Prince Harry’s headline-making memoir, Spare, revealed a number of revelations when it was published in 2023, including details about the royal family’s dynamics.
While the Duke of Sussex’s official name is Henry, he has always been known as Harry, he’s also acquired a rather random bunch of nicknames from his family members.
In the opening pages of the book, as Harry details a reunion with his father, the King, and his older brother, the Prince of Wales, in Windsor after his grandfather Prince Philip’s funeral, he reveals that William calls him “Harold.” In turn, Harry calls his brother “Willy” while Charles is referred to as “Pa”.
And later when the Duke recalled the agonising moment that his father informed him of his mother Diana’s death, he said of Charles: “He always called me ‘darling boy,’ but he was saying it quite a lot now.”
Meanwhile, the Duchess of Sussex affectionately refers to her husband as “H,” while Harry shortens his wife’s name to “Meg”.
During his gap year in 2003, Harry travelled to Australia to work on Tooloombilla cattle station, and it was there he acquired another one of his nicknames – Spike. He shared that the station’s owner, George Hill, had given him the moniker after a visit to Taronga Zoo.
“I’d been asked to pose for a photo with something called an echidna. A cross between a hedgehog and an anteater, it had hard spiky hair, which was why the zookeepers named it Spike. It looked, as George would say, a right mess,” Harry wrote. “More to the point, it looked like me. A lot like me. And when George happened to see a photo of me posing with Spike, he yelped: ‘Haz – that thing’s got your hair!‘ Thereafter, he never called me anything but Spike. And then my bodyguards took up the chorus. Indeed, they made Spike my code name on the radio.”
He added: “Soon enough my mates at home got wind of this new nickname, and adopted it. I became Spike, when I wasn’t Haz, or Baz, or Prince Jackaroo, or Harold, or Darling Boy, or Scrawny, a nickname given me by some Palace staff.”
© GettyHarry even used the name @SpikeyMau5 for his private Instagram account before deleting his account. The profile was inspired by Harry’s love of house music, and adopted part of the name of one of his favourite DJs – DeadMau5.
He also reportedly used the name ‘Spike Wells’ for his Facebook page from 2008 to 2012, which was said to include pictures of him with his then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.
King Charles’s name choice
The Duke of Sussex revealed in his book that his father was set on calling him Albert, after Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, Prince Albert, but his mother, Diana, vetoed the name.
© Getty ImagesHarry wrote: “I found the ‘Grandmama of Europe’ [Queen Victoria] hugely compelling, and not just because Granny loved her, nor because Pa once wanted to name me after her husband. (Mummy blocked him.)”
In the end, the moniker was used as one of his middle names and he was christened Henry Charles Albert David of Wales.
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