Royal filled pauses

In a comment on "Yair" (2/14/2025), Philip Taylor asserted that he routinely pronounces the orthographic "r" in the typical British filled-pause spelling "er":

« some Americans adopt a mistaken spelling pronunciation, rendering "er" with a final [r] » — well, speaking as a Briton, my "er" pauses, if prolonged, also end with an phoneme, although where exactly in the mouth I produce it I cannot be sure. Certainly it is totally unlike the trilled/r/ with which I might say "Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run run run", but I think that it might be fairly close to the phoneme in my Maigret or Rien de rien.

If Philip actually trills the /r/'s in "Run, rabbit, run", and he's not from Scotland, this is a big dialectological surprise. And it's equally unexpected if he produces something like a French uvular /r/ at the end of his filled pauses. More likely, this is an extreme example of why sociolinguists are skeptical of how people think they talk.

Still, it's worth a bit of time to confirm the OED's r-less assertion (audio) about British filled-pause pronunciation. This would be a big task, overall,  given the wide range of British speech across geographical, social, ethnic, and temporal variables, so I thought I'd start with the Royal family. (And I'll also end there, unless Philip's peculiar perceptions return in another form…)

The Good, The Bad & The Rugby has a 2023 interview with "The Prince of Wales, The Princess of Wales, & The Princess Royal at Windsor Castle". It's 50 minutes long, so there's plenty of time for filled pauses.

Here's the first example from Princess Anne, at around 2:16, with a bit of the context:

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And by itself (with a bit of the /t/ from the preceding "but"):

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Here are four of her filled pauses (leaving out the /m/-final versions), concatenated:

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Here's the first example from Prince William, at about 4:31:

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By itself:

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And four of his filled pauses, concatenated:

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The vowel quality of the Royal filled pauses seems somewhat higher and fronter than typical American versions, though I don't have time this morning to quantify that impression. But it's clear that the Royal's filled pauses have no final rhotic sounds, of whatever phonetic variety.