by Penny Junor
The school is huge but it is divided into twenty-five houses, each with about fifty boys, and roughly ten to a year group, and that is where most of them eat, sleep, socialize and study, each of them with a study/bedroom to themselves. Lessons, or “divs” are held in classrooms, “schools,” around the town. Each house master has a dame, whom the boys address as “ma’am,” to look after the pastoral welfare of the boys and deal with laundry, administration, catering and domestic issues. Harry’s was Elizabeth Heathcote, who was said to be “a bit firm but very nice.” Although the boys have to change their own sheets and make their own beds, the rooms are kept clean by “boys’ maids,” who are local women, inured to the smell of dirty socks, who often become very fond of the boys they look after.
Pubs are out of bounds, but otherwise boys have the run of the town in their spare time. Harry often used to walk across the bridge into Windsor and have tea with his grandmother at Windsor Castle. And, in the final two years, they can go to the school’s own pub, called Tap, down an alleyway off the High Street. It serves beer, cider and snacks, but no one’s allowed more than two pints and being drunk is a punishable offence.
Harry followed William into Manor House, known as ALHG after house master Andrew Gailey’s initials, which is located in the center of the school, next to the College Library and “the Burning Bush” (an elaborate wrought-iron street lamp). College is where the scholars live, and Bekynton is a canteen, where those boys in houses with no dining rooms go for their meals.
Every boarding house has two entrances, the Boys’ Door, leading into the boys’ living area, and the door to the Private Side, where the house master lives with his wife and family, if he has one. Dr. Gailey was Irish, as was his wife, Shauna, and they had a young daughter, and several pets including a couple of springer spaniels, Rosie and Jenny. Eric Anderson would no doubt have been key in suggesting Andrew Gailey as house master for the Princes: a historian, a man of great humanity and humor, whom everyone agrees played an enormous role in their lives. He was crucial in supporting and steering them both, with their very different needs, through some nightmarish times, without short-changing the other forty-eight boys in his care.
As Colleen Harris says, “He’s a very, very special man, absolutely adorable and he’s had an enormous influence on them and has been there for some of the really difficult times in their lives and helped them through. Andrew was there day in day out helping them. When the papers were bad he prepared them, he didn’t remove them. You can’t move on if your mother’s there in the newspaper every day.” He was the right man in the right place at the right time; he remains a friend, confidant and mentor, and guards their secrets faithfully.
Harry didn’t find Eton easy—and the chances are that Dr. Gailey didn’t find Harry all that easy at times either. The other new boys in his year didn’t immediately warm to him; he gave the impression of being pleased with himself, which may have been nothing more than a defense mechanism, but it didn’t go down well. He struggled with the academic work and found it hard being compared yet again to his brother, who was the all-round model student: William was popular among his peers, the teaching staff liked him, and he was as successful in the classroom as he was on the playing fields.
Being at the bottom of the academic heap in any school is difficult, and at that time Eton had a very questionable policy of openly listing every boy’s overall marks at the end of the term, so it was no secret where anyone came. One way and another, they were not his happiest years, but Harry went some way to rescuing his reputation and self-esteem on the sports field. He could also release some of the anger that contemporaries say raged inside him, particularly during his early years at Eton. Where that anger came from is pure speculation; there were plenty of possible causes. It could have been that he felt he didn’t fit the Etonian ideal; it could have been the abnormality of everything about his life, the feeling of living in a goldfish bowl, of being an object of constant fascination. It could have been the feeling of being second best—the spare. It could have been a reaction to the upsets and difficulties of his childhood. It could have been the stories about his mother that still filled the newspapers and the whispering about who his father really was. Or it could quite simply have been grief—the loss of his mother—and maybe anger that the whole nation had hijacked something that to him was intensely personal and private. Everyone seemed to feel entitled to an opinion about his mother, a woman they had never met—despite Sandy’s plea on his behalf to move on and let her memory rest in peace, it hadn’t happened. He would find sanctuary in the calm of the Drawing Schools, where he spent a lot of his time with equally angst-ridden teenagers, and transferred his feelings onto canvas.
