by Penny Junor
That was a major part of the magic of Africa for William. It was somewhere he could go where no one knew who he was, and those that did, didn’t care. He was just another guy, and according to Charlie, ‘He was in paradise. Lewa’s a very dynamic place. There’s always something exciting going on. It’s thrilling for an adult, let alone a kid; and there’s an element of danger. Yet it’s not just fun for fun’s sake, it’s doing something worthwhile.’
A couple of monuments remain to mark William’s two months in Kenya in the spring of 2001. First, he built the bird hide at Lewa. The initial attempt sank into the swamp, much to the amusement of the Kenyans; his second attempt survives to this day. He also built a flying fox, otherwise known as a foofy slide, across a deep, death-defying gully at Lake Rutundu in Mount Kenya National Park, a two-hour drive south of Lewa. It is one of the remotest places on the planet, accessed through several miles of single track – and at times trackless – forest and scrub; the sort of place where if you slipped off the path (easily done) or ran out of fuel, you might not be found for months. But when you finally reach the lake and the two-hut lodge above it, you realise it was worth the journey. It is one of the most breathtaking places – and because of the high altitude, literally breathtaking.
It was also the place where William took Kate Middleton – and his mother’s diamond and sapphire ring – in 2010 and proposed marriage to her. He took her there no doubt to show off his amazing piece of handiwork with the flying fox. Or perhaps the place where he actually presented the ring (we shall never know exactly) was at Lake Alice, another ten thousand feet higher and an even more heavenly place and well worth the climb. What history does not relate is whether Kate risked life and limb and crossed the ravine in William’s flying fox, which has a large safety sign beside it (widely disregarded) saying that it is for luggage only, or whether she took the safe option, and walked down to the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.
THE OLD GREY TOWN
William arrived at the old university town of St Andrews in September 2001 and was almost immediately embroiled in an upsetting and ugly row that was not of his making. Colleen Harris had extended the deal with the media; in what was called The St Andrews Agreement, William would make himself available for a photo call when he arrived, and thereafter for an informal chat once a term. In return, he would be allowed to continue his education undisturbed by the media.
Unsurprisingly, he was nervous about starting university. None of his friends had chosen St Andrews and home and family were a very long way away. It was a great choice, in which Andrew Gailey had played a significant role, it having been one of his alma maters. Other strong advocates had been James and Julia Ogilvy. James Ogilvy is the son of Princess Alexandra (a cousin of the Queen) and Angus Ogilvy, and he and Julia, who was a trusted friend of Diana’s, met as students at St Andrews and subsequently married. They have since bought a house there and work nearby and, like many former students, have huge affection for the town. All three of them had obviously been agitating in favour of the place and the year before William started, they brought him for a quiet and unofficial look around. William liked what he saw.
St Andrews is familiar to most people from watching the Open Golf Championships on television. It’s a picturesque coastal town, small enough to be a community, with a good reputation for the subjects he wanted to study. It is Scotland’s oldest university, founded in 1413, and the third oldest in the English-speaking world. It is also now one of the best, but neither its age nor its credentials make up for the fact that it is a long way from anywhere and there are no trains or planes within easy reach. Beautiful and ancient though it is, it is a one-horse town with a limited amount to do – and the reason, no doubt, why it has the highest rate of student marriages of all universities in the UK (my own, as well as the Ogilvys’ and Prince William’s being among them).
A year before his arrival, only two people at the university knew that William had chosen St Andrews. They were Colin Vincent, who was acting principal at that time and William’s academic adviser, and David Corner, a medieval historian, who as secretary and registrar at the university looked after his non-academic welfare. They both knew that William would be filling in the name of only one university on his UCAS application form. But the press, for some reason, thought he had applied for Edinburgh, which proved very convenient for St Andrews in allowing his application and everything else that followed to proceed quietly.
