Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  Her mind, you often felt, was elsewhere. Her sisters were fairly good academically. Sarah was a brilliant pianist. Jane wasn’t far behind. So she had a lot to live up to. She also came late to the school, which is always a disadvantage. Friendships are already formed, everybody knows the staff already. They’ve already started on their course of work. So she had that to cope with as well.

  Occasionally in repose her face would look sad, but I wouldn’t have said that she was a sad person. She was always full of fun and very, very lively and always doing things. She wasn’t moping around or anything like that. I think she was quite happy at West Heath.

  The Shand Kydds bought a romantic hill farm on the Isle of Seil near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Diana had a poster of Seil over her bed at West Heath and took friends there in the holidays, spending her time playing with lobster pots on the beach. She still saw Princes Andrew and Edward regularly in Norfolk. Diana’s sisters had it in mind that she might make a suitable bride for Prince Andrew and she did, for a while, correspond with him at school. Their teasing ambition for her in this direction is one of many explanations that have been produced for her nickname ‘Duch’, short for Duchess. Her brother Charles denies this version, saying that they named her Duchess after the elegant leading feline in Walt Disney’s cartoon The Aristocats.

  * * *

  Aristocat was certainly appropriate for the Spencers. About three hundred and fifty years before her birth, the family bought their peerage for £3,000 in hard cash from the impoverished James I. The first Lord Spencer’s introduction to the House of Lords infuriated another member so much that he interrupted Spencer’s speech on the conduct of affairs in previous reigns, saying with heavy sarcasm: ‘When these things were doing the noble Lord’s ancestors were keeping sheep!’

  But measured in ready cash, that newly ennobled Spencer soon became the richest man in the land. Having founded their wealth on wool, his family captured the London meat contracts and grew richer. With enough gold to fund dynastic ambitions, they acquired a genealogy from the College of Heralds that traced their line through the Despensers to the retinue of William the Conqueror. It was not until 1901 that their right to the Despenser coat of arms was declared a fraud and their pedigree exposed as near-total fabrication. But by then they had been playing a leading role in the affairs of Great Britain for a good century more than the present Royal Family.

  Indeed, the Spencers had helped place the Royal Family on the throne. It was another Spencer who, in 1693, brokered the deal by which William III received the support of the noble families that had fought on the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War. Spencer, described as ‘the most subtil working villain on the face of the earth’, hosted a conference at Althorp, a conference of ‘Great Men’. There, King William accepted the principles of limited monarchy. When his successor Queen Anne died in 1714 without producing the requisite Protestant heir, the Spencers were among the same great families who imported the Elector of Hanover from Germany to be King George I.

  The new German royals found themselves in a country famed for removing inconvenient monarchs, with a parliament that regarded itself as sovereign and a haughty aristocracy that could match them for wealth. For three generations they spent as much time as possible in Hanover. Admittedly, through the long reign of Victoria, the people became less boisterously critical of their imported royals. But a Spencer, in particular, was always liable to remember that meeting at Althorp in 1693 where aristocracy and royalty had met eye to eye.

  2

  I’m a Lady

  * * *

  In April 1975 Jack Spencer died at the age of eighty-three. Althorp was in the hands of Diana’s father at last. Overnight he became an earl, and his children lords and ladies. Penny Walker remembers Diana hearing the news: ‘She rushed along the corridor with her dressing gown billowing out behind her, saying “I’m a Lady, I’m Lady Diana now”. She was so excited.’

  The family moved into their new home, 121 rooms and 13,000 acres set in gently rolling English farmland north-west of Northampton. To deal with four-million-pound death duties, the new Earl Spencer sold two van Dycks. He also introduced a new member to the family: his girlfriend, Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, daughter of Barbara Cartland. Johnny had met Raine when she had been working on What Is Our Heritage?, a book produced by the London County Council. They soon began an affair. In 1975 Lord Dartmouth divorced her and in July 1976 she married Johnny, becoming Countess Spencer. She was a fixture at Althorp from the moment Johnny took over, and was the driving force behind the reforms that were soon under way there. Raine imposed her own exacting standards on the household servants and the tenants.

