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

An investigation into a mysterious room. A room that the most famous family in England apparently does not want you to see. Support the show! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine Nation and all the ships at sea. Summer is finally, actually, truly here. And this week, we are celebrating by bringing you one of our very favorite classic episodes of Search Engine, an enjoyable, well, enjoyable for us, hopefully for you, quest after a very silly question. It's a story about kings and queens and the places they allegedly cannonball, a story which took Search Engine's team of crack reporters across the Atlantic. I hope you like it. We'll be back next week with a new one for you. Or if you just need to hear something new from us right now, we actually have a fresh new episode on the incognito mode feed. It's a story that is about the pursuit of greatness and spicy noodles.

• 0:43PJ Vogt?

  But in order to hear that, you would need to be a subscriber to our incognito mode, which you can find at searchengine.show.

• 1:17PJ Vogt?

  Most human beings start asking questions at about two and a half years old. Our first questions usually begin with what? The quintessential toddler query, what's that? The more sophisticated how and when questions? Those developmentally arrive around three. And then between three and five, the deluge, the constant questions, the why questions. Why is salami so hard to stop eating? Why do people lie? If you can think back, you can probably remember this age, when your parents were like perfect search engines, capable of handling almost anything you threw at them. And you also might remember the few times they'd refuse. When you ask some question whose answer they weren't quite ready to share, and you get an it's complicated, or maybe a when you're older.

• 2:07PJ Vogt?

  I can remember, I swear, decades later, the frustration of that strange invisible wall. In fact, I was reminded of that wall quite recently. A listener had a question about something that felt, honestly, very basic, very answerable, but it just wasn't. It was an unpatchable hole in my understanding of the world. And the more we tried to answer it, the less it seemed like a fun lark and the more it made me want to howl with rage. It made, actually, the entire staff here howl with rage. Why couldn't we know this? Why was it being kept from us?

• 2:41PJ Vogt?

  Check, check, check.

• 2:45PJ Vogt?

  It started in a stylishly appointed one-bedroom apartment not far from my house.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Hi. Hey, how's it going? How's it going? Welcome.

• 2:54PJ Vogt?

  The listener whose home we just entered, his name was Chris. Chris sends me a lot of questions. They tend to be especially good. And the question he had this time was about the British royal family. Well, sort of. Are you normally a royals person?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I am not normally a royals person. I came into this when it just felt like the entire world was conspiring to make me care. Yes. You know, and I needed to find my own way to care about it. Right.

• 3:18PJ Vogt?

  Like, if this is going to be the only show on the TV of the internet, you're going to find like a minor, like, plotline that you can get into.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. I need to find a hidey hole that feels like it's my own. Yes. Yeah.

• 3:32PJ Vogt?

  When Chris and I were talking, it was early summer 2023. And the entire world seemed obsessed with something that was happening in England: the coronation of King Charles. In case you did not care or follow, a recap. Queen Elizabeth had died. Her son Charles was taking the throne. And there was some drama attached to the occasion. A feud between Charles's son, Prince Harry, and his relatives. There was a tell-all book, an Oprah interview, allegations flying to and fro. Many people had questions about the royals of other private lives. I did not.

• 4:05PJ Vogt?

  Every royal headline hits my ear the same. It's always like, Prince Chatterley of the House Targaryen had a royal row at the Buckminster Dog Show or whatever. I tuned it out the way I always tune it out. But for Chris, all this din did a funny thing to his curiosity. It made him wonder, not about the royals's interior lives, but instead about a different kind of royal interior.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  So, okay, around the time of all of the coronation drama, I went down this really insane rabbit hole looking up facts about Buckingham Palace. I guess I was just kind of intrigued by this idea that Prince Charles was moving into a new palace and it just looks so beautiful and certainly from the outside and I was like, I wonder what it looks on the inside. It's probably the most famous palace in the world. We all can imagine what it looks like on the outside. It's just like the storybook version of a palace.

• 5:00PJ Vogt?

  I actually cannot picture it. Can we look at it?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Of course. So, okay, pulling it up on Google Images, I'm gonna show you the outside.

• 5:10PJ Vogt?

  So this exterior photo that Chris pulls up, it's honestly a little hard to describe, but I'm gonna give it a shot. I see lots of Corinthian columns, many windows, most capped with these beautiful stone triangular pediments. Honestly, it's a little similar to the building style you see in Washington DC's monuments. It's just significantly more impressive. Yeah, it's a massive palace.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  It's insane and the idea of living in it is just so inconceivable.