Like every other student, his place was dependent on achieving the required A level grades – which he did – and once those were through Brian Lang, the future principal, and David went to Eton to see Andrew Gailey and others to discuss security and how best to handle William’s arrival and the relationship in general.
What none of them expected in the sleepy town of St Andrews was a terrorist attack. Within weeks of the announcement that he’d be starting in September 2001 (coincidentally the year of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States), the university received a series of parcels that purported to contain the deadly virus anthrax. They came, it transpired, from a Scottish liberation group in protest over a Scottish university admitting an English Prince.
They turned out to be hoaxes but each one had to be taken seriously. ‘I had one secretary,’ recalls David Corner, ‘who said, “If I get another one and have to take my clothes off in the department again, I’m going to charge for it.”’ The procedure was that anyone who might have been contaminated was put into quarantine until they had clearance from Porton Down, the germ warfare laboratories in England, where the substance had to be sent. Feeling sorry for the press office team quarantined in the police station, David popped in to see how they were, taking the principal, Brian Lang, and the boss of the company brought in to handle the tabloids. ‘We walked in and the desk officer said, “Och, they’re fine,” and brought them out to meet us, which deemed us contaminated, so the boss of Beattie Media, the principal and I were locked up for three hours in the police station!’
On the Friday before William’s arrival for his first term, David was asked to join him and his father for the evening, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. ‘I think already some degree of nerves had set in; and I think he [William] thought it was going to be terribly formal, and it was quite the opposite.’ David could not be less formal himself. He is a cheerful, Moses-like figure with wild white hair and beard; rumour has it he owns a tie but it’s seldom seen. He had already been to St James’s Palace to talk reassuringly to the Prince of Wales about what William could expect at St Andrews. Like all Scottish universities – but different from most universities in the UK – students do a four-year honours degree, but rather than studying one subject in ever-greater depth as the years pass, they start with three different subjects in the first year and narrow them down.
‘They had decided that this was not going to be a weekend about William going to St Andrews; it was William and his father visiting Scotland, so they did things like going to a housing estate in Glasgow, going to a dance studio in Edinburgh and eventually they turned up at St Andrews with Dad carrying the suitcase and putting him in his hall of residence.’
Most of the town had turned out to see them arrive, and quite a number of the world’s media too. ‘I think he was really nervous when he arrived,’ says Colleen. ‘All the press were there and it suddenly hit him, and he was very unsteady for a little while after that. He’d had a fantastic gap year, really enjoyed himself, and there he was stuck. He didn’t know anybody, just one or two guys from Eton who he didn’t know that well, and he was very much alone.’
Niall Scott, the university press officer, had been briefed by Colleen Harris that if he spotted anyone in the town with anything larger than an instamatic, he was to get them removed. It was not only William’s privacy that mattered but also the privacy of his fellow students. ‘William was very sensitive to that,’ says Niall. ‘He knew the unsettling effect his presence could have and was keen that it should all be qu
ietened down.’
Scarcely had the last media truck disappeared than Niall saw a camera crew blithely setting up to film outside his office window. ‘It was a red rag to a bull,’ he said. ‘I walked out and asked them what they were doing. I was told, “We’re Ardent, here’s our card. We’re making an A–Z of Royalty for an entertainment channel in the States and we’re waiting to film William coming out of his lecture.”’ Ardent, they explained, was owned by Prince Edward, William’s uncle. ‘We had a full and frank exchange of views on the pavement,’ says Niall, ‘and I said, “You shouldn’t be here, a deal’s a deal, I don’t care who you are, everyone else has left.”
‘It was the start of a very interesting week. We then discovered that Ardent had taken a group of our students, bought them dinner and then asked them to pretend that a year had passed and they were looking back at William’s first year, and this was to be presented as fact. All a bit underhand.’