  The children hated Raine at first sight. She was larger than life, a cartoon aristocrat, all frills and furs but with an iron will. And their father was putty in her hands. Diana had been introduced to Raine in Norfolk when she was eleven. At that time she, her sisters and the nanny had all been summoned to lunch to meet their father’s new girlfriend. She did not make a very good impression. After a few edgy exchanges, Sarah burped loudly. Her father sent her out of the room, and Diana followed in sisterly solidarity. They made no effort to conceal their detestation for the extraordinary woman who now claimed their father’s time and affections.

  After the family moved to Althorp, Diana and Charles Spencer were mostly away at school. They went to Northamptonshire only for part of the school holidays and on those weekends when they did not visit their mother. For Jane and Sarah visits were even rarer.

  * * *

  At West Heath, Diana’s teachers had discovered a sphere in which she excelled. The Sevenoaks Voluntary Service sought to persuade local schools to make visits to Darenth Park, a large hospital for the mentally and physically handicapped. West Heath willingly joined in and appealed for volunteers. Diana was one of the first in her class to raise her hand.

  Muriel Stevens organised the visits. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening about seven o’clock their minibuses would pull up outside the main doors and slightly apprehensive teenagers dressed in jeans would tumble out. It was not an experience for the faint-hearted. The hospital was isolated – a huge, looming Victorian Gothic edifice surrounded by high walls. Muriel remembers that when the children came through the great doors into the bright light the patients would be waiting for them, noisy, their voices echoing in the high-ceilinged hall:

  It was intimidating to walk into that huge place with the level of noise and to see some of the very severely handicapped people that we did have. Some of them would be in wheelchairs. Some of them would be sitting on chairs and needed encouragement to move to get off them. Others would rush up and that in itself can be quite frightening, because they were just so delighted to see these young people they would rush up and of course they would touch their hair, grab their hands. And if you’re actually not used to it, that can be very frightening. Diana was never frightened. She was extremely relaxed in that setting which, for a young person of her age, was incredible.

  She would immediately make friends and she would laugh. Diana’s echoing laughter is a sound that Muriel has never forgotten.

  That tremendous laugh! That joyous sound! And it was wonderful because you wouldn’t actually know what she was laughing at, or have any idea at all what had amused her, but at the sound alone you would find yourself smiling, and as you got closer and you heard it more, you’d find yourself laughing. It was a terrific sound . . .

  Then the dancing would begin. All the volunteers were told that it was important to bend down to the level of the people in the wheelchairs and hold their hands. Dancing with people in wheelchairs was not easy and most could do no more than push their partners from behind. Diana was different. She was tall and lithe and enthusiastic and she had been trained to dance:

  Diana actually danced backwards and drew the wheelchair towards her, by holding the arms of the wheelchair. Now that is incredibly agile and clever and there are not many people who could maintain their balance.
And she kept an extremely good rhythm.

  At Darenth Park, Diana was taught the principles of how to communicate with such vulnerable people in a way that would put them at their ease:

  Touch was the main means of communication and Diana actually took that very much to heart, and we never had to remind Diana of that. We did have to remind some of the other young people – you know, ‘Look it would be better if you hold hands, stroke’ – Diana we never had to remind.

  One of Diana’s relatives told us she had seen something special in her too.

  It was an indefinable quality, something very rare and rather beautiful. I was not surprised years later when she emerged as a great communicator. Even as a young child she had a strange way of getting through to people.

  * * *

  Later in her life Diana would make similar visits in secret, satisfying a desire for contact with people in distress. Few feel this need to give and receive instant emotional contact, to go straight to the heart of a stranger’s deepest feelings. Normally we hold back, embarrassed, scared of saying the wrong thing. But not Diana.

  In 1995, two years before she died, Diana told Panorama interviewer Martin Bashir and a billion others: ‘I know I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, and I want to do that.’ In our interviews we repeatedly invited people from the medical and charity worlds to criticise such an overblown idea. How could this girl from the inner circle of privilege give love to the world, this girl who had never known poverty or hunger? Time and again we were asked in turn, ‘Who are you – who haven’t seen her in action, who haven’t felt it – to contradict her?’

