by Dylan Howard
“I have often talked about Africa as my second home, and I’ve often been asked why I love it so much. Ever since I came to this continent as a young boy, trying to cope with something I can never possibly describe, Africa has held me in an embrace that I will never forget, and I feel incredibly fortunate for that,” he said.
“I always feel that wherever I am on this continent, that the community around me provides a life that is enriching and is rooted in the simplest things—connection, connections with others and the natural environment.”
In February 2004, Harry, a friend named George Hill, and his father’s communications secretary, Patrick Harverson, touched down in Lesotho, a tiny nation kingdom enclosed by South Africa that had been a British protectorate state from 1869 to 1966. The mountainous kingdom is one of the highest in the world, home to an astonishing array of rare flora and fauna. It also has the world’s second-highest rate of HIV; poor medical facilities, infrastructure, and sanitation; appalling levels of infant mortality; grim statistics on child abuse and gender inequality; rampant unemployment corruption; and food shortages. In short, the country was a shocking landscape of suffering, hardship, and misery. It was a world away from Club H.
Harry’s visit began with trips to some of the country’s numerous orphanages, home to thousands of children, many of whom had HIV. He played with them in a manner that reminded onlookers of his mother—that same easy approachability and sense of fun that immediately charmed and disarmed strangers. He mucked in with manual labor too, helping out with renovations and building work as well as kicking footballs around with the youngsters and befriending them. The country’s Prince Seeiso became a close friend, showing his British counterparts around the country and making no secret of the numerous challenges and obstacles Lesotho faced in defeating its many issues.
Speaking to CBS a few years later, Seeiso reflected on the extraordinary impact Harry made on his country. He said, “You go to any part of Lesotho where Harry has been and you get a truthful, honest, and a straight answer. Do you love Harry? We love him, he’s just one of us. Everywhere he goes, I think he bonds a lot faster with the children. Harry is one big child basically. He wasn’t afraid to pick up a child who is HIV positive. He wasn’t afraid to step into and talk to a disabled person who, who is mentally or physically disabled.”
While playing with children in the orphanages over his two-month stay, Harry took the time to learn about their life stories, often in tragic detail. The sensitive young man often found himself in tears when he heard why this or that boy or girl had found themselves there. Some had been abandoned by their parents, others orphaned at an early age. Some had been sexually abused. (One superstitious belief had it that HIV could be cured by intercourse with an extremely young child.) Harry spoke to them all, often gaining the children’s trust with his gentle manner and genuine concern. He became fascinated by the country’s history and frustrated at the lack of resources and facilities available. By the time he left Lesotho, at the end of April 2004, he had gained invaluable insights and experiences that would profoundly shape the way he was to lead his life. He also began toying with an idea that would ultimately bring hope and relief to thousands of children in Lesotho and neighboring states in the years to come. But Harry’s life-changing trip to Africa had one more major surprise to come.
Arriving with Paddy Harverson and George Hill in Cape Town, South Africa, that April, Harry had a wicked glint in his eye, a glint that would have been very familiar to the regulars at the Rattlesnake Bar or Club H. He wasted no time in looking up a girl he’d met in London the previous year, Zimbabwe-born Chelsy Davy, a gorgeous blonde who had been a pupil at the ultraexclusive Cheltenham Ladies College before attending the equally posh Stowe school where she had met the Prince through mutual friends. By the end of school, she missed Africa so much she returned to the continent, to the University of Cape Town, to study Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. When Harry arrived there on his gap year, he tracked her down. Thus began the longest relationship of his life to date.
The instantaneous attraction was apparent to them both—Harry was smitten by Chelsy’s blonde allure, her athletic physique, and her raucous, sharp wit, as well as her toughness and love of the wide-open plains of her childhood. Her father, Charles Davy, was a millionaire safari operator, and the family lived on 1,300 square miles of African savannah teeming with wildlife such as giraffes, lions, and snakes. “At my preschool there were monkeys everywhere,” she recalled, “stealing your crayons.”
