by Penny Junor
And he means anyone. Soon after the Red Cross agreed to administer the funds raised by the television documentary, they all went to a board meeting with the charity’s bigwigs at their head office in the City. “I walked in,” says Damian, “and there were twelve people sitting there, all of them at the top of their game, this is what they do, and I was very impressed. Seeiso gave the background to Lesotho and to what he and Harry were hoping to do, but Harry was very, very clear to define what areas he wanted this money to be spent on and it wasn’t necessarily what the people in the room wanted to hear. It was outside of their capacity for working and I think for a nineteen-year-old to stand up in that room… He was very eloquent and clear on what the objectives were and what he was trying to achieve; he was very impressive. And when he heard something he didn’t agree with he required an answer; ‘Why are we doing it that way?’ It ruffled feathers, I think, but there were people in the room who were keen to support us. The International Director for the Red Cross got it straightaway; he saw this was an area that wasn’t being addressed, we’d found a gap in the market and he said, ‘You’re right on the button, you’ve got to go for it.’ He was a wonderful ally with huge credibility and really helped us drive it forward.”
What was compelling to Harry about Lesotho was that it was small; small enough for him to be able to make a difference, and a place that has been forgotten about. “He’s known all along there is a big problem, there’s the question of who’s going to inherit all the patronages of the Duke of Edinburgh, Her Majesty, his mother and father—and the truth of the matter is there are too many to be shared. He knew there was so much work being done in the UK, which he will inevitably become a part of, but there is nothing in Lesotho, and he knew that the only way there would be, was by establishing something himself.
“He would say, ‘It’s very easy to find a reason not to do something, it’s much more difficult sometimes to take something head on and challenge it, address it and make it happen,’ and he is very, very happy to do that. ‘Why shouldn’t I set up a charity because I’m too young? It’s not a good enough reason.’ He’d traveled with his mother from a very early age seeing the work of charities, he’s been seeing this from day one, listening to the experts in their fields talk about what they do, absorbing it.
“It was very interesting, those that said, ‘This is right on cue here,’ and those that said, ‘Hang on a minute, be very, very careful.’ The under-riding fact was, ‘Is this just a passing fad? You’ve raised some money, which is great, let’s therefore put it into an established organization with no reputational risk. Let them manage it and we can all move on.’ But this thing started to gather momentum and we ended up in the position where the money was not going where we wanted it to go, which was to the grassroots level.
“Harry’s line was, ‘It’s all very well people bringing clothes and organizing dormitories and braille, etc., but at the end of the day these children need feeding, and clothes don’t feed children. To survive they have to have food and the food has to come from a supermarket across the border [in South Africa]. How can we get this money to these people but also control how that money is spent to make sure it’s not abused and that it goes to the children where it’s needed?’ Those are grown-up thoughts for a nineteen-year-old.”
After a lot of discussion about names, it was Prince Seeiso who came up with Sentebale, in memory of both of their mothers, two exceptional women who had died before their time, and who had inspired their sons by their work with HIV/AIDS. It has been widely translated from the Sesotho to mean “forget-me-not,” but in truth the meaning is more subtle. According to Damian the precise meaning is “ ‘Farewell, see you soon.’ It’s not the flower but as a logo it works very well. It’s ‘don’t forget the children’—we’ll see you later, we’re not disappearing.”
Both Princes were in Lesotho the day the charity was officially launched in April 2006 at the Mants’ase Children’s Home where Harry had first met Mutsu, the little boy with the blue wellies who had been his shadow on his first visit. He hadn’t seen the child for two years and was delighted to see him again. “He’s been waiting for you,” said one of the helpers reassuringly. And for the rest of the day, Mutsu, by then six years old, was never far from his side. Harry was asked what impact the orphanage and coming to Lesotho had had on him. “Here especially, it really hits you hard and makes you wake up and think, Jesus, I’m really very, very lucky.” And Harry confessed that he got “slightly grumpy” with friends who failed to be thankful for what they have. “It sort of changes your temper with other people who don’t appreciate it.”
GROWING PAINS
On that sunny day in the mountains, surrounded by colorfully dressed, cheerful children, Harry was filled with optimism. He had taken on his father, and all his father’s cautious advisors and many of the biggest guns in the charity world and, through sheer bloody-minded determination, had done what he set out to do. Sentebale was up and running. It would fund and support small community-based projects that were too small or too new to qualify for funding elsewhere, and help the herd boys and all the other vulnerable children. He would put food into the mouths of these children and ensure that they had blankets to keep them warm, and offer them education and hope. “Come back to this place in twenty-five years, you’ll see a massive difference,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m committed for the rest of my life.”
Today Sentebale is thriving. It is turning over millions of pounds and on the verge of expanding into other AIDS-ravaged African countries. It is a highly respected and effective charity, expertly run; Harry and Seeiso and everyone involved can feel very proud of what they’ve achieved.
