HRH THE PRINCESS OF WALES
1961-1997
Diana, Princess of Wales, died August 31st at 4am Paris time
after a car crash in Paris aged 36. She was born at Park House,
Sandringham, on July 1, 1961.
Not since the heyday of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had
there been an international icon to match Diana, Princess of
Wales. Her picture on the cover of magazines was enough to
guarantee sales worldwide, and no personality in history was
ever the subject of more unremitting attention on the part of
the paparazzi. In that sense, the fact that she should have met
her death with her new boyfriend Dodi Fayed while
apparently seeking to escape a motorcycle pursuit by
photographers carries its own cruel irony along with it.
In an age when stars have become drabber and more
ordinary, she achieved unrivalled glamour and respect. She
developed from being a relatively unprepossessing
kindergarten teacher into a stylish and beautiful young
woman, always well dressed, and beloved for her gentle and
loving nature.
The most successful princesses in history have been those
who loved children and cared for the sick. The Princess
enjoyed a natural affinity with both children and the sick. She
devoted much energy to their care, in a way entirely in tune
with the age. Her warmth and kindness found many outlets,
particularly in regard to those struck down with HIV. She
was spontaneous in manner, happily ignoring royal protocol
to bestow a kiss on a child in the crowd, and writing letters
to members of the public signed "love Diana".
Almost from the day she emerged into public life, the British
people took her to their hearts. She brought to the Royal
Family not only her very English beauty, but the enthusiasm
of youth, combined with an innate dignity and a
good-natured sense of humour.
She was not an intellectual: neither a good passer of exams
nor a noted reader. But she possessed a canny and
straightforward form of common sense. She listened and she
learnt, and whereas she may have found her schooldays
boring, she relished her role as Princess of Wales. She loved
fashion and dancing, and pop stars and groups such as Phil
Collins and Spandau Ballet. In the early years of her
marriage she was as excited at meeting stars like Elizabeth
Taylor as they were to meet her.
Though she was born into the far from stimulating world of
the conventional upper-class girl, reared in the counties of
Norfolk and Northamptonshire and veering in youth towards
the world of the "Sloane Ranger", her character had great
possibilities for development, and develop she did, into a
figure of international importance, confident of her place on
the world stage.
She was given little support, it would seem, by her own
family or that into which she married. Perhaps one of the
reasons that the British public loved her as they did was that
they always feared for her, and were concerned that she
might be unhappy, while admiring her for being a fighter who
refused to give up in the face of adversity.
The world's press loved her, too. Newspapers built her up
into the epitome of a fairy-tale princess. Occasionally they
were fickle and turned on their creation, but it was generally
more comfortable to let the world love her, and their
onslaughts were accordingly short-lived. The press interest
was relentless, however, and it began long before the
engagement was in any sense firm. After her marriage, her
every movement, her every outfit, her every mood, was the
excuse for many column inches of press comment. She was
a natural joy for photographers, being both photogenic and
having an innate understanding of the needs of journalists.
Her face could sell a million copies of any publication, and
both they and she knew it. She adorned many a magazine
cover by editor's choice, and once, memorably, that of
Vogue by her own wish.
In this great love for a public figure there was bound to lurk
danger. When she flourished the press supported her, but
when life was dark it deserted her. In the summer of 1992,
the forthcoming publication of a biography by Andrew
Morton, a journalist from the lower echelons of the trade,
caught the attention of Andrew Neil, the Editor of The
Sunday Times. Several weeks of serialisation damaging to
the monarchy followed. Despite complaints from the Press
Council and pleas from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the
campaign raged on. It could be seen as a major destructive
force in the Princess's life.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was born at Park House,
Sandringham, as the Hon Diana Frances Spencer. She was
the third and youngest daughter of Viscount Althorp (later
the 8th Earl Spencer, who died in 1992), and his first wife,
the Hon Frances Roche (later married for some years to the
wallpaper heir, Peter Shand-Kydd). She became Lady
Diana Spencer on the death of her grandfather in 1975.