Harry hadn’t met many girls who made him laugh, were unimpressed by his status—the Royal thing was a bore for her—oozed raw sex appeal, and could kill a snake with their bare hands, so when he met up with Chelsy in Cape Town, he didn’t hold back. Her beachfront apartment in Camps Bay became a home to him, as the pair tore around the city in her Mercedes coupe and hung out with Chelsy’s friends and family. It was only a couple of hundred miles from Lesotho, but in Cape Town, Harry found another side of Africa that was equally appealing and exciting and in Chelsy, the perfect girl to discover it with. By the time he finally bade Africa farewell and headed back to the United Kingdom, Harry had made two new important discoveries. They would both go on to profoundly reshape his life.
Harry flew back to the United Kingdom that spring, drunk on love. Friends recalled him gabbling excitedly about the willowy blonde who’d captured his heart and were amused and touched to see how deeply Harry had fallen for her. Chelsy was equally smitten with her Prince. The pair had enjoyed a wild, whirlwind romance, and in most cases, Harry and Chelsy would have left matters at Cape Town Airport. But for the two of them, this was something big.
That autumn, Harry turned twenty. By now, the Prince was a familiar face at London’s more ritzy nightclubs such as Pangaea, Mamilanji, Mahiki, and Boujis (home to Harry’s favorite “Crack Baby” cocktails), often snapped in the early hours, emerging red-faced, disheveled, and bleary.
In the early 2000s, London was awash with cash and jet-set Eurotrash, behaving badly and drawing a motley assortment of young British aristocrats in their wake. “It was the height of that period of people spending a lot of money and of there being a big influx of Russians and Italians into the London social scene,” explained nightclub promoter Roger Michael, a familiar figure on the London circuit at the time. The young Princes held court for an endless stream of mainly Russian girls, intent on making some sweet royal memories of their own.
“William and Harry would have tables reserved at the back of the club next to the VIP area, and at one time they even had their own barman called Gordon,” biographer Katie Nicholl said. “They were always relaxed at Boujis, they knew the owner Jake Parkinson-Smith, but they still had to abide by the rules. Like everyone else, they had to take their baseball caps off, which made them instantly recognizable. Women would always be approaching them and asking them to dance. There were always a gaggle of stunning, long-limbed beauties on prince watch.”
The tabloid fascination with “bad boy” Harry, whose partying antics were now far exceeding those of his elder brother, started sounding faint alarms among staff and officials at Clarence House. In October, there was an unseemly altercation with a press photographer outside the Pangaea nightclub. A drunk Harry lunged at the particularly persistent photographer, giving him a cut lip. The press reacted with horrified delight.
Had Harry been dispatched to the strict environs of Sandhurst Military Academy to begin his Army career, as planned in autumn 2004, there would have been little to worry about. But disaster had struck after Harry passed the rigorous entry procedures, the Royal Commissions Board, with flying colors. While coaching a group of kids during a game of rugby, Harry sustained a serious knee injury. His start at Sandringham was delayed until spring 2005.
Nevertheless, much to the relief of the Royal Family and much to the regret of London’s paparazzi, Harry flew off that November to Argentina, where he participated in a six-week stint at a polo ranch in Buenos Aires, enjoying the
demanding routines and the plentiful riding. That Christmas he jetted off to Bazaruto, in Mozambique, to visit Chelsy, who was holidaying with her family on the picturesque island. The pair enjoyed a passionate reunion amid the idyllic setting, and the young Prince returned to the United Kingdom for a Royal Christmas, apparently refreshed and relaxed and looking forward to making 2005 a year of achievement in his personal, public, and romantic life.
Early in January 2005, William and Harry were invited to a birthday party for a close friend, Harry Meade, who, like much of their close gang, had something of a penchant for fancy dress and themed parties. Meade chose the rather questionable “Natives and Colonials” as a theme, perhaps not the most sensitive topic for a bunch of posh, privileged British kids. Among the lion suits, cowboys, safari suits, Indians, and Royals (the irrepressible friend of the brothers, Guy Pelly, came as the Queen), one certain guest took it all a bit too far and wore a Nazi swastika armband while lurching around with a cigarette and a beaker of strong drink constantly in hand. When the inevitable pictures made their way to the front pages, all hell broke loose.