The more physical outlet for those feelings was sport, in which Harry excelled, becoming House Captain of Games. He was widely regarded as a formidable opponent, fiercely competitive. In the Michaelmas and Lent Halves he played football, but his passions were rugby and the Wall Game. The Wall Game is a fearsome and largely inexplicable hybrid unique to Eton (and apocryphally perhaps, Ford Open Prison, where it has been known for Old Etonians to stay from time to time). It is played between Collegers and Oppidans—that is to say, scholars and the rest of the school—and since College owns the wall the game is played against, their team usually has the upper hand. The two teams of sweaty boys covered in mud form a “bully” or a scrum up against a high redbrick wall and push against each other, endeavoring to free the ball. It rarely happens; goals are scored every hundred years on average, and if the scrum moves more than a couple of feet in either direction it’s considered an exciting match.
During the summer, the main sports Harry played for the school were cricket, which made him a “dry bob”—as opposed to rowers who were “wet bobs”—and polo, which he often played at the Guards’ Polo Club over the bridge at Windsor, where his father and grandfather used to play.
His other great enthusiasm at Eton was the Combined Cadet Force, which he signed up for in “D block,” his third year, as soon as he could, and where at last he was able to indulge his childhood fantasies about becoming a soldier. He learned weapon handling, foot drill, first aid, battle skills, signals, navigation and field craft in the basic training, and then went on to the advanced course, which included leadership exercises, shooting, writing and delivering orders, advanced infantry tactics and close target reconnaissance. In every Half he went off on a weekend exercise or “corps scheme,” where the boys did more intensive training, and in the Summer Half they went to a range and fired live ammunition.
He was awarded the highest rank of Cadet Officer in his last year, and in May 2003 he led the annual CCF Tattoo, which is the highlight of the year. It takes place on the evening before the “Fourth of June,” Eton’s equivalent of speech day (which rarely actually happens on 4 June) when parents, grandparents, siblings and Old Etonians descend with picnics, to wander around the school looking at exhibits of work, to watch cricket and other games, have Pimms with their boys’ house masters, and line the riverbank for the traditional parade of boats. In front of an audience of over 800 people, eighteen-year-old Harry as Parade Commander, with ceremonial sword in hand, marched straight-backed on to College Field, after hours of rehearsal, and commanded the forty-eight-strong Guard of Honour.
Harry’s greatest disappointment at Eton was that, unlike his brother, he didn’t become a member of Pop—but it’s a disappointment he honorably shares with most Old Etonians, including his former Private Secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton. Pop, more properly known as The Eton Society, is highly coveted, and only bestowed on nineteen of the most popular and successful boys in their final year. It used to be a debating society, but today it consists of prefects elected by their peers, and with the title comes all sorts of privileges, including the right to wear wing collars, white bow ties, spongebag trousers and colorful waistcoats of their own choice. Harry had to wear black to the bitter end.
THE FOURTH ESTATE
Harry left E
ton in the summer of 2003 with two A levels—Grade D in Geography and B in Art. He was never destined for university; having set his sights on an Army career long ago, all he cared about was getting good enough grades to get him over the first hurdle towards an officer training course at Sandhurst. And he did.
The only sour note was that as he began his first week at Sandhurst two years later in May 2005, a former art teacher at Eton, Sarah Forsyth, accused him in an employment tribunal of having cheated in the course work for his A level and thereby not having earned the B he had been awarded. Her allegations had already been published in the News of the World. She claimed she had been asked to write the text for his Expressive Project and had secretly tape-recorded Harry admitting it.
