone screen, with all the perils of the AI era.
It is fortunate, then, that he is also arguably the best-prepared heir in history. The Prince and Princess of Wales, a source says, have been relentlessly focused on how to make it work since the moment they first talked about having children.
“No one knows better than William what life is like growing up in the Royal family,” the source says. “He is absolutely determined to get it right.”
Close aides and friends stop short of criticising previous generations. But the unspoken part is this: few royal parents have got it right so far, and the Prince and Princess of Wales have had to start from scratch to figure it out for the next.
“The biggest thing is that it has to be family first,” says a friend. “They will serve the institution, but they will also make sure their children are raised with as much normality as possible.”
Raising the “future future King” is part of their role, woven through conversations and Kensington Palace strategy meetings since the Princess of Wales announced she was pregnant. Learning from the mistakes of the past, says another source, has been “absolutely central”.
“Previous generations of the Royal family weren’t renowned for their parenting skills,” says Valentine Low, the author of Power and the Palace. “The one sovereign who escaped such parental failures was Elizabeth II, who was brought up in a close-knit family of four: the difference, of course, was that until she was 10 no one knew she would be queen.
“When it came to her turn, she did her best to be a loving parent to Charles, but duty always came first. She was often absent – once for nearly six months – while Philip was a tough and demanding father. Charles, a sensitive boy, felt lonely and misunderstood.”
Princes William and Harry’s childhoods were scarred by trauma, first of their parents’ divorce, then their mother’s death and their father’s struggle to balance duty and the needs of his sons in a very different era.
William and Catherine, in other words, have had to write their own parenting rulebook.
The Prince and Princess wanted to give baby George “space to be a child”, says a source who knows them. Equally they did not want to have to hide him away. They were genuinely touched by public support for their young family and were happy to share the uncomplicated joy of a royal baby via a walk outside the Lindo Wing and occasional family photos.
The infant George lived first in Anglesey, where his father was working as an RAF search-and-rescue pilot and his mother went about a relatively ordinary life of food shops and trying to entertain a newborn away from family and old friends. They have fond memories and like to return there, but it took some adjusting.
“I had a tiny, tiny baby in the middle of Anglesey. It was so isolated, so cut off,” the Princess said years later while bonding with new, sleep-deprived mothers on an engagement at the sort of baby group she wished she had had for George. “I didn’t have any family around and he [William] was doing night shifts.”
Prince George was robust and happy and, according to uncle Prince Harry in happier times, looked like a “young Winston Churchill”. In photographs, he gazed at his mother in adoration. Safe in the arms of his father, he learnt to wave at the public in the family tradition.
When George was small, The Telegraph recorded his list of “likes” as including tractors, thunderstorms, pasta, The Lion King, stickers, dinosaurs, helicopters, the police and “noise”.
“He was sweet, happy and obsessed with helicopters,” a source who knows the family recalls. Aides who have come and gone from Kensington Palace over the years remember him fondly as “very, very polite”, sitting on laps in the office, and not as shy as he might sometimes seem in public.
He has played his part in international diplomacy too, with varying success. He charmed the Obamas with an after-dinner meeting in his dressing gown. (“Prince George showed up to our meeting in his bathrobe,” the president joked at the end of his term. “That was a slap in the face.”) When he arrived in Canada in 2016, wearing shorts and long socks at the age of three, he rejected the then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s offer of a high five, a low five and a handshake with a shake of the head, much to the amusement of those watching.
In New Zealand and Australia, on his first tour, when he was just eight months old, George joined a playgroup and met a wombat. He was described as “quite a bruiser” (due to his size rather than his behaviour) and “the Republican slayer” for his impact on the Commonwealth.
The great-grandson of the late Queen, he – like his siblings – is well practised in bowing and curtseying when necessary.
At home in Norfolk, where Prince William juggled being an air ambulance pilot with part-time royal duties with the blessing of Elizabeth II, George joined a Montessori nursery, the milestone marked with a photograph of the small boy in a duffel coat and backpack.
But it was not always straightforward. By the time he was a toddler, the future king had become a target for paparazzi, to the deep concern of his parents, protection officers and the Palace. While the British media stuck with agreements to allow royal children their privacy, photographs of George on the beach, at the farm and in playgrounds were taken and sold in Europe and Australia. Ordinary moments with his parents and his grandparents the Middletons were captured by photographers who at one point even went to the lengths of building a hide in the boot of a car.
Kensington Palace staff, in consultation with the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, issued a carefully worded statement that was chilling in its detail of “incidents of paparazzi harassment of Prince George”, tactics the statement called “increasingly dangerous” and “distressing activity around a two-year-old boy”.
Largely, it worked.
The British public, in the shadow of the Diana era, circled the wagons around the royal children and self-policed. To this day, rare photographs circulating on social media will be met with comments reminding their takers to let the youngest royals have their privacy.
Instead, the pictures that have captured George’s life have mostly been official: from the home photo album taken by his mother to chosen professional photographers. His 13th birthday on Wednesday follows suit.
With every milestone has come a new decision: how to balance private lives and public duties.
“The way they have lived their lives – getting the kids outside, spending time together, focusing on the school run – it’s just as strategic as any other part of their public service,” says a source.