The timing could not have been worse. Harry was still in the headlines, following his recent punch-up with a photographer outside Mahiki. Added to that, a major ceremony to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was imminent. Aghast at the reaction, Harry’s office issued a heartfelt apology that went some way to quelling public outrage, but the damage had been done. The world saw a drunken, louche young man, soaked in booze and ignorance, parading around a party in a swastika armband. The fact that no one had been on hand to advise the headstrong young Royal on his decision to wear the outfit did not go unnoticed. Neither did the fact that Harry was barely challenged for his choice of outfit by his peers at the party.
Senior figures in the establishment rushed to play the affair down. Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain, of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, said to the BBC: “The fact that the palace has issued an apology indicates that this was a mistake by the prince. But having been given, the apology should now be accepted.”
But the Queen’s former assistant press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, weighed in with an admonition: “This young man has got to come up front and be seen in person making an apology.” The former Armed Forces minister, left-winger Doug Henderson MP, said the picture showed the prince was “not suitable” for Sandhurst. “If it was anyone else, the application wouldn’t be considered. It should be withdrawn immediately,” he thundered. Fortunately for Harry, and mindful perhaps of the profound ramifications of such a decision, a spokesman for the Sandhurst Military Academy explained that the school was minded to let this one go.
“He is most emphatically not a liability,” read a statement. “We take the same attitude to the prince as any other cadet. I am quite sure there are plenty of cadets who display a lack of judgment, but we never hear of them because they do not end up in [tabloid newspaper] The Sun.”
Harry spent the next few weeks penitently mucking out stables and undertaking backbreaking chores at his furious father’s farm in Highgrove. It seemed that for now, the chastened Royal had learned his lesson.
On May 8, 2005, Prince Harry arrived at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, accompanied by his proud father, a newly-acquired kit bag, and that mandatory item for each new recruit—an ironing board. Harry was excited, apprehensive, and determined. He’d just scraped into the prestigious academy with his less-than-impressive grades and results from his entry exams. He knew he was lucky to have made it in, his acceptance being the culmination of his lifelong obsession with the military. Most of all, Harry was said to be craving anonymity and uniformity. His wildness at school and carousing around the bars of London’s West End and Gloucestershire had led to the media taking a ghoulish delight in watching him wobble erratically through his teens, barely containing the festering anger at the world, following his mother’s death.
But now, away from home and Eton, and thanks to the delicate negotiations by Buckingham Palace’s press team with national media, Harry was set to enjoy a period of growth and development.
Each of the 270 newbies was allocated miniregiments in which they would undergo the grueling forty-four-week induction course. Officer Cadet Wales was placed in the Alamein Squadron, with twenty-nine other recruits. He had to adjust fast, as there was little time for niceties. From being waited on hand and foot as a senior Royal, or as a privileged Eton schoolboy, Harry was now expected to look after himself and his quarters, keeping them spick and span as well as being inspection-ready at 5:30 a.m. each morning.
His bed made with precise hospital corners, his small room spotless, his trousers ironed with razor-sharp creases, and his boots polished to a gleam, Harry would nervously await the eagle eyes of an irate sergeant major who would bawl him out should there be so much as a smudge on his shoes, a carelessly-tucked bed sheet, or an impudent molecule of dust floating around the floor.
But Harry was delighted. This was exactly what he had craved—being one of the boys, one of the crowd, mucking in with everyone else and no special treatment or singling out. The staff at the academy knew they would treat Cadet Officer Wales as they would any other wet-behind-the-ears rookie and instructed his peers to do the same. By and large they did—there is a story about one unfortunate lad who decided to have a bit of fun teasing the Prince and ended up being briskly booted in the nuts by him.