Her Spencer forebears had been sheep farmers in
Warwickshire, who settled at Althorp, Northamptonshire, in
1506. Cousins of the Spencer-Churchills, they included
many connoisseurs and patrons of the arts. Having inherited
a considerable fortune from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,
they were able to spend large sums on antiquities, paintings
and sculpture.
For many generations they served their Sovereigns, and the
tradition continued. The Princess's father was equerry to
King George VI and to the present Queen. Both her
grandmothers, the Countess Spencer and Ruth Lady Fermoy
were close members of the court of Queen Elizabeth the
Queen Mother, as were no fewer than four Spencer
great-aunts. To her two sons, the Princess of Wales passed
strong physical Spencer traits, considerably diluting the
Hanoverian strain in the Royal Family.
While the Princess's paternal ancestors were representative
of the Whig oligarchy of the 18th century, she also
descended through several lines from the Stuart Kings
Charles II and James II, who were not ancestors of the
Prince of Wales. Other paternal forebears included the great
Duke of Marlborough, Sir Robert Walpole, the Marquess of
Anglesey (who lost a leg at Waterloo), and the Earl of
Lucan, of Balaclava fame. On her mother's side there was
Irish and Scottish blood, with a sprinkling of pioneer New
England stock. Her closest relationship to the Prince of
Wales was that of seventh cousin once removed, through
their common descent from the 3rd Duke of Devonshire.
The Princess was educated at Riddlesworth Hall in Norfolk,
and then at West Heath, a boarding school in Kent. She
achieved no O-level passes. Later she attended a finishing
school, the Institut Alpin Videmanette at Rougemont in
Switzerland, for six weeks. Her childhood was somewhat
unsettled and unhappy because of the separation of her
parents when she was six, and their divorce in 1969. She
had more natural affinity with her father than with her mother.
During the period after leaving school, the Princess worked
as a nanny, a babysitter and a skivvy. She attended a
cookery course in September 1978, and soon after this her
father collapsed with a grave cerebral haemorrhage, from
which it took him months to recover. In 1979 she worked
briefly as a student teacher at Miss Vacani's dance studios.
Later she was invited by friends to help at the Young
England Kindergarten in Pimlico, where she was popular
with the children. She worked at the kindergarten three days
a week and at other times she looked after a small American
boy.
In London the Princess shared a flat at Coleherne Court,
Earls Court, with three girlfriends. They found her a kind and
thoughtful flatmate, keen on housework and evenings in front
of the television, a lover of ballet, opera and cinema. She
loved to dance and sometimes they returned to find her
dancing happily around the flat. At the time of the
pre-wedding press siege, these girls were to prove staunchly
loyal allies. Fortunately, they were content to spend hours in
each other's company. Years later, one of them, Mrs William
Bartholomew, the former Carolyn Pride, was a source for
the Morton biography of the Princess.
The Prince and Princess of Wales claimed to have met in a
ploughed field at Althorp where Prince Charles was staying
as a guest of Lady Sarah Spencer, the Princess's elder sister,
in November 1977. The accepted version of the story is that
Prince Charles and Lady Sarah were romantically involved,
though not deeply so. The younger sister fell in love with
everything about the Prince, was keen to be Princess of
Wales, and saw in him a challenge.
She knew from an early age that she would have to tread
carefully, and she never put a foot wrong. It was not until the
late summer of 1980 that Lady Diana Spencer's name came
to the attention of the world. The Prince of Wales was nearly
32 and the subject of his eventual marriage had been of
consuming interest to the media for nearly a decade. Nor
had he helped his difficulty by pronouncing that he thought
30 a good age at which to marry. As November 1978
loomed, the pressure increased. But he remained a bachelor,
and there were times when he looked a less than happy man.
Lady Diana's appearance on the scene refocused press
attention on the Prince's bachelor state. While a discreet and
low-key courtship was executed in private, Lady Diana was
pursued to and from work by determined cameramen and
reporters and had to resort to complicated manoeuvres to
rescue the last vestiges of her privacy. Her subtle handling of
the press earned her not only universal respect but the real
affection of these normally hard-hearted men. At one point
after she had broken down in tears, a note of apology was
placed under her windscreen wiper. But the press pursuit
persisted to such an extent that Lady Diana's mother wrote a
letter of appeal to The Times. Later the Queen was obliged
to complain to newspaper editors through her press
secretary. The Prince proposed early in February 1981.