But it wasn’t plain sailing from the start. Three years in, the charity had major problems. Large set-up and operating costs had not been accompanied by the necessary fundraising program. The Country Director, employed to identify credible partners, was on a generous salary and benefits package. He spent two years finding the best partners, which, once signed up, had a reasonable expectation that they would soon benefit from Sentebale’s coffers. But with little cash left in the bank, Sentebale was unable to meet those commitments, nor pay its day-to-day bills. The very existence of the charity was on a knife-edge. In 2008 the Chief Executive Geoffrey Matthews—who had been part of the Household and had helped organize the Wembley Concert—resigned, and a year later his replacement, Charles Denton, the former Molton Brown entrepreneur, who had come in as Executive Chairman, also resigned.
As Damian says, “There have been lots of ups and downs over the years. Whilst we’ve always said that lack of capacity would never be a barrier to support, when we do support an organization it is a partnership in the truest sense. Both parties have their responsibilities to each other and they must adhere to these responsibilities accordingly. If we’re providing funds and expertise to an organization, a partner, then there are rules that need to be adhered to—proper accounting, transparency—and, if they are not, then obviously we have to let them go. We do have a microscope on our backs, the press, looking for any cracks—because of Harry. It is a total irritation; there’s one event they keep referring back to six years later—on the money we hadn’t spent. I never thought we were going to be castigated for not spending people’s money. Instead we were carefully carrying out our due diligence on potential partners before parting with funds. That was the responsible thing to do. We are just trying to help; trying to help some of the most vulnerable children on earth, and by knocking Harry and what he does, the charities he’s involved with, at the end of the day the people that suffer are the children on the ground, or the organization they represent, just for the sake of selling newspapers. But Harry’s always said, ‘If you make a mistake you must own up to it.’ And we must; too many charities hide if anything goes wrong. If something’s not working you must say so, and both you and others can learn from it.”
Denton was to restructure the governance of Sentebale, but knew that he
might not have time to achieve that. The charity was in danger of going bust. Hoping for a quick injection of funds, he approached the former Conservative Party treasurer, billionaire Lord Ashcroft, and asked for a seven-figure sum. Ashcroft was a great supporter of Harry’s mother, and his initial response to the request was encouraging. One of Britain’s most successful businessmen ever, the value of possible assistance from Ashcroft went well beyond any check he might have written. It all looked very good indeed. Sadly, though, the negotiations were mishandled horribly, and Ashcroft eventually walked away leaving Sentebale with a check for £250,000 rather than the million pounds friends say he would much prefer to have given.
Ashcroft is a man who does not mince words. When a meeting was arranged between him and Prince Harry, no doubt with his tongue firmly in his cheek, Ashcroft said, “Well you’ve fucked up, haven’t you?” Harry laughed.
Kedge Martin was parachuted in as Chief Executive in the summer of 2009, and Denton left in December. “There is a point of view held by some,” she says, “that working for a member of the Royal Family leads to manna from heaven and gold falling through the door and it doesn’t, because there are all sorts of restrictions, quite rightly. It’s not a brand you can go out there and sell, although, of course, it is a very valuable brand in itself. My predecessor had probably brought with him a commercial view as to the value of the brand and wanted to exploit that for the benefit of the children in Lesotho.” The current Chairman, Philip Green, who runs a charity of his own in South Africa, says that having a royal patron presents unique problems. “The difference is the media focus and the scrutiny. You could argue you’ve got to be whiter than white wherever you are, but if you’re not whiter than white when you have a royal patron, it will be exposed much faster and much more aggressively than if you haven’t. In some ways that’s no bad thing, it drives even better behavior, but the focus that Sentebale gets is very much down to the patron rather than what we do or the revenue we have. But equally we couldn’t do what we do if we didn’t have the patron we have.”
Harry and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton already knew Kedge Martin. She had persuaded Harry two years previously to become patron of a small charity she was running called WellChild—it was his first children’s patronage. Kedge is blonde, pretty, gutsy, fortyish and very good fun; also very bright and empathetic with an impressive track record in setting up and turning round organizations in both the commercial and charitable sector. Among other things, she ran the London end of the NSPCC “Full Stop” appeal aimed at ending child cruelty.
WellChild had previously been known as Children Nationwide and was a small pediatric research charity based in Cheltenham. By the time Kedge arrived in 2000, the need for research had diminished; what was needed was nursing for the large number of children with long-term illnesses, so the name was changed. Having heard that Harry had an affinity with children, she wrote to Jamie to see whether the Prince might consider becoming the charity’s patron. She was told that he was not yet taking on patronages, but she refused to take no for an answer. Eventually, in March 2007, after a meeting at St. James’s, Harry agreed to become patron for a limited period. But Jamie had made it clear that Harry would want to be more than a token figurehead; he would only do it if he could add value—and that was his constant refrain, “Am I adding value?”
There was a brief moment when the newly appointed Chairman of WellChild evidently thought not. Harry hit the headlines with a story that on exercise in Cyprus during his Sandhurst training, he had referred to a fellow cadet as, “Our Paki friend.” A video clip was posted on YouTube, in which it was clear that Harry was referring affectionately to a mate. But he was condemned as a racist, causing untold offence to Pakistanis everywhere.