• 5:36PJ Vogt?

  Cause it's like you're like living in like the part of Washington DC that all the fancy buildings are, but that's just your home. Like, yeah, I live in the Pentagon, the White House, the Washington Monument. Like, it's not a home, but it is a home. It's like the home for the fanciest people in Britain.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the White House is a really interesting thing to compare it to because the White House, I just have zero curiosity about what it's like in there. I feel like I know. It's like boring wallpaper. It's four poster beds. You know what I mean? And it just looks small and rinky-dink compared to this. Let's Google the number of rooms. I feel like it's close to a thousand.

• 6:13PJ Vogt?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 6:16PJ Vogt?

  775. That's fucking insane.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  That's crazy. Like, we're in my apartment right now. It's approximately three rooms.

• 6:24PJ Vogt?

  775 rooms is a lot of rooms. It's a lot more than three. But what had specifically piqued Chris's curiosity is that even though British taxpayers have funded all 775 of those rooms, very few rooms can be seen by the British public. The White House, you can visit, you can tour. If you win an election, you could live there. Buckingham Palace is different. It belongs to dynast of one family forever, and the vast majority of its many rooms are only accessible to that family and their many servants. You can go on tour, but you won't see very much. As Chris tumbled down this rabbit hole, he found that his curiosity was particularly drawn to one mysterious room.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  One thing that I surfaced in my research about Buckingham Palace was there's a pool. Obviously, there's a pool. That's a very commonplace amenity. But there are no pictures of the pool. No one's outside of the royal family seems to have seen this pool. It's a very private amenity.

• 7:24PJ Vogt?

  Wait, no one's ever taken a photograph of the pool in Buckingham Palace?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  It does not exist on the internet. There are speculations about where it is. So if you Google this pool, you'll see this little chung.

• 7:39PJ Vogt?

  Chris pulls up the Google search results, which spit out a bunch of screaming British tabloid headlines about the existence of this secret Buckingham Palace pool. Some feature photos taken from a helicopter or maybe a drone, very high up, with one section of the palace exterior circled. My god, it's like a CIA intelligence photo where someone's taken an aerial shot of Buckingham Palace, and then they've just, with a white circle, circled their theory for like, instead of where Bin Laden's hiding in a cave, it's where they think the pool is hiding in Buckingham Palace.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  That is exactly what it's like. And I need to know what it looks like in there. So, look, this is a closer picture of it. I think this is about the closest we've ever...

• 8:19PJ Vogt?

  This is definitely a pool house. So it's like, it's like a... It's hard to tell the scale. It's either a two or three-story stone building with like giant window frames. Like, oh, this would be a really nice pool. Because it has the thing where you kind of have like, like, modern buildings have like big windows that look out onto a yard, but this, it's like on like an old Roman-y looking building. And then also, you get the view from an outside pool, but it's indoor, and I'm sure it's heated. Oh, that's nice. That's really nice.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  It's the Parthenon with windows.

• 8:52PJ Vogt?

  It's the Parthenon with windows if it were just a swimming pool.

• 8:58PJ Vogt?

  At this point, it might bear repeating. Chris does not care about the Royals. If anything, he resents how much information about them has been dumped without his consent into his mind. Photos of them in their bathing suits, anecdotes about their squabbles. Chris doesn't care about the Royals, except now that there was one private room in the life of this internationally overexposed family, one volume of water that had been perhaps arbitrarily made private. Now that Chris was being told he wasn't allowed to know about the pool, perversely, his curiosity roared online.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  The reason that we haven't been able to see the swimming pool is actually what makes me feel like I need to see it.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  I just kind of imagine that it's the coolest swimming pool ever. Like, that's sort of how I think of it.

• 9:49PJ Vogt?

  And for you, is that like a really tall diving board? Is it like a really deep, deep end? Is it like a jacuzzi where it's kind of not tepid and gross? Like, what is the coolest swimming pool ever in your imagination?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I think it's like the rarest marble, like, you know, yeah, I think it's like just insane materials that it's made of.

• 10:07PJ Vogt?

  For me, it would also be about like the stair placement. Like, because I think sometimes when you get to experience a big swimming pool, the problem is where the stairs are, where you like have to like swim too much to get out of it. And I just feel like the Royals would have had like really thoughtful stair placement.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I agree. I think every detail has been considered, including that one.

• 10:36PJ Vogt?