Colleen had stayed on for a couple of days and she too spotted the Ardent crew. ‘They kept saying they had permission to be there and I said, “Well, I’m the person who would give you permission and I haven’t, so you can’t be here.” “No,” they said, “we’ve got permission from Prince Edward.” They wouldn’t go, so I rang Mark [Bolland]. It became a massive story. Edward rang and said he was sorry about the confusion, they were going to go, it was a misunderstanding.’
The Daily Mail claimed the Prince of Wales was ‘incandescent’ with rage: so angry that he had refused to take telephone calls from his youngest brother. The story escalated into a major attack on Prince Edward and his competence as a film-maker and ran in most of the newspapers for several days. Then Prince Philip was said to have weighed into the argument. He thought William was being ‘overprotected’ by his father and had ‘overreacted’ to the film crew. In a very rare reaction from Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip issued a strongly worded public statement saying he thought nothing of the sort; the views attributed to him were ‘totally without foundation’.
‘Who knows how the conversation went between them all at Sandringham that Christmas,’ says Colleen. ‘William and Harry would not have been happy about their uncle being made to look a fool.’
A NORMAL STUDENT
Knowing his father was engaged in a major family row would have been upsetting for any student trying to settle quietly into a new university in a new part of the country, surrounded by strangers. How much more devastating then to have it splashed all over the newspapers.
The first few weeks and months were tough but he gradually found his feet and began to make friends. Inevitably, perhaps, he gravitated to the familiar and the safe – the only two old Etonians in his hall of residence, Alasdair Coutts-Wood and Fergus Boyd. He had known them vaguely at Eton and Andrew Gailey had done a little engineering to ensure that there were at least a couple of familiar faces in hall with whom he thought William might become friends.
William was cautious about letting people into his confidence, perhaps rightly. At Ludgrove and Eton he had been protected by the system and he was among children who came from solid middle- and upper-class backgrounds – not known for their anarchic or Republican sympathies. At university there were no safety nets and he was amongst a student population of nearly seven thousand very diverse people from every background under the sun and almost as many countries. There was no presumption that they would be sympathetic to him and no reason to suppose they might be supporters of the monarchy. Many of them, some of the lecturers included, were not. Equally, there were people who threw themselves at him, particularly star-struck American girls, whom he steered clear of. As his father discovered at the same age, those that came forward usually wanted to be friends for all the wrong reasons, while the more genuine people didn’t want to be seen to be sucking up. There was also the very real fear of photographs or stories and snippets being sold to the media. He knew he could trust the sort of people he mixed with at school and at home. Sticking with them was a safer bet.
There was no shortage of people to choose from. The university struggles to shake off its public-school image and the student profile is mixed nationally – about one third are Scottish, one third European, including English, and one third from further overseas, mostly America – but in William’s year there were dozens of boys from Eton. ‘They can appear to be terribly posh,’ says David. ‘Most of them go home for the weekends, but put them all in a minibus together with the others for a week on a field trip and they all get on famously. St Andrews is an incredibly inclusive place.’
William did mix with the state school students in academic and sporting settings;‘It was almost a thing that William was determined to do,’ says David. ‘His very close friends were all from public schools. Interestingly though, he started playing very early for the university water polo team. Water polo is not a particularly public school sport, it is one of the roughest games you can play – it can be brutal – and he was playing in the Scottish league and the Celtic Nations Tournament, so he was going to places like Motherwell [a relatively depressed former steel town south-east of Glasgow], which is an utterly no-nonsense place. In his bathing cap they didn’t know who he was.’
The hall of residence he chose was called St Salvator’s Hall, commonly known as Sally’s, which is one of the smallest and most central, where Kate Middleton also happened to be living that first year, which is how they came to meet. Most early friendships are formed with the people you live with at university, quite simply because you bump into each other all the time, in the corridors and bathrooms, over breakfast and the coffee machine, and clutching armfuls of dirty socks in the laundry room. William had missed Freshers’Week, when there are parties and discos and time for the new intake to work out the geography of the town and make a few friends before the work starts in earnest. In his absence, the public school element in Sally’s had already sought each other out and Kate – with her Marlborough College credentials, her fashionable clothes and her well-kempt mane of dark brown hair – was one of them.