  * * *

  On the dormitory walls horses were giving way to pop stars. But Diana Spencer’s pin-up wasn’t a singer: he was Charles, Prince of Wales.

  In the mid- to late 1970s there was nothing peculiar about this. The Prince of Wales was very much in the news and widely regarded as the most eligible bachelor in the world. The newspapers called him ‘Action Man’. His image was daring and athletic, that of a man prepared to compete at anything. He had served with the RAF, the Navy and the Fleet Air Arm and done his best to undergo the most dangerous trials in their respective training programmes. And like the adaptable military toy from which he took his nickname, Charles was regularly seen in the appropriate uniforms in which to dive, parachute, pilot planes and helicopters, ride polo ponies, captain boats or ski. He was photographed and filmed with a variety of glamorous women – actresses, models and pop singers. Dark-haired, tanned and muscular, he would be striding confidently across a polo field wearing expensive sunglasses and the most sharply cut of navy blazers. He was known to be looking for a bride, and speculation in the press had already focused on several suitable aristocrats, including Lady Jane Wellesley and Davina Sheffield.

  In the late 1970s one writer was allowed to sample Charles’s lifestyle. A Sunday Times journalist named Anthony Holden was researching a biography to mark the Prince’s thirtieth birthday. He flew in Charles’s helicopter, dined at Buckingham Palace, met many of Charles’s friends:

  I spent eighteen months, while doing the book, travelling all over the place with him . . . there was a trip through the Amazon where I was the only journalist, and we had dinner together in the hotel – it’s unthinkable all these years later.

  Holden wrote of the glittering junior court that was gathering around the Prince of Wales and predicted that ‘a place at his table will be the most sought after in the land’. He wrote about Charles’s ‘magic’, the way he was the instant focus of attention at any party or meeting, the flurry of charged excitement that accompanied him everywhere he went.

  Property developer Peter Palumbo had known Prince Charles since he was sixteen. They played polo together at Windsor.

  He had all the aces – he had everything. He was the future King of England, he was wealthy, he was good looking, he was intelligent, he was sporting, he was a man of action, and he was a very considerable person. He was immensely eligible. I thought the Prince of Wales was quite wonderful. I mean, he was funny, he was obviously full of his responsibility in terms of public duty, but he was amusing and he was kind. He was a compassionate person and we had some good times at Windsor Park playing polo. There was enormous speculation all the time in the press and in social circles about who he might marry – after all, it was a very topical interest – and as the years went by and he had not married, speculation became even more fevered.

  Penny Walker remembers that Diana idolised the Prince from the age of about thirteen or fourteen, and had a picture of him near her bed. Other West Heath girls remember that Charles was much discussed in their school. Most of the girls in Diana’s peer group were expected to marry well and he was, without doubt, the most eligible man they could imagine. Diana could already boast of him as a family friend. And then, during 1977, in the summer after Diana sat for her O-levels, he was a particularly close friend of her elder sister Sarah. The press called it a romance, so that was how everyone thought of it, but Diana’s uncle Robert Spencer told us that Charles knew perfectly well that Sarah was in love with Gerald Grosvenor, who had just broken up with her, and that he was helping her through a difficult time.

  For Diana the most exciting thing was that her sister spent the summer ‘dating’ the heir to the throne. And in the autumn Charles accepted an invitation to go shooting on the estate at Althorp. It was November 1977 and Diana was sixteen. Having failed all of her five O-levels the previous summer, she was revising for a second attempt, but she made sure she was at home that weekend. In a ploughed field near the village of Nobottle, Charles met Sarah’s little sister. She made an immediate impression. He found her ‘jolly’ and ‘bouncy’, the same slightly plump, noisy teenager that West Heath friends recall. And she was unfazed by his celebrity, chatting away happily without a trace of embarrassment.