  I assume that like curiouser people about the Royals than me have poured through like every part of their life, sometimes in like really tragic ways. I don't think that I'm intrepid enough that I will actually end up like in Buckingham Palace, like hanging from the rafters with like a little camera or whatever. But I want to fulfill the curiosity of the hardest question. Like, what, what can I get you that will feel like an answer to this question, which might be unanswerable?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I would settle for anything better than what's out there online. Like, any kind of imagery you could paint for me around the interior, any scenes you can paint for me, like, yeah, like so and so like went to the pool and like ordered poolside Negronis. I'm like. If I can just basically-

• 11:18PJ Vogt?

  Pull this pool one moat more into the light of public view, you will be happy.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 11:25PJ Vogt?

  Okay, I think I can. That feels achievable. All right, thank you, Chris.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I believe in you. Thank you.

• 11:36PJ Vogt?

  After the break, we dive in.

• 11:54PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 11:59PJ Vogt?

  Chapter one, The Outer Circle.

• 12:03PJ Vogt?

  When we started trying to answer this question almost two years ago, it's not that we thought it'd be easy, but frankly, it didn't seem that hard. We set the bar low enough. We just needed to talk to a person who had seen the pool with their own eyes. All we were seeking was a fact as small as, did the Royal Pool have a royal diving board? If so, was it one of the really big ones, like with a ladder?

• 12:27PJ Vogt?

  So we made our reporting plan. First stop, the press office of the Royal Collection Trust, the organization that manages visitor access to Buckingham Palace. We told them we were very interested in the architectural history of the palace and asked if they can make a historian available for an interview.

• 12:45PJ Vogt?

  To our delight, they responded. They asked for a list of questions in advance. We sent them over questions with our question about the pool artfully tucked towards the back, where we hoped it would not trigger alarms. We said we just wanted to know if the palace had modern amenities, like perhaps a swimming pool? And if so, could they talk about that? Those two words, swimming pool, they shut down like a pumpkin stand in November, closed for business. I'm sorry for the disappointing response. We do appreciate you getting in touch. Huh. Okay. We fanned out. Next, we tried six degrees of separation. We hit up every friend of ours who was British or knew a British person, anyone remotely famous or who knew a remotely famous person.

• 13:29PJ Vogt?

  Shockingly, one person we knew had an old friend who had married into an obscure branch of the extended royal universe. She and her spouse, a member of the royal household, had been to the palace many times, but neither had ever seen this pool.

• 13:45PJ Vogt?

  Weird. One lovely British woman I met at a dinner, literally this devolved into just asking strangers at dinners about the royals, told me, "Oh, this'll be an easy question to answer." There's lots of students, actually, who intern at the palace. And she said she knew at least one. So she texted her friend, a former palace intern. The friend confirms over text, "Yes, there's a pool." But then immediately clammed up. They said they couldn't really talk about their time there, even though this was years ago. What were these monarchs hiding in their murky marine depths? Our next move was to go to the archives. Producer Garrett Graham read newspaper clips about the palace until his eyes bled. And then we started watching the documentaries.

• 14:29PJ Vogt?

  Buckingham Palace. One of the most famous buildings on the planet. Home to arguably the world's most famous family. This particular series looked very promising. A, quote, "six-part look at the secrets of Buckingham Palace." Today, it's the largest private house in the country, with an astonishing 775 rooms, including a swimming pool. The swimming pool. They go on. A swimming pool, a doctor's surgery, and a post office. There's even an ATM in the basement that dispenses cash only for the royals. The royals use cash? Question for a different episode. This is the story of Buckingham Palace.

• 15:13PJ Vogt?

  The documentary series starts well before the existence of the swimming pool. It starts, actually, with the story of the palace before it was yet the modern palace. If you traveled back in time 260 years, Buckingham Palace would have looked like this.

• 15:31PJ Vogt?

  We see an exterior shot of a red brick house on a country lane. Handsome, stately, certainly nicer than your house, but not a palace. That's because Buckingham Palace didn't start life as a royal residence. It was originally built as a private house by a man called the Duke of Buckingham. The private house that our modern Buckingham Palace would be expanded out from, that first came into the royal family in 1761. In the centuries after, some of England's most notable architects would, in phases, transform this red brick townhouse into the 830,000-square-foot behemoth that sits there today. The story of that transformation is unspooled across the series's many installments.

• 16:12PJ Vogt?

  But it begins to dawn on the attentive viewer as these installments roll on that even in what has been billed as a six-part exposé, the host is clearly locked outside of the palace gates. The cameras don't film the interiors. Instead, it's a lot of blueprints, it's a lot of recreations, a lot of people in wakes. The swimming pool's appearance in the doc as a topic comes after the section about Queen Elizabeth's many corgis.

