NEED TO KNOW

  • Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh is a key player in the royal family despite little fanfare surrounding most of her engagements
  • A source reveals how Prince Edward’s wife, who turned 61 on Jan. 20, quietly goes about her royal duties
  • “She is able to find a connection with people across cultures and languages and background,” says a staffer

When Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh headed out to see the air ambulance, she brought back painful memories of an intensely difficult moment in her life.

In 2001, she was airlifted by the emergency teams from Thames Valley Air Ambulance to the hospital for surgery after suffering from an ectopic pregnancy, which occurs when a fertilized egg grows outside the main cavity of the womb. It can be life-threatening.

Happily, she and her husband, Prince Edward, went on to have two children: Lady Louise Windsor, in 2003, and James, Earl of Wessex, in 2007.

The visit on Jan. 15 underlined the quietly effective, low-fanfare manner in which Sophie, who turned 61 on Jan. 20, goes about her public life.  

Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh in Sept. 2020.
Tim Rooke/Shutterstock

No time underlined perhaps that more than when, during the COVID pandemic six years ago, Sophie helped out at the kitchens of hospitals to provide workers struggling in the early weeks of the outbreak. The organization she helped, Meal Force, delivered 59,000 meals a week to 16 different hospitals around the greater London area.

Calling her legacy “very powerful,” a source who was with her during those weeks in early 2020 told PEOPLE, “If a member of the royal family comes and helps in a kitchen at a time like this, it gives the same kind of reflection as the legacy the [late Queen Elizabeth] left when she was driving ambulances during the war.”

“Sophie’s set a great example and has literally been involved in everything that goes on in the kitchen so the nurses can eat.”

The source added, “When she leaves our kitchens, she generally then goes on to do more projects in different hospitals. Yesterday, she was packing bags in a hospital in Hampshire. She just pops up in different places and just does things. There’s a magic about what she does and we all applaud that.”

Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh helping out at the Lighthouse community hub in Woking, U.K. in Dec. 2021.

Max Mumby/Indigo – Pool/Getty

As she has become one of the royal family’s and U.K.’s most effective humanitarian ambassadors across the world, her roles and duties are often inspired by her own personal interest or experience, like supporting the air ambulance. Moreover, when her daughter Lady Louise Windsor was born about a month early and weighing just 4lb 9oz, Sophie lost several pints of blood in the emergency. She was separated from Louise in the first days, as her baby was taken to another hospital, 35 miles away, for special treatment.

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Lady Louise was also born with esotropia, a condition in which both eyes point forward. Sophie has championed charities that combat sight defects and conditions around the world.  

Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh in Mumbai, India in May 2019.

Chirag Wakaskar/Getty 

A staffer who has traveled with her on those trips said, “She is able to find a connection with people across cultures and languages and background. I think of it as scattering magic dust.”

In India, in 2019, “She spoke very openly about her own experience as a mother of a premature child,” a staffer who traveled with Sophie tells PEOPLE. “She understood why some women were quite traumatized by the experience. That connection was very beautiful.”