by Penny Junor
While not unusual or surprising in itself, the switch did cause the odd wry smile around the academic community. The campus had been marginally rearranged before William’s arrival. The Art History department, which had been fragmented in buildings all over the town, was brought under one roof in what had been the principal’s house. It was a grand building on the Scores (the most prestigious address in the town) overlooking the sea, and was a hundred-yard walk for William in the mornings from his hall of residence. The incoming principal, Dr Brian Lang, who arrived at the same time as William, took a modest modern house in the town. ‘He conveniently took the view that modern principals didn’t need to live in a house with thirty-seven rooms and have man servants,’ says Niall Scott, tongue firmly in cheek. ‘That allowed us to put all of Art History in one place, which for academic as well as security reasons was better.’
John Walden was William’s Geography tutor throughout the four years and in his final year, supervised two big pieces of independent work, a review essay and a ten-thousand word dissertation. ‘The academic stuff was fine,’ he says, ‘he was a perfectly capable student, no different from any other students in the cohort.’ What fascinated him about William was the security circus. You could walk around the town and not know it was happening but then you got a little peek and realised it was a big operation. ‘I had to discuss all the details of field trips with his PPOs, how many in the class, where we were going and the timings. The PPOs kept a very low profile but wanted to know everything. In the first year the Geography department was near the Scores but the lectures were down on the North Haugh in the Purdie building [on the other side of town], so William had a little commute. They eventually got bored with him having to walk and somebody bought him a pushbike, and thereafter, one PPO would stand in the halls of residence, put him on his bike, send him off down the road, where there was a black car with darkened windows and another PPO waiting to see him arrive safely on the North Haugh, “Yes, he’s arrived,” they would radio. Some terrorist could have come along and shot the wheels off his bike – so in that sense it was very relaxed – but there were a lot of people one way or another working on the operation.’
Brendan says, ‘He always had an eye out for the press and would hang about after class after all the other students had gone. The first time he asked me if I minded and he said it was in case anyone was waiting outside. I remember asking him if he was going to take part in Raisin Monday, the day when students go bonkers and drink copiously, dress up, have foam fights in the Quad and do silly things. He said no, because he was just too vulnerable, if he did anything silly and the press got hold of it …’
Raisin Monday is an age-old tradition at St Andrews. Older students have always taken first years (Bejants/Bejantines) under their wing and shown them the ropes. They are called Academic Parents and on Raisin Monday their ‘children’ express their gratitude by giving them a pound of raisins – deemed as something of a luxury in the days when each student went up to the university with a sack of oatmeal and a barrel of salt-herring to see them through the term. Nowadays, the raisins are more likely to be in liquid form, while in return, the Parents give their ‘children’ formal receipts for the gift; these can be written on anything from a ladder to a chicken – the more awkward or comical the better – which the ‘children’ have to carry around with them for the rest of the day.
‘Otherwise,’ says Brendan, ‘I don’t think his style was cramped too much. St Andrews was the best place he could have come to. It was small, no one made a fuss of him, people were protective.’
Peter says, ‘My feeling in the first year was that he hadn’t quite clicked that this was going to be the freest moment of his whole life.
‘In Tesco’s people treated him as a normal customer. I saw him in a queue for the checkout once and an elderly lady from the town start chatting to him. He dealt with it very well. He wasn’t so friendly she was encouraged to come back for more but he was not off-putting. But he was always aware that someone from the News of the World could be lurking with a lens. When he walked about the town he pulled his baseball cap down low and wrapped an Aston Villa scarf round his face, and you didn’t really notice him.’
The odd paparazzo, of course, lurked. Despite all the agreements, there were still a few hanging around, hoping for a shot of him with a girl or doing something compromising that could be deemed to be in the public interest. One that appeared in several of the tabloids was certainly not in the public interest and, on the face of it, was harmless. It was a shot of him in the street laden with Tesco plastic shopping bags full of groceries. William was incensed and rang Colleen in his father’s office. ‘“Why are these photographers following me?” he was saying. “They shouldn’t be, you’ve got to stop it.” He assumed we could keep the cordon around them and we couldn’t, it wasn’t sustainable. In the PCC code it said up to the age of eighteen, but post-eighteen it was only goodwill and it was much harder to control the media then. He kicked up a real stink about it and it was really quite hard. He couldn’t understand why the media would want these pictures and why it would happen.’
She wonders whether the St James’s Palace press office did both boys a bit of a disservice after their mother died – whether they went too far in their determination to protect them. ‘If you look back at some of the PCC wording, although it applies to everyone, it was skewed to protect those boys.
‘I think we got carried away with it, kept it going too long and the boys got used to it, anyone would. So when they got to eighteen and the rules fell away, they couldn’t understand why we couldn’t control things. I had a lot of problems.
‘I can remember having a conversation with them both when they were expecting that they could go off and do something and I would just sort the media out and no one would hear about it and it would all be fine. I thought, actually what have we done? That’s not real life, we can’t do that any more.’
Sandy disagrees. ‘Maybe we didn’t get it right all the time but I firmly believe that we had to come down [on the media] hard and fast after Diana died. The boys needed to see we could protect them from intrusion, tittle-tattle. Being constantly in the papers for the slightest thing could have been embarrassing for those teenagers within their peer group. Seeing the privacy and respect now extended to the Duchess of Cambridge, I think we set the scene back then and William and Harry were allowed to develop into the men they are today without having a paranoid fear or dislike of the media.’
For all that, not many intrusive photographs made it into the press during William’s four years in Scotland. All his tutors agreed that being able to shop for groceries, have a pint in a pub, walk around the town and come and go like anyone else was a positive element for him at St Andrews.
‘The independence was probably the most important part of what he got out of the university; that, and meeting Catherine, of course. Forget the degree; the degree was probably somewhere quite low down the list. So while he started off more uncomfortable than a lot of kids who come to university on their own for the first time, once he got through that, into his second year maybe, he relaxed and began to really enjoy it.’
The consensus seems to be that he was comfortable when he could make an easy getaway but wasn’t keen on confined spaces, of which the university library was one. Peter Humfrey wasn’t the only one who felt William didn’t spend enough time in the library. His explanation: ‘It’s one thing to walk around the place but quite another to sit somewhere where you can be immediately surrounded by the curious.’
William did agree to go on a field trip to Dundee. It was a first-year human geography trip to look at urban activity, and see how it is separated into different zones. ‘It’s an interesting place,’ says John. ‘It used to have a bad reputation but parts of it have improved dramatically in the last ten or twelve years, although it’s still got some colourful spots. William was amongst a group of students that went to the colourful spots. They were huddled in a group discussing
some low-quality housing, when someone in a flat three floors above threw open the window and, in the broadest of accents, told the group, including the future King, to go f*** themselves.’
KATE
St Andrews in the sun is as beautiful and romantic a place as you could hope to find. The sea glistens, even the grey of the granite glistens, the sands stretch invitingly, and in the warmth of the summer, you wander around the cobbled streets and the ancient ruins of the Castle and the Cathedral and marvel at living in such an ancient and uplifting place. But in winter, when the temperature drops, the days are short, the sky is thunderous, the sea grey and angry, it can be as miserable as sin. William was not the first undergraduate to go through a period of wanting to leave the place.
David Corner began to realise at the end of the first term that he was worried. ‘I would get halfway through a conversation about something boring and I would say, “How are you?” and he would say, “I’m okay” and you could tell he was not as okay as he had been two months before, and I would say, “Is there anything I can do?” and he would say, “David, that’s awfully kind but no, I’m okay.” And it was a stiff upper lip in a certain sense that was very difficult to break down. So what I did was, I said, “You’ve got my phone number. If ever you feel you want to ring it, you ring it – and I’d say that to any student, William, in this situation.” I think we had one talk that pierced the surface but no more. One of his themes time and time and time again was, “How will this affect other students?” It was extraordinarily generous of him because he was under pressure, but that was the watchword for everything.’
The accepted wisdom is that William was homesick and felt cut off being so far away from his family. He himself has said he was not so much homesick as feeling daunted. David Corner thinks the real problem was one that afflicts a lot of students: self-doubt. ‘I think he was enjoying some subjects more than others. Social anthropology is tough, very theoretical and William is quite a practical person. It was no coincidence he eventually got to geography, which is almost tangible. St Andrews has lots of very bright students. I remember my own experience of going to Oxford from a Birmingham school; you talk to your peers and they all seem to know more than you do, and it was that sort of reaction partly. Also perhaps loneliness.
‘He was the sort of student who was never going to get into academic difficulty, a student who was conscientious. What I noticed as an outsider was this tremendous thing that I suspect most members of the family have, which is a notion of obedience, a notion that you do what you’re told. That was very obvious when they ever talked about the Queen, but it was also obvious about life in general. He’s not the brightest student we’ve ever had but he was always a conscientious student and got it done. And when he couldn’t get any peace, he used to go and sit in the top of the local police station and do his essays; there was a nest where Fife police met the protection squad and he used to go in there and do his work.
‘I think it was because he was lonely that he became so close to the group that became housemates in his last three years and who were at his wedding. He needed them and they were a great lot, incredibly protective. I remember seeing them once in Anstruther [a fishing village along the coast]. He’d gone to get some fish and chips and I happened to be sitting outside in a car waiting for my wife, and I saw a local weaving his way up the road, pointing a finger and cursing and muttering. It was very interesting to see their group movement. They almost formed a shell around William and I thought how mature for kids of that age. He’d started doing things that were mostly male, water polo and rugby, sea swimming and scuba diving at Elie. I think he was on his way back from diving at Elie when I saw him having fish and chips. They ate it on the pavement out of paper.’
It was several months before he felt comfortable enough to engage with university life and there were many weekends when he disappeared to see friends at Edinburgh university, or visit Balmoral or Gloucestershire to hang out with his childhood friends. He thought long and hard about leaving St Andrews and had many conversations with his father who tried to dissuade him, also with his grandfather, who had no time for quitters. Another valuable voice was that of his old house master at Eton, Andrew Gailey, always understanding, calm and wise. You can be sure that in the end it was William’s decision and his alone. He decided to stay and tough it out, which was undoubtedly a welcome decision for the university, the fortunes of which could have been seriously compromised had he left. It was certainly the right decision for William. There would have been unfortunate echoes of Prince Edward’s decision at a similar age to quit the Royal Marines a third of the way through a gruelling year-long Commando course. Not many in the media saw it as the courageous decision it was – most of the press hung Edward out to dry.
One of the voices William listened to during that time was Kate Middleton’s. She was also away from her comfort zone for the first time during that first year and was as daunted by some elements of this new life as he was.
Kate had been one of the least pushy of the girls he met in that first year. She had a quiet, confident presence and was friendly and laughed easily. She was the sort of person with whom it felt safe to open up a little, someone who had depth and empathy. They were both a long way from home and their backgrounds were very different, but by coincidence, they had both been Raleigh venturers to the same place in Chile the year before. Kate’s expedition had followed immediately after William’s, so they knew many of the same people and places and could compare notes, share stories and laugh about the discomforts together. They immediately had a bond. They were also, they discovered, both keen tennis players, swimmers and skiers and all-round sports enthusiasts. And they were both studying History of Art, so they went to lectures together and for coffees afterwards, and for drinks in the pubs and wine bars; they swam and surfed together and played tennis on the university courts. As time passed it developed into a close and mutually supportive friendship.
There had been no thunderbolt when they met. Asked for her first impression of William during their engagement interview, Kate said, ‘I actually think I went bright red when I met you and sort of scuttled off, feeling very shy about meeting you.’ As commonly happens, she started going out with a fourth-year student, Rupert Finch; and William’s eye was also roving elsewhere. According to their fellow students, most girls’ reaction to him at that time was, ‘What a nice guy, and looking back he was cute, but girls didn’t go, “Wow he’s so good looking”.’ (Except perhaps for the Americans who fell at his feet.) Kate was said to have had a photograph of William on her wall at school but she knocked that myth on the head when asked about it in their engagement interview. ‘There wasn’t just one, there were about twenty,’ said William. ‘He wishes,’ said Kate. ‘No, I had the Levi’s guy on my wall, not a picture of William, sorry.’ To which William replied, ‘It was me in Levi’s, honestly.’ The truth is, it was more than a year before they were anything other than very good friends, and making each other laugh was an important part of it.
Kate left little impression on the academic staff at St Andrews, who confess that when lecturing to a sea of faces, it’s rare for one to stand out. ‘She was another girl in a pashmina,’ one said. ‘I wouldn’t have remembered her at all if I hadn’t seen something in the newspaper in the second semester. When I read about her charismatic personality … well, maybe it’s developed – but it wasn’t that obvious then. Sometimes students passing through you know are headed for great things, but I didn’t notice her in four years.’ Those organising the Raleigh expedition have no strong memory of her either. They too, like university professors, are processing hundreds of young people every year and one more girl battling the elements, with unwashed hair and no make-up, in grubby jeans, is easy to miss. When Malcolm Sutherland looks back at photographs of Kate in Chile, compared with how she looks now, he can’t believe it’s the same girl.
But part of her allure for William was that she didn’t stand out. Today, with the design
er frocks, the killer heels, the make-up and the perfectly tended hair, she looks as though she was made for the red carpet, but that wasn’t how she looked when William fell in love with her. She looked like any number of attractive young girls, with a good figure and ready smile. She was natural and relaxed, pretty without ever looking as though she was trying too hard. Although her parents were extremely wealthy and she had been to a top school, she wasn’t a ‘Sloane Ranger’ or a ‘Ya’, as so many of the girls he knew in Gloucestershire and London were – and like so many of the girls who hung around him at St Andrews too. Her parents were resoundingly middle class; she spoke without an exaggerated upper-class accent, and she was refreshingly shy, yet intelligent and strong.
Not so shy, however, that she wasn’t prepared to stride down an improvised catwalk in the Students’ Union wearing little more than a bra and pants – but it was for charity, and compared with what some of the other models had on she was modesty itself. It was an annual event called Just Walk, said to be ‘Scotland’s most prestigious fashion show’ – and for the record did not happen at the 5-star St Andrew’s Bay Hotel but at what is arguably the ugliest and tattiest building in the town. The event is entirely run by students to raise money for charity while supporting up-and-coming fashion designers, and William is said to have paid £200 for his ticket and seen Kate in an altogether new light, apparently remarking to his friend, ‘Wow, Fergus, Kate’s hot!’ The flimsy dress, designed by Charlotte Todd, who was then a fashion student, was intended to be a skirt but someone decided it would look better worn as a dress. The photograph has become as iconic as the picture of Diana in her diaphanous skirt. As for the dress itself, it lay boxed in the bottom of Charlotte’s mother’s wardrobe for eight years and was sold at auction in 2011 for a staggering £78,000.