• 16:42PJ Vogt?

  As well as a corgi, King George gave his daughters another present, something which isn't found in the average home, even today. We've arrived, after three hours and 48 minutes of punishing, non-pool-related content, at the subject that brought us here. By the time the 1930s came around, no self-respecting grand house was complete without its own swimming pool. And so, George VI planned a surprise for his daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, somewhere for them to have their weekly swimming lesson from the comfort of their own home. You'd expect, in this moment, in a sane or just world, to see the damn pool, even just a still photograph of it. Instead, what we get is the palace floor plans we've already seen, except now, they

• 17:27PJ Vogt?

  add a green rectangle to represent the location of the swimming pool. And then they cut to a very familiar-by-now exterior shot of the pool building, the parthenon with windows, photographed, as always, from a great distance away. We are no closer here than we were with Chris. They recite some facts that we'd already come across in the newspaper archives, like the infamous Nazi attack on the pool, soon after its creation.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  So, almost immediately after the start of the Blitz, a bomb landed, and it wrecked the swimming pool.

• 17:59PJ Vogt?

  Maybe the Nazis were also mad they weren't allowed to see the pool. But the pool was later rebuilt. We learn that King Charles, as a little kid, would invite his schoolmates over to sail model boats in the pool. But still, nothing really about the pool itself. Does it have a diving board? A marble staircase? Is it big? Is it small? Is it an above-ground number? We learn zilch.

• 18:24PJ Vogt?

  It remains there to this day, but it's one of the most private parts of the palace. No images of the interior have ever been made public.

• 18:35PJ Vogt?

  So this was the totality of what the BBC documentary could offer us about the pool. Basically, nothing. It felt like we needed to talk to someone who actually had royal connections, who could get inside the palace with a camera in their hand. Can you just introduce yourself? Like, say your name and what you do.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm Ashley Hicks, and I'm a designer of interiors and objects for them, and also a photographer of historic interiors. And I've written a book about Buckingham Palace's interiors.

• 19:05PJ Vogt?

  Chapter two, The Palace Photographer.

• 19:11PJ Vogt?

  Ashley Hicks spent months roaming Buckingham Palace, taking these beautiful, naturally lit, shadow-drenched portraits of the interior rooms. He also has a personal connection to the palace. His grandfather was Lord Mountbatten, uncle of the late Queen's husband, Prince Philip. Ashley's relatives were central enough to the royal family that, as a kid, every June, he would get an invitation to the Queen's birthday parade.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  We would go and watch them ride back into the palace, and we'd go and give the horses sugar lumps and carrots. And then we would go up and have a Coca-Cola, because we were children, and some sandwiches, with our mothers saying, "Now make sure you eat enough, because that's all the lunch you're getting."

• 19:56PJ Vogt?

  How were the sandwiches at the palace?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  They were pretty good, actually. They were Marmite ones, which, you know, obviously are very good if you like Marmite. And if you don't even know what Marmite is-

• 20:07PJ Vogt?

  I don't.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  -then you need to study a bit of English culture.

• 20:13PJ Vogt?

  Ashley, 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.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  I mean, the interesting thing about the White House, in a way, is the amount that you see it in movies and on TV.

• 20:34PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  And I mean, that Oval Office, I mean, I feel like I've lived there, don't you?

• 20:39PJ Vogt?

  I do, and I feel like-

• 20:40Speaker 03

  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 got no idea. There'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.

• 20:58PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  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. Then I was told, "Oh, don't lift a chair by its arms," you know, all this kind of thing.

• 21:37PJ Vogt?

  How many of the 775 rooms were you allowed to photograph?

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't know. Are there 30, something like that? Are there really 775? Maybe there are.

• 21:48PJ Vogt?

  That's what I've been told.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Maybe there are.

• 21:51PJ Vogt?

  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 his book, the page on which our quarry had appeared. I have your book here, and it's, I have it dog-eared. On page 90, you have this beautiful exterior shot of, it's taken from the back gardens.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 22:15PJ Vogt?

  And so then on the left side of the photo, there's this building that it sort of resembles the Parthenon with windows.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:20PJ Vogt?

  Is that the poolhouse?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  I think that is the pool.

• 22:23PJ Vogt?

  Have you been inside?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  No, no, I haven't, no.

• 22:27PJ Vogt?

  And are you curious about it?

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Not especially. I, 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?

• 22:52PJ Vogt?