They met with friends, and then found themselves attending the same lectures, walking to and from Sally’s, bumping into each other at the sports centre, in bars and around the town – it’s not a big place, there are just three main streets – and people with anything in common tend to gravitate to one another.
Sally’s was purpose-built in the 1930s – out of the ubiquitous grey stone that is so characteristic of the town – with spacious gardens at the back. William had made it very clear that he didn’t want anything fancy, so he had a standard room to himself but shared a bathroom. He also shared laundry and kitchen facilities, although most meals during the week were provided. At weekends they had to fend for themselves in the evenings but there were plenty of bars, pubs and restaurants serving food, or there was the chippy. The only difference between him and every other student in Sally’s was that his PPOs had a room nearby.
‘Some of the protection people came the year before William arrived and said, “We need to see the rooms,”’ says David. ‘So, because I’m not supposed to be telling anybody anything I had to say to the manager of St Salvator’s, “Look, when is the present student who occupies that room likely to be out?” “She’s never in between 9 and 11 in the morning,” she says, so I took these burly policemen, about eleven of them, up to this room. It was empty, the manager unlocked it, we all stood in the room, they all chatted away. There was then a wonderful pitter-patter along the corridor of a naked student except for a bath towel coming back to her room to get dressed. She handled the police a lot better than the police handled her!
‘The protection people were a scream. They dressed like seventies middle-class students – in cords and jackets. They stood out a mile trying to blend in and look like students.’
The university wanted no guns on campus. ‘I don’t know what they actually did,’ says David. ‘But everyone in the town used to refer casually to a certain vehicle which regularly toured the streets neighbouring the campu
s as “the gun van.”’
David and William met every three or four weeks. ‘Our meetings were not really businesslike because he was incredibly jovial, it was very knockabout and that was the level at which he wanted it – and not, perhaps, the level he expected from a university. I think he had this notion he was in a different hierarchy and it went up to people like me and it would be as formal as some of his other hierarchies were, and he enjoyed the fact that it wasn’t like that. The fact that someone would say, “Ah come off it.” So we got on extremely well, but it was not beyond the superficial in terms of personal things.’
David was much amused by a conversation with the Queen during her Golden Jubilee at Buckingham Palace. He was sent as a representative of one of the six ancient universities, ‘to swear allegiance and say we were loyal citizens’, he says, ‘and I remember the Queen asking me, “How’s William?” as if I saw him every day, as if St Andrews was one quad. I said, “As far as I know, he’s absolutely fine.”’
HORSE-TRADING
At the beginning of William’s second term he was upset by an even bigger family row hitting the news. The News of the World (with Rebekah Wade now at the helm) ran an exclusive story under the headline, ‘HARRY’S DRUG SHAME’. Harry, then sixteen, had confessed he’d been smoking cannabis and drinking under-age and after-hours in the Rattlebone. According to the story, Harry’s behaviour had come to light in November 2001 and his father had taken him for a short sharp shock to Featherstone Lodge, a drug rehabilitation centre in south London, to spend a day talking to recovering drug addicts.
It was another of Mark Bolland’s attempts to repair the Prince of Wales’s reputation. What could have been a wholly negative story had a positive spin: Charles had masterfully handled the scenario that every parent dreads and can identify with. He was not a bad father, as the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was one of the first to proclaim: ‘The way Prince Charles and the Royal Family have handled it is absolutely right and they have done it in a very responsible and, as you would expect, a very sensitive way for their child.’ Peter Martin, chief executive of Addaction, Britain’s largest drug and alcohol treatment agency, said ‘The Prince of Wales has acted with deep sensitivity and very quickly, which is exactly what is needed.’To which the Department of Education added, ‘Parents play a very important role, as demonstrated by Prince Charles, who has set an extremely good example.’