Clarence House issued a statement saying: “It is not true that Harry cheated in his exams. These are unfounded allegations by a disaffected teacher in the context of her dispute with the school. A full investigation into these allegations was held by the relevant exam board which found no evidence to support the claims.” This was confirmed by a senior Edexcel examiner, who double-checked the work, which made up around 20 percent of the final grade, and concluded that the anonymous candidate had not cheated.
A spokesman for Eton College said: “We believe these allegations to be absurd. They are not just untrue—the exam board confirmed this—but are of no relevance to the tribunal case whatsoever. Eton refused to give in to what appeared to be a crude attempt to embarrass the college into paying money. That is why we are determined to fight this matter in tribunal.”
After the tribunal, Paddy Harverson, who had been brought in as the Prince of Wales’s new PR supremo in 2004—one of many changes—told the media that the allegations had previously been disproved and it was unfair for the teacher’s lawyers to give the court only a small portion of the tape. He accused them of having “placed their own interpretation upon it.”
He went on. “The tape… contains barely audible half-sentences, and it appears to have been edited,” he said. “It is also difficult to tell what Harry is saying and what he is referring to, due to the poor quality of the recording and the disjointed nature of the tape. The fact remains Harry did not cheat.”
To mark the end of his five years at Eton, Harry had agreed to a pose for a set of photographs showing him engaged in various activities around the school during his final term. They were the quid pro quo for being more or less left alone by the press during those years.
Maintaining a good relationship with the media was—and still is today—vital. But it has always been a balancing act for those employed by the Household to manage it. The monarchy relies upon the oxygen of the media for its life blood (it must not just be relevant, it must be seen to be relevant), but as William and Harry saw so painfully when they were growing up, if the balance is upset, and the boundary between their private and public personas is badly violated, then the result can be catastrophic. The PCC Code of Conduct covered the boys to the age of eighteen, after which it was a constant battle to keep stories out of the press, and for every one that appeared, many more were suppressed; and much of the time it was the result of good old-fashioned horse-trading.
“We’d say, ‘Okay, you’ve got that, but let’s go with this, if you don’t say anything about that.’ There was a lot of negotiation like that going on,” says Colleen. “There were many times when we managed to protect William and Harry and keep them out of the media when they were up to mischievous things. Nothing terrible, nothing criminal, but things they wouldn’t have wanted the media to write about.” Their success was partly down to good relationships with the press, but partly because she and Sandy discussed things with the boys ahead of time. “ ‘What could happen if you did this, and what might happen if you did that?’ They might not have always agreed but we worked through scenarios.” Sandy would always say to them, “Don’t ever do anything that you don’t want to see in a newspaper at some stage.” One can only conclude that William heeded her advice more than Harry.
But Harry was always more of a risk taker; he was a typical last-born child in that respect and, being the spare, always had more freedom to behave as he wanted; he could get away with misdemeanors that William, as heir, could never have contemplated—or, as a typical, cautious, respectful firstborn would never have contemplated. Not that William was a saint. There are plenty of stories about him at local pubs and parties that never went any further. As a friend who knows them both well says, “The idea of Harry being the wild one and William the good one is nonsense. They were both wild; Harry was just the one who got caught.” Harry didn’t do things in half-measures; he didn’t share his brother’s sense of responsibility or decorum. He loved being the center of attention, the clown, the one who made everyone laugh. He was a party animal, he was rebellious and no great lover of authority; but Harry always, always had a kind heart.
As Sandy says, “He was quite amazing. He’d go from this naughty child that one minute you wanted to throttle, to this quite compassionate grown-up person. He is one of the nicest kids I’ve met. Yes, he was a bit of a rebel and don’t you love a boy who’s a rebel? Everyone does. But inside there was something about him, he could always see another person’s point of view at a very young age.”
Colleen vividly remembers the first year she had to organize the annual skiing photo call at Klosters. It was a year when there was no snow on the mountains, so she postponed it, but by that time the media had all arrived in the village. Most of them were more than happy to hang around and wait for snow, but some couldn’t and so, as an interim solution, she found a location outside the hotel. William, Harry and their father all duly performed for the cameras. But she had made it clear to them that once the snow arrived, they would have to do it all over again for all the other photographers. “They didn’t hear that bit,” she says with a laugh, so when she told them, after a night of heavy snowfall, that they were needed up the mountains, it took some negotiating.