  Even 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.

• 23:35PJ Vogt?

  Several 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. And then, my editor, Shruti, got this idea,

• 24:19PJ Vogt?

  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 Shruti 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.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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.

• 25:03PJ Vogt?

  That sounds bucolic. That sounds relaxing. I feel like-

• 25:07Speaker 04

  It's not. They're so rowdy. It's deeply irritating after a while.

• 25:15PJ Vogt?

  Chapter three, The Investigative Reporter by the Sea.

• 25:20PJ Vogt?

  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 like one of the harder areas of reporting, which is extremely powerful, extremely secretive families, like oligarchs, royal families. Like, why is this the kind of story you find yourself drawn to?

• 25:46Speaker 04

  That is a great question and something I often ask myself. Like, I kind of constantly try to find a story that is slightly less unwieldy and then get drawn into these like knotty morasses and think, why do I do this to myself? But 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

• 26:29Speaker 04

  don't we know what this pool looks like? Come on, guy. Like, what are they hiding? What is so secret about this pool? This is crazy.

• 26:36PJ Vogt?

  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. Heidi both appreciated the strange complexity of her question and had suggestions about how to get it answered.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 27:11PJ Vogt?

  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. Is it just like, I mean, I assume you're not going on LinkedIn?

• 27:23Speaker 04

  I am literally going on LinkedIn.

• 27:25PJ Vogt?

  You're going on LinkedIn.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  That is literally what I'm doing. Yeah, LinkedIn is amazing. And this, I feel like this is one of those things where like, you know, magician should never reveal their secrets because like, it's LinkedIn. That's the secret.

• 27:36PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 27:37Speaker 04

  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 and then you can filter those. Um, so I took the liberty of like doing this.

• 28:03PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Just to see what we would find.

• 28:05PJ Vogt?

  Thank you.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Um, no, I mean, you know, you guys could do it. It's, it's, 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.

• 28:16PJ Vogt?

  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. Heidi filtered her search to just show ex-employees, the people most likely to talk.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  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.

• 29:08PJ Vogt?

  Wait, so I'm looking, oh my God. So wait, you see.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  I'm seeing, I've got a.

• 29:14PJ Vogt?

  We're bleeding out the names here just to respect the privacy of these people.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  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 are all have left the palace a really long time ago. So like, I just don't think they're going to be feeling that awkward about talking about it.

• 29:45PJ Vogt?

  We 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.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Well, I think this is just a hunch, but I bet you it's a really scuzzy rundown pool.

• 30:04PJ Vogt?

  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 like opulent and golden and maybe like, maybe there was an elephant there somehow. But you're like, oh, it might just be kind of a crappy pool.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  I 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 particular about the Queen was that actually, you know, Rimma 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 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. 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

• 31:11Speaker 04

  send you a picture, but it is like, super shabby and she's eating her breakfast out of Tupperware.

• 31:16PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 31:30PJ Vogt?

  Heidi sent me a link to the story. And in the photos, I could see the weirdly dingy room. There's a plastic princess phone and 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.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Which I think is basically the situation of the monarchy. Like, they actually, you know, their state is huge and kind of enormously expensive to maintain, and they're having to constantly scrap for taxpayer funding to to kind of maintain these state rooms. And so the Queen was notoriously frugal, you know, with her own sort of stuff. And so that's my hunch. I reckon this pool is rundown 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.

• 32:22PJ Vogt?

  Our 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.

• 32:44PJ Vogt?

  In 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.

• 32:58Speaker 05

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• 33:40Speaker 05

  Today, nine Fortune 10 companies run on Claude for the work they want to get right. And these businesses are helping Anthropic shape what comes next. Build your business with support from Claude at claude.ai/odyssey.

• 34:04PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. Okay, I think you're like, super off mic, or else I'm-

• 34:08Speaker 06

  I'm probably off mic. I also can't hear myself at all.

• 34:13PJ Vogt?

  Chapter four, Search Engine's royal correspondent, Garrett Graham.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  Hey PJ.

• 34:18PJ Vogt?

  Hey Garrett.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  How's it going?

• 34:20PJ Vogt?

  You know, another day in paradise.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Yeah?

• 34:22PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  I am here to tell you about some digging that I've done.

• 34:28PJ Vogt?

  I need to be honest here. I've been using the royal "we" in this episode a lot. We researched, we investigated. The royal "we" for most of these months was Garrett. On this journey, Garrett didn't just ingest historic newspaper archives and royal biographies. Honestly, 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.

