The Prince voiced his concern (one he would be voicing for the next fifty years) that young people seemed ‘pretty indifferent’ to the Commonwealth and that it was receiving hostile treatment in the British media. He was also keen to find out more about India’s views on the organisation.
This was certainly not small talk. During his visit to the economics department of Marlborough House, a lively discussion ensued when the Prince asked whether some countries had been given independence too soon. One official, a Mr Kellock, firmly rejected that idea, saying that ‘the timing was right; it was the preparation that had been wrong’.
Clearly Smith and his team wanted the Prince onside as a high-profile youth ambassador – exactly the same sort of role that the Queen would have in mind for both Prince William and Prince Harry a generation later. Smith later wrote that the Prince, ‘in his individualistic way’, was ‘every bit as good a public educator as his mother’. Later that year, he addressed 5,000 members of the Institute of Directors at the Albert Hall on the subject of ‘Youth and the Commonwealth’. It was one of Prince Charles’s first major public speeches and he did not hold back. Why, he asked, were people not ‘almost ecstatic’ about the opportunities presented by the Commonwealth? He went on to attack the airline industry for the lack of cheap flights. The Prince wanted more people to be able to have some of the life-enhancing experiences that he had enjoyed in Australia – ‘the country where I became a man’. He was even nostalgic for the ‘man-eating spiders and acid-squirting caterpillars’ that he had encountered on a school outing to Papua New Guinea.
What comes through very clearly is that this earnest twenty-one-year-old was already giving much thought to the direction of international politics and his likely place in them. A month after his day at Commonwealth headquarters, he was off to the White House. President Richard Nixon had laid on an eventful visit for the Heir to the Throne and Princess Anne, including a cookout at Camp David, a dinner dance for 700 and a trip to the top of the Washington Monument, from where the Prince raced the President’s son-in-law back down the 898 stairs to the bottom (and won). A half-hour chat on leadership in the Oval Office turned into a ninety-minute discussion on the world, during which the President discussed Vietnam, the threat of communism in India and his view that the Prince should be ‘a presence’. It soon emerged that the President was also trying to pair off the young Prince with his unmarried elder daughter, Tricia, twenty-four. The two found themselves seated next to each other at one meal after another, while the President and first lady told the Prince: ‘We hope we can get out of sight so you will feel completely at home.’ Had there been any mutual attraction – which it seems there was not – it would surely have been quashed by clunking press headlines suggesting that the pair were already an item. Many years later, the Prince would relay the story to President George W. Bush, with a light-hearted promise that he would not try to set up his two sons with his girls, Jenna and Barbara. But the Prince and his sister had clearly been touched by Nixon’s efforts to make them welcome. The Prince later wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, saying that the President had been ‘extremely hospitable’ and ‘overflowing with kind remarks’ about the ‘special relationship’.
When the Prince sought to repay the compliment a few months later in a speech to the UK/US friendship society, the Pilgrims of Great Britain, there was an extraordinary intervention from the government. Heath’s officials did not want the Prince to talk about the ‘special relationship’ at all. In December 1970, the Prince’s Private Secretary, Edward Smith, alerted his young master to the Foreign Office view that ‘whereas there once was such a relationship, there no longer is’. Any mention of it would ‘annoy all the Europeans’. Once again the FCO was showing that it was much more concerned about not upsetting new EEC partners than about alienating old allies. Just as Heath would infuriate the Queen the following year by standing between her and her Commonwealth, so he was testing the patience of her son.
A few weeks earlier, the Prince had personally discussed the impact upon the Commonwealth of Britain’s EEC entry with the Prime Minister, when they both attended the funeral of former French President Charles de Gaulle. Afterwards, the Prince wrote that Heath had assured him that any economic impact would be minimal. Heath could not resist a dig at the Commonwealth, too, adding that ‘there was one thing he could not stand and that was being told what to do by African countries’.
As a future monarch and therefore obliged to listen to ministerial advice, the Prince amended his speech to the Pilgrims. However, he did so grudgingly. He omitted the word ‘special’, but continued to talk of a ‘close relationship’ between Britain and the USA, one forged in ‘historical bonds of culture and language’. As the Prince’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, has observed: ‘The issue was the first but very far from the last potential casus belli between the Prince and the mandarins.’