“My God. I asked the Prince of Wales and he said, ‘Yes, absolutely fine, go ahead. You talk to William.’ So I had to go and chat to William. Harry was there as well—they were watching something on the telly. It was hysterical, a program called Banzai which they would shout every so often. Harry kept bursting into laughter; the Prince of Wales was sitting in the corner reading, looking up at me. So I said, ‘We’ve got to do this photo call.’ William said, ‘No, we’ve done a photo call.’ ‘No, that was only for some of the media, the ones that had to leave. Now we need to do another one, otherwise you’re going to have all the paparazzi following you around for the rest of the week. So let’s just go and do a nice big one up the mountain.’ ‘No, I’m not doing it.’
“Now, I’ve got 150 media,” says Colleen; “it’s my first trip, Sandy’s sick so I can’t ring her and I’m sitting there with this belligerent young man. This carried on backwards and forwards for a bit and in the end, I just lost it, the mummy in me came out and I said, ‘Look, you’re doing it, otherwise you’re all going to be in trouble and it will be a rotten week for everybody. It won’t hurt you, it’ll be good for you, dah, dah, dah, dah,’ and went mad, and he just sat there.
“Then Harry said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it William. Get out the way, Colleen, I’m watching something,’ and that was it. So Harry got the deal signed for me. What a nightmare. I couldn’t believe it. If you look at the photos now, that was the photo shoot where the public first heard William speak. Up on the mountain at Klosters with Harry and his father and I asked an ITN guy to ask him a question, ‘Say “How’s it going?,” ’ and he responded. It was a great photo call. They laughed, they chatted, they did it brilliantly; the best one they’d ever done. And it was a turning point. The media went crazy because they’d never heard him speak on camera before. It was a kind of two fingers up to me I think, it was like, ‘Yeah, I can do it if I want to, when the mood takes me. I can deliver.’ ”
But she doesn’t think the press office always got it right. She remembers Harry breaking h
is arm at Eton and her and her colleagues not letting the media report it. “We said it was a private matter because it happened at school and the media were saying, ‘Hang on a minute, this is of public interest,’ and we said, ‘Yes, but it’s not a proper break so it doesn’t count.’ ”
The most extraordinary examples of horse-trading that ever went on was in January 2002 when Harry was thrown to the lions in order to make his father look good. The News of the World (with Rebekah Wade now at the helm) ran a seven-page exclusive story under the headline, “HARRY’S DRUG SHAME.” According to the story, Harry, then sixteen, had been smoking cannabis and drinking heavily underage and after-hours in the Rattlebone Inn, a pub in the village of Sherston, just a few miles from Highgrove. He had been so drunk that on one occasion, at the end of a lock-in, when asked to leave, he had called the French under-manager, “a fucking frog.” All of this had come to light in August or September 2001. He had confessed to his father, and his father had taken him for a short sharp shock to Featherstone Lodge, a drug rehabilitation center in south London, to spend a day talking to recovering drug addicts.
“Worried Charles chose to ‘terrify’ Harry away from drugs by sending him to therapy sessions with hard-core heroin addicts,” claimed the News of the World, but a “family friend” said that Charles remained “very calm. He didn’t confront Harry aggressively but sat him down and asked him to tell the truth.” Later, after the visit to the Featherstone Lodge, Harry had “returned to Highgrove for a heart-to-heart that he will never forget.” Adding, “He has never done drugs since. William is such a steadying influence. The two of them have had detailed discussions and Harry has changed his ways. He now understands the very real perils of drug-taking and excessive drinking. He has a lot to be thankful for. If his brother and father did not care so much about him there might well have been a different end to this story.”