• 35:12Speaker 06

  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 and 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?

• 35:27PJ Vogt?

  Are they convicted of a crime?

• 35:29Speaker 06

  They're convicted of having seen the swimming pool of Buckingham Palace and not telling us about it yet.

• 35:33PJ Vogt?

  In the world of podcasting, holding on to narratively interesting information is a crime?

• 35:37Speaker 06

  It is a crime, and they're found guilty.

• 35:41Speaker 06

  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. Which meant that the tablet guy was out.

• 36:06PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 06

  But the next step that I took was just to start reaching out to the people on LinkedIn.

• 36:11PJ Vogt?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 36:28PJ Vogt?

  A maintenance officer turned aromatherapist?

• 36:30Speaker 06

  That is right.

• 36:31PJ Vogt?

  Life has so many chapters.

• 36:32Speaker 06

  It does.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  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.

• 36:42PJ Vogt?

  So, okay, so you're poking around.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  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 onsite swimming pool plant operation."

• 37:00PJ Vogt?

  Okay, that feels like...

• 37:01Speaker 06

  It feels promising. It feels like this guy would have seen the pool, right?

• 37:03PJ Vogt?

  A neon sign.

• 37:04Speaker 06

  So, I slouched 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.

• 37:23PJ Vogt?

  It'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 gonna like me? Are they gonna talk to me?" Like, it's sort of the same like drawing a painting from a couple of dots type of thing.

• 37:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I reach out several times, actually. No response. Totally fine. We have more suspects. I move on to the next one.

• 37:46PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 37:46Speaker 06

  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, but on the other hand, it means like he was definitely there before the India era, and so maybe he's more keen to chat with us about it. I reach out LinkedIn and on Facebook. Again, zero response.

• 38:05PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so then what?

• 38:06Speaker 06

  Uh, 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.

• 38:16PJ Vogt?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 06

  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.

• 38:29PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, okay.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  And so I'm like, we've 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."

• 38:46PJ Vogt?

  So wait, what was interesting?

• 38:46Speaker 06

  Not a single word of reply. There was nothing interesting about it. It was just a failed attempt at a joke.

• 38:52PJ Vogt?

  I see, I see.

• 38:53Speaker 06

  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.

• 39:04PJ Vogt?

  Please.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  In the world of royal servants, there are few more controversial figures than Paul Burroughs. 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.

• 39:22Speaker 06

  Chapter 5, The Chatty Butler.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  Paul Burroughs spent 20 years working alongside the royals.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  He started as a footman to the Queen before becoming Princess Diana's butler, regularly crossing paths with Prince Philip.

• 39:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  He 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.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  I 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've touched your heart.

• 40:40Speaker 06

  All this to say, he seems like the perfect candidate to tell us what the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace looks like.

• 40:46PJ Vogt?

  So you reach out to him?

• 40:47Speaker 06

  So I shout him an email. 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.

• 40:59PJ Vogt?

  Please.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  "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."

• 41:12PJ Vogt?

  Ah, of course.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  And of course, by fee, that agent means that we need to pay money to do an interview at the butler. And at Search Engine, I think most journalists in the US, we don't pay for information, meaning we don't pay sources to talk to us?

• 41:24PJ Vogt?

  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. But 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.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  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 UK is that reporters are a bit more comfortable offering sources, like, some compensation for information. Like, I found some poll data saying that 53% of reporters in the UK believe paying people for confidential information is justified on occasion, compared to 5% of journalists in the US.

• 42:23PJ Vogt?

  Well, one can't help but notice that it's, um, 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.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  And on the other, like, this is, this is also just a guy who has sustained an entire career off of selling the information that he does have. So 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.

• 43:08PJ Vogt?

  Chapter six, American tourists in London.

• 43:12PJ Vogt?

  So we weren't going there to report this story, per se. We were going there for another commitment. Like, Shojin had been invited to speak at a podcast conference, but we'd said yes because we knew that Buckingham Palace was in England.

• 43:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 43:39PJ Vogt?

  Derek, is that, what is that little tan building to the right of the palace?

• 43:44Speaker 06

  I don't think that's the swimming pool.

• 43:46PJ Vogt?

  Oh, Derek.

• 43:47Speaker 06

  But 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, I suppose we'll get more information.

• 43:59PJ Vogt?

  But that's not the pool.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  No, well, the, the pool has glass on the outside.

• 44:02PJ Vogt?

  Oh, right, this looks a little more mausoleum-y.