  Once she got back to school she couldn’t wait to show off about it, as Penny Walker recalls:

  She rushed into school on the Monday after her weekend away, saying, ‘I’ve met him. I’ve met him at last.’ And she had. She’d met him in the ploughed field, and her dream had come true. She’d come face to face. It was just something that you knew was part of her life. She had this idealistic crush if you like on Prince Charles and it was always there, but I never dreamt that it would actually happen.

  * * *

  Diana failed her O-levels again so, instead of moving on to the sixth form she was hurriedly booked into the Institut Alpin Vidamanette near Gstaad in Switzerland, an old-fashioned finishing school, where skiing and cookery were high on the curriculum. She had never been confident about schoolwork. When she was small her clever brother Charles had taunted her, ‘Brian! Brian!’ after the slow snail in the children’s programme The Magic Roundabout. Throughout her life she would make self-deprecating asides about her dimness (‘brain the size of a pea, I’ve got’, ‘in the academic department you might as well forget about it’).

  The finishing school conducted its business entirely in French. Diana was one of only nine English-speaking girls out of seventy-two. Her French was far from fluent and she was shy about making mistakes. Consequently she had difficulty fitting in. The only thing she did enjoy was the skiing. Mary Clarke says that Diana wrote to her soon after arriving in Switzerland about what a miserable time she was having. Diana also wrote long, pleading letters to her parents saying how unhappy she was and asking them to let her come back immediately.

  As she continued to blush in silent embarrassment rather than mumble bad French, Sarah came to nearby Klosters on a much-publicised skiing holiday with Prince Charles. There was speculation back home about whether Charles was going to propose but, on her return, Sarah appeared to sabotage any possibility. She had what seemed a harmless conversation with the press. Asked whether she would marry the Prince, she replied that when she did marry it would be for love and that it didn’t matter whether the man concerned was a prince or a dustman. If there had been any possibi
lity of romance, these unexceptional words were enough to end it. Just talking about him was, it seemed, enough to disqualify an entrant in the royal marriage stakes. Diana watched and took careful note.

  Her second sister Jane was getting married. Her match was less ambitious, but it still brought her within the ambit of the Royal Family. She was to wed Robert Fellowes, son of the land agent who ran Sandringham, and now the Queen’s assistant private secretary.

  In April, after a term and many begging letters, Diana was allowed to leave her finishing school and return to her mother’s home in Cadogan Place. The family considered what to do. She needed a social life and she needed some interests. First came a ten-week cookery course in September 1978. And then, just as she began it, she learned that her father was dangerously ill.

  * * *

  That September, Johnny Spencer nearly died. He collapsed after complaining of a headache and was rushed to Northampton General Hospital. It was a brain haemorrhage. Raine and the four children were summoned to his bedside and told that his chances of survival were slim.

  But Raine was not prepared to allow Johnny to die without a fight. She took charge and gambled, insisting that he be moved to London and insisting that the doctors operate straight away. He survived, but only just. Raine then kept him alive, according to family legend, by the pure force of her willpower, literally ordering him to get better. Her constant presence by the bedside made the children feel excluded. Then she took two steps that may have saved him. One was to obtain an untested drug from Germany; the other was to get the vicar of All Saints Church, Northampton to exorcise the ghost of his father.

  Whether through intercession pharmaceutical or spiritual, Johnny Spencer did recover, though he remained physically weak and heavily dependent on his wife. As he recuperated at home, Raine decided that now was the moment to leave her mark on Althorp for ever. She began a process of modernisation, installing en suite bathrooms with central heating. She carpeted the long corridors, she replaced faded, water-stained silk wall coverings with new ones in lurid pinks. All that she put in was frilly, garish and expensive. To achieve this transformation of the interior decor, she sold what Charles Spencer later estimated to be one fifth of the contents of the house. Most was disposed of privately to Bond Street dealers, and some large profits were made from subsequent resale. As all this happened, Earl Spencer beamed his weak approval while his heir and his daughters looked on, steaming with sullen fury. The final affront to family pride came when the famous portrait of Robert, 1st Lord Spencer, which had dominated the grand staircase for centuries, was replaced by a full-length picture of Raine in her beauteous youth.