Terry Hutt, fervent supporter of the Royal family known as ‘Union Jack Man’

Terry Hutt, who has died aged 91, was a retired carpenter, serial campaigner and ardent monarchist, nicknamed “The Union Jack Man” by the late Queen, whom he met more than 100 times.

Perhaps the most flamboyant and telegenic supporter of the Royal family of recent decades, Hutt became a fixture in the press for his willingness to spend multiple nights encamped on pavements with his Thermos to be in pole position at any pageants, walkabouts or hospital appearances, dressed head to toe in Union Jacks, and often armed with his Union Jack umbrella as well. The Telegraph once called him “the human equivalent of the ravens at the Tower”.

His fame as the eminence grise of hardcore royalists spread as far afield as Mexico; a tailored Union Jack suit was a present from admirers in Holland.

In 2013 he spent nearly two weeks encamped on a bench outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, before the birth of Prince George, being fed tea and porridge by the hospital staff. As a child of the Blitz and an Army veteran, “sleeping on the streets is nothing for me,” he observed.

He slept rough on his 80th birthday while awaiting the arrival of Princess Charlotte, and was given a chocolate cake by Prince William and Princess Catherine. For Prince Louis, he spent a record 15 nights on the bench. “We need babies to keep the family going as the more of them there are, the better it will be,” he declared.

He felt a particular affinity with Diana, Princess of Wales, whom he had met under a bridge when he was helping the homeless. His greatest affection, however, was reserved for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who had won his heart when she and George VI visited Hornsey Rise in north London in 1940, and reassured the four-year-old Terry Hutt, whose family’s house had been flattened, that they were not going to leave the country. “Churchill and people like that already had a plane waiting for them, but they didn’t,” he recalled. “Times were really hard then, and that went a long way. She was my Queen.”

In later life, the Queen Mother invited Hutt to her birthday parties. On what would have been her 103rd birthday, he left flowers outside Clarence House. The then Prince Charles waved and sent out his chief treasurer with the message: “Thank you for all you do. We are upstairs but we know why you are here.”

The youngest of 12, Terence Hutt was born in north London on April 30 1935, the son of Arthur, a horse-and-cart driver, and his wife Ann, who went blind. Terry was evacuated to Wales for the rest of the war, and did not see his father for six years. “I felt I wasn’t wanted,” he recalled. “I didn’t recognise my father when I saw him again.”

This painful separation later spurred him to campaign for Fathers4Justice, one of a litany of causes which enjoyed his full-blooded support and extensive repertoire of sandwich boards, badges and comic outfits.

Another passion was the NHS, after Hutt, aged 48, had undergone emergency open-heart surgery, followed by three further bypasses. By then a veteran of the Royal Ordnance Corps, he was forced to take early retirement as a joiner, and used his spare time to demonstrate against the closures of hospitals, often dressed as a Tudor doctor, and on one occasion successfully aimed an egg at the Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley.

On another occasion, he dug a pit in Michael Heseltine’s Northamptonshire arboretum to protest against open-cast mining. His various campaigns found him crawling under moving buses, climbing trees on Whitehall, blocking the Newbury bypass, barricading himself in Manchester City’s boardroom and declaring himself the “number one fan” of Ken Livingstone.

Having settled at Waltham Abbey in Essex, Hutt dedicated himself to pensioners and the disabled, both locally and nationally, and lobbied tirelessly for free bus travel and against the imposition of VAT on winter fuel and council tax rises. At Christmas he delivered food to the lonely and needy, dressed as Santa Claus.​

“Life is like the Army – it’s comradeship and caring about each other that really matters,” he said.

In his final years he moved to Weston-super-Mare, where his roomful of royal souvenirs had to be housed in an overflow caravan.

He was married for more than 50 years to Joy, with whom he had a son, David, and a daughter, Tracey; two other sons were lost in infancy.

Terry Hutt, born April 30 1935, died May 9 2026​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]