• 44:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. We show up, there is a massive crowd, there's like a royal marching band, like, playing brass instruments as we walk by.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  But 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 in a month when the palace was closed to tourists, which meant for us that... We weren't gonna be able to get inside of the palace.

• 44:34PJ Vogt?

  Okay, we're passing around sort of, would you say this is the back of Buckingham Palace?

• 44:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 44:57PJ Vogt?

  From the building that supposedly has a swimming pool in it.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  Google Maps is giving me a route.

• 45:03PJ Vogt?

  You'll be very bloody by the time you're there. There's also security.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  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 like 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.

• 45:23PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah, on the other side of the wall, I'm sure life's great.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  People are swimming, hanging out.

• 45:30PJ Vogt?

  What did you just hear? Somebody yell with a British accent, cannonball?

• 45:35Speaker 06

  So that was attempt number one, which was in May. But honestly, I personally left feeling not that disheartened because I knew I was gonna 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 gonna be over there.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Welcome to Buckingham Palace. Please pay attention whilst we give you some useful information so you can make the most of your visit.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  And I show back up.

• 46:18PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  My second time at Buckingham Palace in like two months. And the first tour I had booked was like the actual inside of the palace, like as much of the interiors that they'll show to visitors. And so I walk up the side entrance and I go through what's pretty much airport-style security.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  Before you pass through our airport-style security, please remove anything metal or electronic. From your pockets.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  There's metal detectors, there's bag screeners, there's an announcement that no photos will be allowed inside the palace. But 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.

• 47:22PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 06

  And so you get shuffled along from there into what they call the grand hall, which is exactly what it sounds like. And the tour more or less proceeds as you would expect. I mean, you're going through the staterooms, 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's book.

• 47:51PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, as you're describing it, I was like, this is exactly my mental image of it. And then I remembered like, yes, you have a mental image because you've liked the 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?

• 48:09Speaker 06

  I definitely thought on multiple occasions, like, I think I can outrun some of these guys.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  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.

• 48:31Speaker 06

  So I'm kind of like shuffling somewhat quickly through this first tour because...

• 48:37Speaker 06

  The second tour is in the back 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. And I'm about to start the garden tour, which, you won't believe, happens to start directly in front of the swimming pool.

• 49:03PJ Vogt?

  Seriously? So couldn't you, like, see through the windows?

• 49:05Speaker 06

  I was, 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.

• 49:13PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 49:15Speaker 06

  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.

• 49:28Speaker 06

  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 months.

• 49:37PJ Vogt?

  That's so frustrating.

• 49:38Speaker 06

  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."

• 49:55PJ Vogt?

  What?

• 49:55Speaker 06

  "The new king has actually turned down the temperature a few degrees, so I'm swimming in it less, but there's the poolhouse 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." But 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?"

• 50:30PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  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. There'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.

• 50:53PJ Vogt?

  Wait, four of us have to swim in it at the same time in case there's accidents?

• 50:57Speaker 06

  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.

• 51:08PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 51:09Speaker 06

  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. I feel like we'd done that. And so I talked to Shruti 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.

• 51:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, the world we understand is fundamentally unknowable, but you want to think that like some things could be known.

• 51:45Speaker 06

  So I went back to LinkedIn.

• 51:47PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 51:48Speaker 06

  And this time, instead of just searching for the keywords Buckingham Palace and swimming pool, I searched for the keywords Buckingham Palace and podcast.

• 51:56PJ Vogt?

  What?

• 51:57Speaker 06

  And it turns out there's one former employee of Buckingham Palace who also has a podcast.

• 52:03PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  Of course, the suspect we were looking for the whole time was another podcaster.

• 52:21PJ Vogt?

  The worst kind of criminal there is.

• 52:22Speaker 06

  So we're going to talk to him tomorrow.

• 52:31PJ Vogt?

  Chapter seven, Secrets of the Palace.

• 52:37PJ Vogt?

  Hello. 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 so exciting. Um, 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 about the sounds that you go really deep on really niche topics. I had a look at some and listened 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 Rithik Karia, host of the podcast Football For Sale, which is actually about soccer, and also a former employee of the Royal Household. What 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.

• 53:21PJ Vogt?

  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. And 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, we literally went on Google search, summer jobs in London.

• 54:04PJ Vogt?

  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. So 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.

• 54:47PJ Vogt?

  And you go and work in this shop in the garden for three months. And 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-

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Background and people still want to talk to you about it when they're in the shop.

• 55:01PJ Vogt?