Likewise, the training took no shortcuts or special privileges for Harry. Despite having to have his personal protection officers within sight at all times while out on exercises, Harry underwent the same tough routines and tasks that everyone did. His NCO would gleefully hurl abuse and lively reprimands to the Prince at every opportunity, which Harry came to value and respect. The course was so demanding and degrading that on average, despite the coveted places at the academy, 15 percent of new recruits would drop out in the first two weeks.
The training was the making of Harry. For the first time, he was being shouted at, pushed around, forced to be on his toes at all times, worked from dawn to dusk, and treated exactly like everyone else. He found what had been lacking in his life so far—stability, discipline, self-reliance, and comradeship, according to a friend. Until now, William had been the only other person who truly understood what Harry might be feeling at any one time. Now he had a whole platoon of fellow recruits, all going through the same ordeal and drawing strength and motivation from one another.
“My father’s always trying to remind me about who I am and stuff like that,” he said some years later. “But it’s very easy to forget about who I am when I am in the army. Everyone’s wearing the same uniform and doing the same kind of thing. I get on well with the lads and I enjoy my job. It really is as simple as that.”
The following year, to mark his twenty-first birthday, Harry gave an interview in which he recalled those early weeks of his training, shocked and jolting through each grueling day: “You’re marched around in a green overall, half like a gardener, half like an inmate. I do enjoy running down a ditch full of mud, firing bullets. It’s the way I am, I love it.”
Harry spoke in glowing terms of his comrades in his platoon, and it became obvious to everyone in his family that, to their great relief, after an uninspiring academic career so far, he was finally finding his niche.
However, trouble was never far away. It emerged some years later that, despite the binding of the Official Secrets Act upon all Academy staff, a pharmacist called Tracy Bell, who worked at the school’s healthcare facility while Harry, and later William, were attending, sold five articles about the royal Princes between October 2005 and July 2006. Furthermore, in a High Court trial years later, it emerged that the notorious phone-hacking scandal involving the British tabloid The News of the World had extended to members of the Royal Family. It explained why another minor scandal reached the front pages, when Harry bent some rules and reached out to his private secretary, former soldier Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, for information about the 1980 Ira
nian hostage siege in London, when he was under pressure to write an essay on the event. No one could understand at the time how the story reached the press, as only Lowther-Pinkerton and Harry had known of the request.
Likewise, it baffled everyone when photographers and journalists would suddenly pop up when Harry was out in the countryside on training exercises.
While Harry was charging through swamps firing machine guns, back in South Africa, his girlfriend Chelsy was finding out what it was like to be romantically linked to one of the most eligible young bachelors in the world. Speaking in 2015, Chelsy recalled the “terrifying” experience of being relentlessly tailed by the paparazzi, having her car tracked and the world’s media lying in wait for her wherever she went: “I found it very difficult when it was bad. I couldn’t cope. I was young, I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible.”
For a relatively carefree teenager, this was a rude awakening to something of what Harry went through day to day. She remembered how Harry had been reluctant to go public with their romance at the start, and how she didn’t understand. Now she did.
In his twenty-first birthday interview, Harry expressed his anger and frustration with the press’s intrusion into his private life, saying of Chelsy: “That does irritate me, I see how upset she gets … that is my private life.”
The relationship was a struggle on many levels—the six thousand miles between them, the diverging paths in life, Harry committed to all-encompassing military training, and Chelsy to studying law. Harry would pine for Chelsy when he was alone. She was sensible and level-headed and would support him without being remotely bothered by his position and status. Chelsy loved Harry, despite the trappings of his family, although her concern for him was frequently perceived as neediness. In the phone-hacking trial in 2015, it was revealed that Chelsy called and texted Harry, during his training, sometimes up to sixty times a day. As Harry was forbidden to use his phone during the days (along with laptops, televisions, and any other gadgetry), he couldn’t respond to her. (For his part, the same trial revealed that around 2006, Harry would often call Chelsy up late at night when he was drunk and bellow endearments at her.)