The engagement was announced on February 24, after
which Lady Diana was better protected. From that day on
she was surrounded by what she described as "a mass of
smiling faces". Indeed the engagement was greeted with
universal approval though the Princess herself found her
immediate pre-marriage days in Buckingham Palace both
tense and lonely.
The Royal Wedding took place in St Paul's Cathedral on
July 29, 1981, by the shared wish of both bride and groom.
Prince Charles ensured that it was a "marvellous, musical,
emotional experience", with three orchestras playing and Kiri
te Kanawa (soon afterwards appointed a Dame) and the
Bach Choir singing. Lady Diana chose her favourite school
hymn, I vow to thee my Country.
Many heads of state attended, including nearly all the
crowned heads of Europe, President Mitterrand of France,
and Mrs Nancy Reagan, wife of the then President of the
United States. The King of Tonga required a special chair to
be built to support his mighty frame. A last-minute absentee
was King Juan Carlos of Spain, because of the decision of
the Prince and Princess to embark on the Royal Yacht
Britannia at Gibraltar. The wedding day was such that for a
brief while it seemed that all strife was set aside, the sun
blazed richly and at the end of it, the police thanked the
public for their vigilance, and the public praised the police,
and, as one commentator put it, "the world was a friendlier
and easier place for everyone".
The honeymoon was spent first at Broadlands, the home of
Lord and Lady Romsey, and a favoured retreat of the Prince
when he had stayed there with the late Lord Mountbatten in
his youth. Then they cruised on Britannia in the
Mediterranean. A long holiday at Balmoral followed.
Returning to London in October, the Prince and Princess
took up residence at Kensington Palace and at Highgrove
House in Gloucestershire. These were their homes for the
next 11 years. Their first royal engagement was a 400-mile
tour of Wales, the first such visit of a Princess of Wales for
113 years. The tour included a visit to Caernarfon Castle
where the Prince had been invested in 1969. The Princess of
Wales was given the Freedom of Cardiff, made her first
public speech and spoke a few words of Welsh. Despite the
ever-present threat of incendiary devices, the tour was a
resounding success.
The Princess made an immediate impact on the world of
fashion. The British fashion industry, long in a precarious
state, was given a welcome boost by her arrival. Her style
was fresh, attractive and original. She became the
personification of current trends in British fashion, with
felicitous results for the trade.
The Princess soon revealed a penchant for outfits of
considerable glamour. On her first outing with her fiancé, she
had arrived at Goldsmiths' Hall in a décolleté black taffeta
dress, a considerable contrast to her formerly discreet image,
which caused the octogenarian Lady Diana Cooper to joke:
"Wasn't that a mighty feast to set before a King?" Her
wedding dress with its lavish detail and lengthy train matched
the magnificence of St Paul's Cathedral and her going away
outfit was chic and stylish. The fair fringe she favoured early
in the marriage was widely copied for a time.
Very soon the Princess was pregnant, giving birth to a boy,
Prince William of Wales, on June 21, 1982. A second son,
Prince Harry, followed in September 1984.
In the early years of the marriage the Waleses normally
undertook joint engagements. This was the period of the
Princess's apprenticeship. But it soon became clear that of
the two it was her that the public most wished to see, and
Prince Charles was to some extent reduced to a male dancer
supporting his glorious ballerina in her pirouettes.
While the popularity of his bride should have delighted him, it
added a sense of pointlessness to his slightly frustrated life.
Equally, he was irritated when he tried to make an important
speech, and the next day the papers merely reported his
wife's outfit. He failed to grasp that one of the things the
world wanted was a recurring series of images of a young
couple enjoying a happy family life. He always appeared
reluctant in such photo-calls, fearing that this diminished the
import of his more serious endeavours. The Princess, on the
other hand, fulfilled all such demands to perfection.
CONTINUED GALLERY AND FUNERAL GALLERY ENTRANCE ON PAGE 2
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