  And did it feel like, you know, you described the title as unglamorous. I've worked in retail jobs before it 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?

• 55:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 55:31PJ Vogt?

  Supermarket.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, supermarket. And I was doing like fruit and veg. So I was doing food stuff. And 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 like hold over my family members a lot, which is quite fun.

• 55:53PJ Vogt?

  And when you started working there, like, did anyone ever give you like 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?

• 56:07Speaker 04

  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. So 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. And 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 worked 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. But 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.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 57:06PJ Vogt?

  And what time period was this?

• 57:07Speaker 04

  This was 2019.

• 57:09PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  When I worked there.

• 57:10PJ Vogt?

  You're talking to the most royals dumb person, perhaps in North America. But, but okay, but there was an ongoing scandal that everybody but me knows about.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was an ongoing scandal about a man in America who owned an island and one of the particular British royals.

• 57:26PJ Vogt?

  Oh, a man who owned an island. Okay, I do know that one.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:30PJ Vogt?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:33PJ Vogt?

  In case you're as slow as I am, this was a scandal that involved a man whose name rhymes with Ephraim Jepstein.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 57:50PJ Vogt?

  You're like one of the guards with the fuzzy hats.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could do that, but you'd just be like, nothing, and you just move on. Because what people will do is they will say, a royal spokesperson said this.

• 58:01PJ Vogt?

  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 royal tea 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.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the risk that you're playing with.

• 58:26PJ Vogt?

  It made sense that even an employee as junior as Rithik 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. An easy way to make a living. Hence these rules. But Rithik 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.

• 59:06PJ Vogt?

  What can you tell me about the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace?

• 59:10Speaker 04

  The actual question?

• 59:11PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, it's weird, like, there is one.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Like, I think that's

• 59:21PJ Vogt?

  The main thing you like, you wouldn't have thought about it. Oh, I've thought about it. Have you? 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 it's, 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. We're changing rooms and a gym attached to it in a building.

• 1:00:03PJ Vogt?

  It 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 imagine that as a royal pool, that sometimes the family allowed their staff to swim in. Rithik 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.

• 1:00:34PJ Vogt?

  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. And are people swimming like on a day where you walk in or they're just like, there's, so you're saying? Yeah. 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? We fought a war for diving board.

• 1:01:17PJ Vogt?

  You know, there's like little, like springy, you're talking about like those 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 at the pool, which would make sense because the gym, is that true? Yeah, yeah. And what, tell me about the gym. Uh, it's just, again, it's just, it's pretty, it's a government-funded gym. It's, 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, 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. Yes.

• 1:02:02PJ Vogt?

  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'd 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.

• 1:02:47PJ Vogt?

  Like, if you, if you wanted to fancy gym, I'd go down to the Equinox or something. Yeah, we have Equinox here. Yeah, if you, if you wanted a fancy gym, go there. 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.

• 1:03:19PJ Vogt?

  The 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 learn, for instance, that if we ask a question and get silence in return, we may have crossed the line and that we should consider retreat. A 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, OK, here's my, I think this is my last question for you. I still feel like one thing I do not entirely understand. Definitely.

• 1:04:03PJ Vogt?

  Many parts of Buckingham Palace are, you know, 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? Like, there are no pictures of it online. So there's very strict rules about pictures and people taking pictures. Like, 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. You're not allowed to record something funny that happens at lunch with your colleagues. You're not allowed to, like, pick up a FaceTime call. So that's probably the reason why, I'd say.

• 1:04:47PJ Vogt?

  Like, I think part of it is like, 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 at. Yeah, OK, there's not really a nice answer here. I will go back to my time in the palace. And 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, I think this is where it gets a bit like funny, where, where you guys may not take this.

• 1:05:32PJ Vogt?

  Well, there is a level of like, you assume that they have a level of like superiority. I say, uh, 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's, 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.

• 1:06:15PJ Vogt?

  Cause I think the British are very protective, or even if you don't like them, a lot of British people are very protective about conversations of the royals should only occur between British people.

• 1:06:30PJ Vogt?

  So 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.

• 1:07:05PJ Vogt?

  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. America 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?

• 1:07:29PJ Vogt?

  I 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 actually 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.

• 1:08:03PJ Vogt?

  That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed what you heard, if you enjoyed anything you've heard recently on our show, if we kept you company, if we gave you something to talk about at a dinner party, please consider signing up to be a paid member to support our work. You can get a subscription 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 Vought, and Truthy Pinamaneni. 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 Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Mark

• 1:08:48PJ Vogt?

  Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode.