by Penny Junor
Charity work is now one of the monarchy’s main and most important functions. It began with George III at the end of the eighteenth century, but it was the present Queen who made it an integral part of her family’s daily work. And as the historian Frank Prochaska wrote in Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy, “Barring cataclysm or self-destruction, the monarchy is only likely to be in real danger when the begging letters cease to arrive at Buckingham Palace.” As the monarchy’s constitutional importance declined, it forged a new role for itself as patron, promoter and fundraiser for the underprivileged and deserving.
There are currently over 160,000 registered charities and other organizations in the UK, and about 3,000 of them have a royal patron or president. The Queen has more than 600 patronages, the Duke of Edinburgh more than 700, the Prince of Wales more than 600, the Princess Royal nearly 300. The Duke of York and the Duke and Countess of Wessex have fewer but still significant numbers, as do the Queen’s cousins, the Gloucesters and the Kents. William and Harry’s cousins have chosen to lead normal lives and, apart from Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the Duke of York’s daughters, they do not have royal titles. As the older generation starts falling by the wayside, the number of royal patrons left to go round—currently eighteen—will be drastically reduced. Even if William and Harry had four children each in quick succession, it wouldn’t be possible for them to share even half of that number of patronages between them. The existing model of charitable patronage has to change.
The second conclusion they came to was that they needed some funds of their own to be able to distribute from time to time. Initially it was a very human response—going to the scene of a human tragedy and wanting to be able to help. The Queen and the Prince of Wales have their own funds, which they occasionally dip into when they visit an earthquake zone or other catastrophe. However, because of the way their finances are set up, the two Princes have never been able to do that. They wanted to be able to put their hands in their pockets, as seed corn, and encourage others to give.
The solution they came up with was to start a royal charitable foundation—something that had not been done in living memory, possibly ever. And the person they found to set it up was Nick Booth, who for ten years had run the NSPCC’s Full Stop campaign against child abuse. He had recently moved his young family to Philadelphia to become Vice President of Big Brothers Big Sisters, the world’s largest mentoring organization. “After all those years of royal patronage, for them to say, ‘Let’s try something different, let’s build a foundation that finds really exciting projects, put in some money, some leverage and awareness into those, scale them, but not necessarily stay with them for ever,’ is very interesting,” he says.
Speaking of its creation in September 2009, William said, “We are incredibly excited about our new Foundation. We believe that it will provide a unique opportunity for us to use our privileged position to make a real difference in the future to many areas of charitable work. We feel passionately that, working closely together with those who contribute to our Foundation, we can help to make a long-lasting and tangible difference.”
“The Princes were the first people to put money into it,” says Nick, “which is good philanthropy—’I’ll give and I’d like others to support, and we’re busy fundraising.’ ” The Royal Foundation has no big endowment; it has to raise all the money it distributes, which in the first year was about £3 million. Within weeks of Nick arriving, three private donors paid all of its administration and staff costs for the first three years. So every donation went straight into the projects being supported.
“Before I arrived they chose three areas of interest. We are not constrained by those, but currently those are: disadvantaged children and young people, veterans and military families, and sustainable development conservation. They may change over time, but these are first baby steps. We are working out within those broad areas what our first priorities are going to be. Also, what the DNA that runs across them is—and that’s an interesting thought process because they feel quite disparate. I think they are linked by two things.
“One, because the Princes are passionate about them, and that’s a perfectly valid reason to have three disparate areas. It’s a personal foundation of two, now three, living principals, as opposed to an endowed historic institution.
“The second link is that in each of those areas you have a group of people who cannot fulfill their potential because of the circumstances they find themselves in. We are tiny, but can we use our convening power and our leverage and our resources to either remove the blocks to those people fulfilling their potential or put in place accelerators that will help that process? What is it in each of those areas that will allow us to help those people really go on and be all they could be in their lives? For two young Princes and now a young Duchess that’s a very compelling alignment of values and vision.”
Five years on, there has been a name change and many remarkable projects are underway. “The Foundation is a work in progress,” he says. “We’re not in any sense getting everything right, I’m sure we’re not, and we’re far from knowing what our future will look like, but that’s the interesting thing about building something that’s never happened before; there’s never been an organization like this in however many years of royal history; there’s no book on how one does it, so we’re learning as we go.”
It was set up as The Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry; after William’s marriage to Kate Middleton in 2011, it became quite an unwieldy name with the addition of “the Duchess of Cambridge.” “So, after some discussions,” says Nick, “we became The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry, and the use of the words Royal Foundation [which is how it is generally referred to] needed the permission of Her Majesty. She was very supportive of that process.”
The Princes’ Charities Forum completes the picture. Every six months the Chief Executives of all the charities of which both Princes are patrons, and a few of which they are not, get together with them both—and now Kate too. It started out when they had just three charities between them: Tusk Trust and Centrepoint, of which William was patron, and Sentebale. Jamie came up with the idea of getting them all together round a table as a way of demonstrating to each charity wanting their patron’s time that there was no favoritism, and of seeing where they could double-up on engagements to maximize its use. They used to meet more frequently and less formally, with no fancy name, but there are now so many charities involved—forty-three at the last count—that it would be impossible to arrange. But what no one could have foreseen was that the Forum would take on such a life of its own. Everyone involved agrees it has been brilliant.
