Carole Cutner got her dream assignment — to take photographs of King Charles, then aged 25 — because of a chance meeting at her daughter Louise’s Jewish school. It led to several photoshoots and a lifelong friendship with the future monarch.

“In 1978, I was on the parents’ committee of Carmel College when we were told Prince Charles had agreed to open the boarding school’s new refectory,” Carole, now 87, told the JC at her central London flat. “The governors didn’t even know I was a photographer, but I suggested we needed photos of him.”

After photographing the event, Carole sat down to dinner alongside the King’s personal private secretary, Squadron Leader David Checketts. “I told him, ‘The Prince is far better-looking than all previous photos I had seen’. He asked if I would be interested in doing portraits of ‘the young man’,” she told the JC. “He then scribbled a phone number on his name card.”

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Striking: One of Carole’s portraits of Charles

When Carole rang the number after the weekend, a voice answered: “Buckingham Palace”. She was summoned to the future King’s office to display her portfolio, and a few days later she was told that Charles himself approved.

“I had to tell the Prince’s secretary that I was terrified. He assured me all visitors to the Royals felt the same, but the Royals were experts at putting their visitors at ease.” That is what Carole found.

“I had asked in advance what to call him. ‘Sir’, I was told. But I said that term reminded me of my school headmaster, and I asked to call him just Prince Charles. And that’s what I did.”

Carole says she found herself put at ease almost immediately. The then-Prince was witty and accommodating. “I asked him if we could do the shoot outside in the palace gardens. I used just one camera, a Hasselblad, no lights, and I asked him to stand next to a tree.”

Her photographs were selected by the palace to be used round the world on the future monarch’s 26th birthday. One picture made it on the front cover of Time magazine — which paid Carole £80.

Charles wearing a kippa at Cornwall College With the principal Jeremy Rosen

Charles wearing a kippah at Carmel College in the first photo Carole took of him

The future King soon ordered another shoot, this time inside the palace. Again, he agreed to only natural light, in black and white.

Then came a third shoot, in military uniform. Paris Match used one on its front cover, showing the then-Prince in a huge bearskin hat as colonel-in-chief in the Welsh Royal Guards.

They have kept in close touch ever since. “I send him a birthday card each year. And I’ve been getting a Christmas card, with his personal message, every year since 1978. He’s also hand-written me a number of letters, which are of course confidential.

“We like each other. We laughed together. And his cards and notes are full of humour and wit.”

Carole also photographed Charles’s mentor, his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, at his home in Hampshire. She, Mountbatten and Charles had an informal dinner, listening to the Goon Show on the radio, she recalls.

Carole, who grew up in Leeds, remains “very proud” of her Jewish heritage. “I’m fit, thanks to golf and good genes,” she said. “One thing I’m sure of: Charles’s career is going to go from strength to strength. He will be a wonderful, magnificent king. You’ll see.”