Who is Lauren? Meghan Markle reveals identity of hero nanny who saved son Archie from bedroom fire
LONDON, ENGLAND: In the first episode of her long-awaited Spotify podcast 'Archetypes', Meghan Markle in conversation with Serena Williams revealed details about her son's caregiver for the first time. The Duchess of Sussex, 41, recalled how Archie, now three, barely escaped a fire in his bedroom during the Sussexes' royal tour to South Africa in autumn 2019.
Meghan expressed her distress in the episode, which aired on Tuesday, August 23, about the near-miss accident. She received the news shortly after delivering an empowering speech to girls in Cape Town's Nyanga township. She spoke about traveling back to see Archie and then having to leave him for another official engagement. When recalling the incident, she described Archie's then-nanny, Lauren, a Zimbabwean who liked to tie him on her back with a mud cloth as "amazing."
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Meghan went on to say that Lauren stayed with the family until they left for Canada, which was before the Duchess and Prince Harry relocated to the United States after stepping down from their roles in the royal family. It comes after Harry and Meghan were ''forced to let go'' of one of Archie's night nurses during her second shift with the couple ''for being unprofessional,'' according to their 2020 memoir 'Finding Freedom'.
Speaking on her podcast, the Duchess said, ''There was this moment where I'm standing on a tree stump and I'm giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there's been a fire at the residence. 'What?' 'There's been a fire in the baby's room.''' ''...We get back, our amazing nanny, Lauren, who we'd had all the way until, um, in Canada here. Lauren was in floods of tears. She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap and she just said, 'You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.'"
''And she was from Zimbabwe and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, 'let me just bring him with me before I put him down', in that amount of time that she went downstairs... the heater in the nursery caught on fire." Meghan added, ''Everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement. I said, 'This doesn't make any sense.'"
The Sussexes had dropped their young son off at the housing unit where they were staying after traveling in for their official tour in 2019, with the couple then leaving to begin their royal visit with their first engagement. Meghan recalled, ''There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguisher. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.'' The duchess added, ''We had to leave our baby... and even though we were being moved into another place afterward, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.''
Meghan was seen holding a four-month-old Archie as she exited the plane with Harry, and keen royal observers noted that their nanny could be seen in the background of one of the photos. This was only the second time their nanny had been spotted, following a month earlier when she was seen accompanying Harry and Meghan to Sir Elton John's home in the south of France, also dressed in an unobtrusive black outfit.
The nanny's time with the family, however, was "brief," according to the authors, who wrote, ''Meghan and Harry felt they were forced to let the nurse go in the middle of her second night of work for being unprofessional.''