He doted on his granny and was writing to her from the age of 5.

The careful, spidery handwriting, guided by faint pencil lines, is disclosed today in a letter that was written by Prince Charles – long before he was Prince of Wales – to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1954, accompanied by an explosion of multicoloured kisses.

The Prince and his younger sister, Princess Anne, were with their parents on the maiden voyage of the Royal Yacht Britannia when they were briefly joined by the Queen Mother. Most mothers press their offspring to write solicitously to their grandparents, and Charles dutifully asks his grandmother if she had enjoyed her visit.

It is brief, but a note from a grandson who has only recently learnt to write is worth a million times more to a granny than silence.

The letter will appear as one of 270 photographs in a book to be published by the Royal Collection to mark the Prince’s 60th birthday in November. The collection spans his official and personal life from early childhood through university days, investiture as Prince of Wales, life with Diana, Prince of Wales, the birth of his sons, right up to marriage to the Duchess of Cornwall.

Images of his early childhood feature strongly, including some of his favourite toys. One picture shows a trolley of wooden bricks decorated with the words “Prince Charles Express”, and another portrays his beloved Sunbeam Coupé pedal car, which he loved driving up and down the Grand Corridor at Windsor. The car is still there – royal children tend not to wreck their toys, and royals have the space to store them. Nor do they move house much, the average family’s incentive for a clearout.

Many of the pictures are familiar, but some are hitherto unseen, like that of Charles and Anne washing a liferaft on board Britannia during that same 1954 maiden voyage touring Commonwealth countries, and one of the Prince and his sister, aged 5 and 3 respectively, posing by a height marker just as ordinary children do.

They have been drawn from the Royal Archives at Windsor, the Royal Photograph Collection and the Prince’s personal collection, and will be published to coincide with an exhibition of memorabilia associated with the Prince to be staged at Windsor Castle on May 16-22.

Woven through the book are some of the Prince’s favourite paintings from the Royal Collection, the largest assemblage of art in the world outside state collections. Works by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Winterhalter, Landseer and Zoffany are accompanied by the Prince’s personal view of the chosen artists.

It was Granny who encouraged the Prince to a love of art, seeing he had a sensitive side to his nature. He has since become a keen watercolourist, and some of his works are in the book.

In 1985 the Prince reintroduced the practice of taking an artist on his overseas tours, and a number of the resulting works are also included.

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