It was also in 1970 that the Prince was sent to Fiji for his first experience of a ceremony that his mother, on government advice, could never undertake herself – handing independence to a former colony. All through the Sixties, as one colony after another sought to go its own way, the Queen had despatched Prince Philip, Princess Margaret or one of her cousins to lower the flag. Now it was the turn of the younger generation. The Prince was particularly struck by the good humour of the Fijians, along with the complete absence of ill will towards the outgoing colonial power.
He was becoming fascinated by the Commonwealth and its vastly different cultures and power struggles. The following year, he accompanied Princess Anne on a joint visit to Kenya, the key African state that would for ever be associated with the Queen’s accession to the Throne. Here the Prince conducted his first investiture, as he dubbed the President of the East African Court of Appeal a Knight Bachelor. While Princess Anne learned about the work of Save the Children, her elder brother disappeared for several days on a walking safari through what the British High Commissioner, Sir Eric Norris, called ‘Kenya’s harshest country’. The only transport consisted of a few camels to carry the baggage. It was, said Norris, a very unusual safari for a VIP – ‘not one of the plush kind organised for wealthy tourists but a simple one’. Not only were there no refrigerated drinks, there were not even any tents. ‘The Prince regarded this safari as the highlight of his visit and one of the most interesting things he has ever done,’ Norris informed his masters at the Foreign Office, adding: ‘HRH was such a congenial travelling companion that all others from the hard-boiled escort to the camel men much enjoyed the expedition.’ Royal photographer Reg Davis remembers that the Prince also reappeared with his first beard.
The Kenyans were delighted at what amounted to a vote of confidence in the region, particularly given the turmoil in so many neighbouring states. ‘With revolution next door,’ wrote Norris, ‘the Heir to the Throne was calmly wandering around the wildest parts of Kenya guarded only against the possibility of attack by elephant, lion or rhino. Kenyan chests were well out.’
BACHELOR DAYS
The Prince would see a great deal of the world during his subsequent five years in the Royal Navy. He did not take to the Navy with quite the enthusiasm his father had shown. ‘Poor Charles,’ the Queen remarked to one dinner guest not long afterwards. ‘Hopeless at maths and they made him a navigation officer!’ Yet the Prince went on to qualify as a helicopter pilot, encouraged by his Dartmouth tutor, Robert Woodard, the future captain of the Royal Yacht. ‘I was responsible for his welfare. I took him to pubs and learned how he was dreading his future because nothing was private,’ says Woodard. ‘But he did well. He flew the Wessex 5 off HMS Hermes carrying commandos.’ After taking command of the minesweeper HMS Bronington, the Prince left the Royal Navy in 1976. From then on, as a full-time member of the royal team, his foreign assignments on behalf of the Queen would become more serious. He was also starting to test the boundaries of what was, and was not, politically and constitutionally acceptable. The then Foreign Secret
ary, David Owen, was astonished and impressed to receive a five-page handwritten letter from the Prince reporting his impressions from a recent visit to Brazil, so much so that he was unsure how to respond. ‘I didn’t reply for weeks which was very bad so in the end I went to see him.’
By far the most challenging mission for the Prince, however, would come in 1980. Following the success of that hot-tempered, touchand-go Commonwealth meeting in Lusaka the year before, Rhodesia was now finally about to become Zimbabwe. Unlike so many previous independence ceremonies, this one came fraught with danger, not least the disarming of two trigger-happy guerrilla armies and a very angry buffalo. Even the ceremony itself would result in riots, tear gas and a furious diplomatic incident involving the Secretary-General of the United Nations, no less. And there, as a spectator in the midst of it all, was the Prince’s future wife.
HANDOVER NUMBER ONE
The bloody Rhodesian civil war was over. Following that speedy Lancaster House agreement between all sides in the Rhodesian civil war, Britain had re-established the position of Governor of Rhodesia to organise elections and independence. Margaret Thatcher had selected Christopher (now Lord) Soames – that charismatic former Ambassador to France – for the job.
