The Queen Mother would proudly recount that Charles always picked the weakest person for his team, because he knew what it was liked to be overlooked (Picture: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images/Hugo Burnand-Pool)

One cold misty morning in 1957, on a playing field in Hampshire where the soil was frozen underfoot, nine-year-old Prince Charles stood in abject misery.

He’d been made the unwilling team captain for games – and in front of him stood the various sporting champions of his boarding school, jostling to be picked first.

Who to select for his team? The top scorer, the solid defender or the golden-haired popular boy? Charles didn’t waver. Pointing to the back of the group, he chose the boy with glasses who most hated games.

Next, he selected the overweight boy who always struggled to keep up. Amid the groans and catcalls of others, Charles picked the least likely candidates first – ensuring that those normally left until last were, for once, part of a team.

It’s a kindness his doting grandmother Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was never to forget. She would proudly recount that Charles always picked the weakest person for his team, because he knew what it was liked to be overlooked.

Indeed, some months after the scene on the playing field, a severe Asian flu swept the country – ‘an epidemic carrying chesty complications’, which killed 33,000 people in the UK and became known as the ‘forgotten pandemic’.

Given the opportunity to pick teams for sport he chose those who were unlikely to be picked (Picture: Hope Bob/Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty)

Charles championed the underdog as he knew what it felt like to be overlooked Picture: (Hulton Archive/Getty)

It hit Charles’s school hard. Boys who were unwell were visited by their parents or driven home to recover.

Young Charles was confined to bed with a fever so bad he could hardly speak. He begged the school matron in the hospital wing to send for his ‘Mama.’

The calls went unanswered. At Buckingham Palace, it was deemed unsafe for either the Queen or Prince Philip to visit their stricken son, despite their recent vaccinations. Charles was left to recover alone, later writing to his parents to beg them not to worry.

It was part of an unhappy childhood that haunted his later years but fuelled his desire to right all wrongs. Far from the pampered princes of the past, Charles the campaigner will forever be the prince who truly championed the underdog.

Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor was born at Buckingham Palace on November 14, 1948. A sensitive boy, he was separated from his parents by duty and formalities. Returning from a Commonwealth tour of six months in 1954, the Queen and Prince Philip greeted their five-year-old son with an awkward handshake.

Charles spent as much time as he could with his grandmother Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who encouraged his love of music and art. But at the age of eight, he was sent to board at Cheam School to ‘toughen’ him up. Charles clutched his teddy bear, cried himself to sleep nightly and wrote long letters to his parents twice a week – the start of his lifelong interest in letter-writing.

As a child Prince Charles was often separated from his parents (Picture: PA Wire)

The young prince was sent to Cheam at the age of 8, to ‘toughen him up’ (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty)

Prince Phillip insisted Charles be sent to his old school of Gordonstoun (Picture: PA)

Fellow pupils called him ‘fatty’ and ‘jug ears’ but worse was to come when Prince Philip insisted Charles be sent to his old school, Gordonstoun, which boasted a spartan regime of morning runs followed by cold showers all year long.

Charles later described it as a ‘prison sentence’. On a school trip in 1963, he ordered a cherry brandy in a pub – sparking headlines and leading to the sacking of his only friend: his police bodyguard. Nobody else befriended him for fear of being teased.

Fellow pupil Ross Benson recalled: ‘He was crushingly lonely for most of his time there. The wonder is that he survived with his sanity intact.’

Back home, Charles found himself upstaged by sister Anne (Philip’s favourite), brother Andrew (the Queen’s favourite) and Edward, the baby of the family.His loneliness and unhappiness were compounded by frequent ridicule from his father. When teenage Charles persuaded his parents to watch him perform Shakespeare on the school stage, he overheard his father laughing loudly in the audience. Philip told him later that his portrayal of Macbeth ‘sounded like the Goons’.

At the age of 17, Charles was sent to the Australian Outback for two terms at Timbertop school, where he joined fellow pupils in basic jungle tasks – which he relished. The next year, he left for Trinity College, Cambridge.

Charles was a sensitive young man (Picture: Allen/Milligan/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)

Charles’s father Phillip was not supportive of his acting hobby (Picture: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty)

Camilla was deemed ‘too racy’ to be a marriage prospect (Picture: REX/Shutterstock)

Charles proposed to Lady Diana Spencer after 13 meetings (Picture: Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)

At a charity polo match in 1970, Charles met horse-loving society girl Camilla Shand. Bright-eyed and prone to jump behind bushes for a sneaky cigarette, with a drink often clenched in one hand, she dazzled Charles. The shy prince had found his soulmate but Camilla was deemed ‘too racy’ to be a future marriage prospect.

Instead, loveless and unsatisfied following his Navy career, 32-year-old Charles was steered towards the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, proposing after just 13 meetings.

A total of 750million people worldwide watched the couple marry at St Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981. With the births of William in June, 1982, and Harry in September, 1984, Charles became an openly affectionate father.

But as Diana’s star rose, famously dancing with John Travolta and holding the hand of an Aids patient in 1987, she stole the limelight while her husband watched in resentful frustration.

As the marriage broke down, Charles sought solace with mistress Camilla while Diana fled into the arms of different lovers. The couple divorced, and Diana’s new-found happiness with boyfriend Dodi Fayed ended in tragedy on August 31, 1997, when their car, driven by a drunken chauffeur, crashed in Paris.

No-nonsense Camilla moved quietly back into Charles’s life, and if he lost his temper she’d simply return to her home until he calmed down – a habit she continued after their wedding in April 2005.

Charles was an openly affection father to sons William and Harry (Picture: Getty)

Charles proudly walked his daughter-in-law Meghan down the aisle (Picture: Jonathan Brady / POOL / AFP)

Camilla and Charles pets are rescue dogs (Picture: Clarence House/PA Wire/Handout via REUTERS)

Ironically, it was as the public accepted Camilla that Prince Harry’s resentment seemingly festered. His marriage to Meghan in 2018 appeared to be a triumph for Charles’s blended family. Charles proudly walked the bride down the aisle while a delighted Camilla celebrated alongside William and Kate.

So the resulting media onslaught – from a petulant Prince Harry and his wife in the form of TV interviews and a memoir – might have floored a lesser man than Charles, who has always referred to his second son as ‘darling boy.’

But while monarchs have been fawned upon in the past, Charles has long been used to criticism and ridicule. Remember the laughter of the public throughout the ’70s when he championed organic produce, talked to plants and denounced ‘ugly’ architecture – views that proved prescient.

He also launched The Prince’s Trust after leaving the Navy in 1976, which has helped more than a million youngsters.

The sensitive boy toughened up as a man, earning respect from his mother and dealing firmly with the problems of Prince Andrew – disgraced through his friendship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – and Megxit, when Harry and his wife broke away from the royal family. Within hours of the Queen’s death last September, Charles addressed the nation in an emotional speech, paying tribute to his ‘darling Mama’.

Far from a remote figurehead, the new king forages for mushrooms and freezes any he doesn’t eat so they can be used later. Breakfast is one plum, picked from his estate and jarred for use later. Lunch is skipped because, at 74, he feels it slows him down. And dinner is a simple supper where possible, shared with Camilla and their beloved rescue dogs.

The Queen started her reign in the aftermath of a war, and King Charles takes the throne of a country in turmoil yet again, after a pandemic and amid a cost of living crisis, a Ukraine war and ever-present terror threats.

But with Camilla solidly at his side, offering him love and support, he’ll weather all storms. Make no mistake, this king has broad shoulders indeed.

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From childhood, King Charles III knew how it felt to be bullied and overlooked.