Surprise royal launches world record marathon rowing bid around British Isles

The 26th in line to the throne is the son of Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Chatto, and the artist Daniel Chatto. Along with three friends, Charles Bromhead, Oli Dawe-Lane and Frasier Cutt, the junior royal is getting ready to race around the entire British coastline non-stop in a rowing boat. The young friends hope to set a new world record for circumnavigating the British Isles and raise £150,000 for their charity.

They will set of from Tower Bridge on June 1 and row all day and all night in an attempt to complete their journey.

Only four boats have ever successfully finished the course, with the last one to do so taking 27 days.

Arthur and his friends are up for the challenge, training hard on nearby rivers in Edinburgh.

“We’ve all been trying our best to get up to standard”, Mr Dawe-Lane told the Daily Telegraph.

“Arthur drove four hours just to find a rowing machine to put in his room.”

The rowers are undaunted by the huge physical challenge posed by the event, insisting they are out to win.

Mr Bromhead said: “We have no intention of losing, put it that way.

“A few days in, it might become a case of either survival or winning.

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“But we’re physically training to be competitive with the other team.”

The course is not without its dangers, as the team readily acknowledge.

Charles Bromhead explained: ““Where do you start? The shipping lanes, especially in the Channel, are going to be quite bad.

“The first one will be Camber, then Lulworth, then a few a bit further down, there’s a missile firing range just on the edge of the Lake District.

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“There’ll be a lot of dynamic risk-assessing.”

However, the Queen’s great-nephew is more concerned about the possibility of capsizing, admitting to being nervous about going overboard.

He said: “I’d probably say I was worried about capsizing.

“But we should be harnessed in, and it is a self-righting boat, so in theory if we do capsize, we should flip back around.”

The young royal regularly takes photos of the team in training, posting the pictures to his army of 130,000 followers on Instagram.

The team still need to raise sponsorship to ensure they have the funds to enter the race.

Arthur, a former pageboy to the Queen, is a keen fan of TV series The Crown and is the first royal to publicly admit it.

He said: “Yes, I have watched it. I guess it’s only an interpretation.

“So I just kind of remember what they’re actually like and don’t let the TV persona mar my judgment of any of them.”