The election would be won by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU Patriotic Front, ahead of rival guerrilla leader Joshua Nkomo and white leader Ian Smith. Independence could now go ahead and the Prince of Wales would do the honours. However, the Governor, the Palace and the Foreign Office had a problem: there wasn’t much time.
The Foreign Office sent a telegram to Soames suggesting a reliable ex-army ceremonial expert called Colonel Eric Hefford, who would put together a decent handover parade for £1,300. Soames replied that the government could save itself £1,300. Colonel Hefford was not required, ‘as we have the services of an Army officer, Lt Col Parker Bowles, Assistant Adjutant General (London District) who is experienced in ceremonial matters’.
Andrew Parker Bowles had joined the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) fresh from school at Ampleforth and knew the Royal Family of old. His parents had been racing friends of the Queen Mother, whom he credits with persuading him to stay in the Army when he was about to leave it, fed up with endless ceremonial duties. ‘My father was horrified,’ he says. ‘Before I knew it, I was having lunch with the Queen Mother. She said: “I’ve got just the job for you. The Governor-General of New Zealand is looking for a new ADC. Go and see him tomorrow afternoon.” And I did.’
Parker Bowles would go on to thrive in the Army, rising to Brigadier, and would command the Household Cavalry during two very different episodes, both of which remain engraved in regimental history: the 1981 royal wedding procession of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the 1982 IRA bomb attack in Hyde Park. In 1973, he had married Camilla Shand, the former girlfriend of the Prince of Wales, who was said to have been heartbroken on hearing the news of her engagement while serving in the Caribbean with the Royal Navy. By 1979, Andrew Parker Bowles was a major ‘doing a pretty ordinary Army job in London’ when Major-General John Acland, whom he knew and greatly admired, was sent to run the Commonwealth Monitoring Force keeping the peace in Rhodesia ahead of the elections.† Parker Bowles offered his services and, days later, he was in the African bush trying to persuade thousands of heavily armed guerrillas to withdraw from the battlefield and let democracy take its course.
‘My job was to work with the returning armies of Mugabe and Nkomo and put them in assembly areas. The white Rhodesians were looking for a reason to lure them out and kill them. So I had to keep them in these camps which were pretty rough,’ he recalls. He grew to know and rather like Robert Mugabe, who once gave him a book for his young son, Tom.
With a tiny British unit of half a dozen men at his disposal, Parker Bowles – by now an acting Lieutenant Colonel – had a dangerous job. In the first week of 1979, he earned a Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. He had set off into the bush around Bindura to negotiate with a renegade force of 400 Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) guerrillas, who were still operational and were warning they would fight anyone in their path. The citation – for ‘exceptional courage’ – notes that ‘Lieutenant Colonel Parker Bowles covered miles searching for them and on a number of occasions had weapons pointed at him. Entirely unprotected, without thought for his own safety but fully conscious of the tremendous risk, he was ultimately responsible for bringing the group into the Assembly Area without casualties to either side.’
Even that paled before his encounter with an altogether more aggressive adversary. Once the elections were over and it became clear that all sides were going to accept the result, Parker Bowles could turn his attention to the handover arrangements. As the Governor’s chief military liaison officer and a friend of the Soames family, he had a room at his disposal at Government House. So he invited his wife, Camilla, to join him for the week of the independence celebrations, before it had been decided that the Prince was coming. ‘It became a feast for the press,’ he laughs. ‘I just said to Camilla: “Come out and stay with the Soameses”.’ The Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster reported: ‘Charles’s old flame lights up darkest Zimbabwe’.
It was Andrew Parker Bowles, however, whom the Prince should have been most grateful to see. For in advance of the royal visit, the thirty-year-old officer took it upon himself to double-check every section of the itinerary that the Foreign Office had proposed for the Prince. This included a trip to the Henderson Veterinary Research Station at Mazowe, where staff had developed an experimental programme to domesticate the notoriously irascible African buffalo. Known as the Cape buffalo, it remains one of the most dangerous animals on Earth. Yet the vets at Mazowe were so convinced they had found a way to tame a creature responsible for at least 200 deaths each year that they were going to invite the Prince to ride one.
