39. Poor Security Made Stalking Queen Victoria Remarkably Easy
Britain’s royal household bureaucracy was a mishmash of inefficiency, ineptness, and outright incompetence. When Victoria once asked a servant for a fire, she was told no can do: his job was to arrange and prepare the wood and coal for a fire, while a separate department was responsible for actually lighting it. In another example, cleaning palace windows was divided between two departments, one for cleaning the outside, and another for the inside.
Security was also inept and inefficient, with no single person in overall charge of safeguarding the royal palaces. Buckingham Palace, for example, had low walls topped with tree branches, and lax guards. As a result, drunks and the homeless were often found sleeping in the garden, propped up against the inner wall or laid out beneath the trees. Less innocent interlopers, such as stalkers, faced little difficulty in progressing past the garden, and into the royal palace.
