Why is September so busy for the royals?

A wonky examination of what happened to the previously quiet holiday month of September

Princess Anne lays a wreath at the memorial service held at the Oosterbeek War Cemetery in the Netherlands to commemorate those who gave their life and fought in Operation Market Garden during the Second World War, on September 22, 2014 (Photo: UK MOD © Crown copyright 2024 / Sgt Jimmy Wise)

This is a very geeky post filled with data. I enjoyed researching and writing it but recognize that it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

“It’s not normally this busy.”

“There’s a lot of royal news this week. Again”

If September felt like a surprisingly busy month for the royals, you’re not alone. Person after person asked me what was going on after noticing the flurry of royal news — from Kate’s video marking the end of her chemo treatments to the King and Queen’s trip to the Scottish legislature.

I’ll be honest — I was behind in inputting the official engagements from September into my massive Excel sheet and hadn’t examined the data closely. But what really got me curious was this startling headline in the Scottish Express: “Tireless Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh set to be crowned ‘hardest working royal.’” If that wasn’t enough, the article’s deck caused me a moment or two of panic (that will teach me to fall behind!): “Princess Sophie has doubled the number of engagements she is carrying out this year and is on course to topple the Princess Royal as the hardest-working member of The Firm”

Could Sophie really be doing more engagements in 2024 than Princess Anne, who at one point in the year accounted for 1/3 of all work undertaken by the current roster of 11 working royals? Then, I clicked on the article to read that the author was referring to work completed in only the month of September. Ok, panic over. The story was not so startling but still interesting.

And that got me wondering about the month itself. Had something actually changed when it comes to royal work in September or did a few high-profile events influence our perceptions? So, as I do with those sort of query, I plunged into my Excel sheets of royal work data to see if perception could be separated from fact.

No reuse without the written permission of Write Royalty Inc.

I have eight years of raw data from the Court Circular from which to look for trends. And because I’m always asked why I don’t go back further into the 2000s, let me explain: inputting each year of royal work from the official Court Circular involves filling around 75,000 cells with information (dates, locations, type of engagement, etc.). It is enormously time consuming. Still, I’d tackle that job if a kind benefactor wants to finance it (just email me!)

Now back to September issue.

First, let’s look at the raw data in the blue-hued graphic (above). The first thing to see is that the amount of work jumps around from year to year. A plotted trend line (the dotted black line) is stubbornly horizontal. Sigh. Take out the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, and the trend line bends down very, very slightly. Perhaps the only thing to note is that, without those pandemic years, September 2024 saw the least number of engagements.

So if it’s not the raw number of engagements driving attention to royal work in September, what other factors should be considered? For that, we have to look at who did what in September.