Parker Bowles was not convinced: ‘I went to this agricultural college and they said: “We’ll show the Prince this and that and then we’ll get him to ride this tame buffalo.” And I said I wanted to see someone else ride it. There was no saddle and it had only been half-tamed. They said it was fine to ride and they put this little local boy on it to show me. It was pointless putting him on because on the day there would be a mass of press and a strange adult white man riding it.’ There was nothing for it. The gallant Lieutenant Colonel decided to climb aboard and test the plan himself. ‘After a few minutes, I was thrown off and before I knew where I was, the other so-called “tame” buffalo came along and gored me. I’ve still got a hole in my leg.’ He points to where the horn went through his right thigh, noting that a difference of a few inches would have killed him.
Everyone made light of the incident. According to The Daily Telegraph, the director of the college, Dr John Cundy, said that the animal – called Ziggy – was ‘extremely tame’ and had merely reacted to ‘the Colonel’s Blues & Royals style’. Had the Prince followed the Foreign Office plan, though, he would have been in grave danger. ‘I always remind him that if it hadn’t gored me and had gored him, things might be very different these days,’ laughs Parker Bowles. ‘He gives me a wry smile and, rightly, takes it quite lightly.’ It had been a serious incident, though. Parker Bowles had been badly hurt and only left hospital with three days to go before the handover. ‘I tried to stand up the next day and collapsed,’ he recalls. ‘They’d found a piece of my corduroy trouser with the artery.’ He still managed to be back on duty in time to greet the Prince.
And there would still be further dramas. During a tour of Salisbury (which would be Harare within a couple of days) the Prince was taken on a tour of the Glen Norah township, having expressed an interest in looking at urban housing. The royal convoy promptly stopped outside a two-room shack owned by Ransford Makwara, a twenty-two-year-old unemployed man who immediately assumed that he was about to be arrested and ran for it. ‘The poor man thought it was the police so he locked himself in the loo at the bottom of the garden and wouldn’t come out,’ says Parker Bowles. Eventually, Makwara wa
s persuaded to emerge from the lavatory and show the Prince the pot of beans he had stewing on his fire.
The Prince had been well briefed on the leaders of both the old Rhodesia and the new Zimbabwe. Foreign Office notes show he was warned that Joshua Nkomo remained ‘bitter and wary . . . left with a feeling that his present position does not reflect his past as “father” of Rhodesian African nationalism’ (Nkomo had won twenty of the 100 seats available, while Mugabe won fifty-seven). The Prince was warned to be particularly wary of Rex Nhongo, the commander of the ZANLA forces. ‘Drinks heavily’ according to his FCO biography. ‘His wife (still known by her nom de guerre as “Spill Blood”) is Minister for Youth and Sport in the new Government.’ The notes added that Nhongo ‘was something of a trial to Col Parker Bowles’s patience’. Parker Bowles puts it more succinctly: ‘Rex Nhongho threatened to kill me at one stage.’ It was Nhongho himself, however, who would be murdered in mysterious circumstances some time later.
Despite reports that Camilla Parker Bowles would act as the Prince’s official companion at the eve-of-independence dinner, the honour was actually given to Barbara Travers, twenty-eight, a nurse and a farmer’s daughter, who described herself ‘the luckiest girl in Rhodesia’.
As dusk fell the following day, the flag was finally lowered at Government House with Governor Soames standing alongside the Prince. Just behind them, running the show with military precision and a keen eye on his watch, was Parker Bowles. The atmosphere was positively jovial. Lord Soames and Mugabe had by now built up such a rapport that, seven years later, the latter would travel all the way to a Hampshire country village to attend Soames’s funeral. Shortly before the handover, the outgoing Governor had felt able to offer Mugabe an immortal piece of advice from one political operator to another. Leaning through the window of Mugabe’s departing car, he told him: ‘Now, don’t f*** it up!’
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 60