“The Chairman of WellChild wrote a letter to Jamie,” says Kedge, “saying the board will have to consider whether we still want Harry.” The press had said, ‘What do you think of your patron’s behavior?’ All the staff were told you never talk to the press, but the Chairman gave his opinion and I think it included the fact that WellChild would have to consider the position of Prince Harry as patron. That was a bad moment. So I then had to write a groveling letter, which caused some furor. I think it would be inappropriate for a Chairman who had any member of the Royal Family as patron to have that kind of attitude and speak to the press about it. You might have that opinion but you don’t speak openly about it. I remember driving up to London with a letter of profuse apology for my Chairman’s behavior in the formal way. There was so much other stuff going on but at the time it was huge. I spoke to Harry about it a long time later. He wasn’t angry. I think he’s got a more humorous view of the world than that; but, no, the Chairman didn’t survive!”
Harry’s first encounter with the children—who are all chronically sick and disabled—was on the day of the Concert for Diana at Wembley. He invited some of them with their families. “The families were quite scared but Harry was brilliant with the children,” says Kedge. “There is something extraordinary about Harry with children. He has said, many times, it’s because he’s a child himself—part of him still is and I hope always will be. He’s got that level of engagement, he’s on the same wavelength and they respond accordingly, which is totally genuine and totally spontaneous. And it’s been fabulous for the families who’ve met him. It’s a great fillip if you’re having a shite time in life because you’ve got a sick child. But I also think we were the right charity for him at the time because we were growing.”
The charity is small but ambitious. It aims to provide specialist nursing and other practical support for the 100,000 plus children living in Britain with long-term conditions. Some were born with them, others have been damaged by trauma, and many of those children are left languishing in hospital because there is no specialized nursing care in the community. The impact on the families and stresses involved in a child with complex care needs is huge. The divorce rate is way above the national average and siblings become carers themselves. “Not only is there benefit to the NHS in freeing up that resource and saving money,” says Colin Dyer, who took over from Kedge as Chief Executive, “there’s benefit to the child. Every piece of research will tell you children do better at home. Yet no one had identified that gap in care.”
“There is a lot of role-playing in what the Royal Family have to do,” says Kedge, “and there are times when there has to be the polite interest and Harry’s very good at that, but with children there’s a genuine interest as well. He really cares about these children as individuals and what they are going through and learning from them, as well as from the parents, but more from the children. I think he’s interested in children having a voice rather than adults speaking for them. He probably understands the vulnerability of children and the loneliness of children more because of what he experienced as a child. If you’re talking to a child who’s sick and having all sorts of ghastly things happen [like Lachlan who by the age of ten had had fifty-four brain operations], it’s a different variant on losing your mother. If you’ve had a very comfortable childhood that’s always been happy and healthy and you’re bounced off to school then bounced into work and you’ve not had many tragedies, you probably don’t have that much empathy with people who did. He understands their vulnerability. And possibly, genetically, his heart is so big because his mother’s heart was so big. He’s such a thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly nice, nice man. It’s difficult to articulate.”
Her role at Sentebale was to save it from oblivion, restructure it and make it viable. “Things had gone wrong and were going wrong and one of the first decisions I had to make was to withdraw funding from one of our partners because they weren’t being transparent in their accounting—essentially they were frauds. One of the early projects was a center dealing with children who had been abused. It’s a hard decision because you’ve got to have your principles that Sentebale will only partner organizations that are transparent and accountable and will do what you want them to do. When I first came o
n board we went through all kinds of processes and meetings, and eventually withdrew the funding, but we made sure there were other donors coming in so the children had food and all their emergency needs catered for, but the salary costs we stopped. And then of course you make a decision like that and they go running to the press and the next thing is ‘Harry’s Orphans Left Starving,’ and they weren’t. It’s times like that when you think, it’s so wrong, so morally wrong, so incorrect, it’s so dishonest and it’s unhelpful. It’s bordering on the wicked, actually, when there is such dishonesty and such misinterpretation.”
HELPING HEROES
Having a royal patron may bring unique problems but it also brings unique advantages: media exposure and, from that, profile and revenues of which most other charities can only dream. Not surprisingly, when cartoonist and former Royal Green Jacket Bryn Parry and his wife Emma launched Help for Heroes in October 2007, they hoped that they might persuade William and Harry, as serving officers, to become patrons.
Their son was in the Army so they knew what it was like for families to have their loved ones on the front line, and Bryn had friends who had been wounded, but it was not until they went to visit Selly Oak, the critical military hospital in Birmingham to which casualties from Afghanistan used to be sent (they now go to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the same NHS Trust), that they were inspired to found a charity to help those soldiers adjust to life after injury. Those men they saw that day—which was “shocking and moving and the defining moment,” according to Bryn—are now immortalized on the home page of the charity’s website. “It’s about the ‘blokes,’ our men and women of the Armed Forces. It’s about Derek, a rugby player who has lost both his legs; it’s about Carl, whose jaw is wired up so he had been drinking through a straw. It’s about Richard, who was handed a mobile phone as he lay on the stretcher so he could say goodbye to his wife. It’s about Ben, it’s about Steven and Andy and Mark; it’s about them all. They are just blokes but they are our blokes; they are our heroes. We want to help our heroes.”