“Preparing their children for the lives they are going to lead, it’s central to their roles – it’s not something that’s on the side.”
The first days of school at St Thomas’ and then Lambrook have been recorded calmly by one television camera, one photographer and one journalist; light years away from the wall of lenses looming in front of a young Prince William in his day.
At prep school in Berkshire, George, Charlotte and Louis live like any other pupil, from extracurricular clubs to school trips. The Prince and Princess of Wales attend parent functions, sports matches and chapel. Perhaps most surprising in its normality, they are also on the parent WhatsApp groups, making them the first future king and queen to receive notifications about little Hugo’s missing PE kit. But arranging play dates and, increasingly as George and his siblings grow up, running the taxi service of Mum and Dad are all part of the royal couple’s day-to-day duties.
Recently, there have also been signs that they are encouraging more independence in their eldest. “George was boarding last night,” William mentioned in a radio interview this summer. Come September, George will join Eton at the same boarding house his father and his uncle once went to. He will go with friends, some of the boys from Lambrook, and will recognise others from the small prep-school circuit he plays sports against.
The case for Eton is clear. Unusually, even for a top boarding school, the boys of F block (first years, to the outside world) each have a bedroom to themselves. George will be just down the road from his family in Windsor, and there are no girls to complicate matters in front of prying eyes. Year-nine boys, of which George will be one from September, are not allowed smartphones, instead being allowed only a “brick phone” for basic contact with their families.
William and Catherine are determined, sources say, that their son should be allowed to continue his education in peace and privacy – and the brick phone policy is integral to ensuring that. The Prince and Princess are “extremely protective” of their children, says Russell Myers, the best-selling author of William and Catherine: The Intimate Inside Story, but they are also accessible and approachable. They will be on hand to help George “navigate” the challenges of the modern world if need be, Myers says.
“William’s experience of Eton was a happy one, but both he and Catherine realise their children’s school lives may be considerably different in today’s world.”
They are highly alert to the dangers of social media. The Prince has previously tried to persuade tech giants to do more to protect children (“Fight back against the intolerance and cruelty that has been brought to the surface by your platforms,” he urged them in 2018), and the Princess’s illness has left her even more convinced about the need to swap screens for outdoor time. “In an increasingly digitalised world, where so much of life is mediated through screens, the need for genuine human connection has never been greater,” she said earlier this year.
Choosing Eton, Myers explains, was a family decision. “If it didn’t work for him, it didn’t work for the family,” he says. “This shows how connected they are and how George and his siblings have been prepared for whatever may lie ahead.”
Melanie Sanderson, the managing editor of The Good Schools Guide, says Prince George, like most of his cohort, will be “really well prepared” for Eton, where all new starters are “tiny fish in a big pond” and must master the skill of being in the “right place at the right time” for classes in what is sometimes described as a “mini university” town.
“The boys are expected to be really independent from the word go,” she says. “It’s a big place with a lot of people and a lot on offer.”
The school is spread throughout the small town of Eton, which is already full of tourists and will be braced for more royalists hopping over from Windsor Castle once the second in line to the throne is there.
The distinctive uniform means that all boys are “used to being gawped at”, says Sanderson, with Prince George able to blend in among them easily. Of pupils and parents, she adds, it is a “much broader church than you might expect”. “It’s not a place where it’s cool to be flashy about wealth or your dad’s job, or get dropped off in a helicopter – more likely a Volvo estate with Labradors in the back.”
The students, she predicts, will take a royal newcomer in their stride. The Prince and Princess’s own approach will follow the pattern they set at Lambrook, where they brought children and parents into their world and trusted them, and everyone proved trustworthy in return.
Prince William “talks to this day about how formative it [Eton] was for him”, says a source. “He made his lifelong friends there.”
There is no set master plan for the years ahead, although anyone with a passing interest in the Royal family will have noticed Prince George undergoing a slow and steady introduction to public duty. From the Platinum Jubilee in 2022 to VE Day, where he took the chance to ask Second World War veterans about their service, and semi-private visits to The Passage homeless charity and an RAF airbase, George is learning the ropes.
Mick Clarke, who as chief executive of The Passage hosted Prince William and George to serve up Christmas dinner in 2025, said the young Prince was “well up for it”. “Very much like his dad in terms of he just wanted to crack on, which was lovely,” Clarke added, saying it seemed clear that the schoolboy did “bits and pieces” in the kitchen at home.
The history books will record him as a visible heir: bouncing on Charles’s knee in a 70th-birthday portrait, stirring a Christmas pudding in a photograph with his father, grandfather and great-grandmother in 2019, taking his place as a Page of Honour for the Coronation of Charles III in 2023.
Prince George, reiterates a source who knows the family, is “a very down-to-earth young man”. “Mum and Dad give really careful consideration as to when and how to introduce all their children to royal work, and strike the balance with their normal lives.”
They have never sat him down to announce grandly that he will one day be king, but introduced him to his family’s role in public life gradually over time.
“They should be confident about the years ahead,” says a source. “There are challenges, but they have been absolutely consistent about putting the family at the heart of everything they do, and the public supports them.”
For now, Prince George is turning 13. You can find him on a tennis court, a cricket field or up a tree.