“I don’t think anyone envisaged it—at the beginning—going beyond that initial remit,” says one of the Household, “but what happened was that these charities got into a room and found that they could help each other out with all sorts of things that had nothing to do with the Princes.”
As Charlie Mayhew of Tusk says, “The first time we met, there didn’t seem to be any synergy between us, but we quickly did see there were opportunities to share ideas.” Julia Samuel from the Child Bereavement Charity, which is now working with the Armed Forces, WellChild and Centrepoint, providing training and resources to each, agrees. “The Princes’ Forum extends our reach into areas that we would never have been in otherwise. It means we don’t compete because we all feel so pleased with ourselves to be sitting round the table. There’s a real generosity of spirit; we are all very lucky and want to help each other and learn from each other.”
NOT JUST A BIMBLE
William and Harry’s trip to southern Africa in June 2010, the year South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup, was their first official overseas tour together and a gratifying example of everything the Princes’ Charities Forum had come to embody. In six days they visited three countries and gave a massive fillip to four of their charities, which because of the Forum, they both knew and cared about.
Their travels began in Botswana with Tusk, which was celebrating its twentieth anniversary year. Tusk, set up in 1990, is dedicated to halting the destruction of Africa’s wildlife. It is not just about elephants, as its name might suggest, and it’s not just about wildlife either, but about local communities and teaching them how to appreciate and manage the assets they have and profit from the tourism the wildlife brings. Tusk’s Charlie Mayhew admits he had been a bit naive in anticipating quite how much interest there would be in this tour—and was astonished to discover just what William and Harry have to endure. “On the first engagement we had something like eighty overseas media in addition to local Botswanan and South African press. It was a huge. We had two TV crews from the U.S, a German crew, five UK TV crews plus the newspapers. The logistics of just trying to get them around was not easy.” That first engagement was just twenty minutes outside the capital, Gaborone, at an environmental education center in the Mokolodi Nature Reserve. It is one of Tusk’s flagship projects in southern Africa, teaching 12,000 children a year, in short residential courses, about conservation and the wildlife that sustains the country through tourism. “Many of them,” as Charlie points out, “are growing up in a part of the country where there’s no contact with that world, no connection with the environment, and yet they are the future leaders of the country.”
Four young people from Centrepoint, who had once been homeless in London, were working at the center for six weeks. Had it not been for the Forum, they might never have discovered Africa. Pat Randall, one of two support workers with the group, says, “The effect on the guys was incredible to see. They were really shy and anxious at the start, with arguments between everyone, and people wanting to come home because they missed their friends and didn’t like the conditions they were living in; it was very hard work. By the end, none of them wanted to come home; they were all so proud of what they’d achieved and the friends they’d made in the local community and between themselves. It is really going to help them through their lives; they’ve all gone on to do good things. Two have gone to university, one is doing a course in dental nursing and the other is at college.”
After the press had gone, both Princes stayed for a barbecue at the center and immediately had the young people in fits of laughter. Nineteen-year-old Iesha from Peckham says, “They were really cool. I asked William for his fleece, and he said, ‘As a souvenir or to keep you warm?’ I said, ‘Both,’ and he said, “You can have a picture instead.’ And Harry said, ‘Back off Iesha.’ He was cheeky, a really cool person. I would love to chill out with him and have a normal conversation. I thought they’d be stuck up but they were really friendly and the best part was they remembered our names and used them.”
There followed a private meeting with the country’s President, Ian Khama, who is a keen conservationist, then the Princes parted company. William went on to do another couple of engagements for Tusk, and Harry flew to Lesotho, where they caught up a day later. In Botswana, William had taken the lead; Lesotho was Harry’s patch. Although William had helped his brother raise money for Sentebale on many occasions, this was the first time he had seen for himself what all the fuss had been about.
Most of their joint fundraising has been done on the polo field, where they have raised millions of pounds for charity over the years, but in 2008 they had swapped horses for motorbikes and taken part in a 1,000-mile cross-country adventure in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The Enduro Africa Motorcycle Ride was an endurance test: eight days in sweltering temperatures, over mountains, gorges, scrubland, rivers, dry river beds and coastline—hostile terrain in the country’s poorest province. “It’s not just a bimble across the countryside, that’s for sure,” Harry had said before they left. “We’re expecting to fall off many a time.” Making light of the river crossings, William said, “We’ve got our armbands in our pack. We’re ready to go.” Alas, one of their fellow riders was less well equipped; when he fell into water up to his waist, Harry was the one who swam to the rescue, thereby earning himself the “spirit of the day” award. Eighty riders took part and between them raised over £300,000 for Sentebale, Nelson Mandela’s Children’s Fund and UNICEF. Simon Smith, who had organized the ride was impressed by the Princes. “They were both fantastic riders and didn’t run from anything. They asked us to treat them as one of the group and that’s what we did. They mucked in with chores and shared a beer and food round the barbecue. They were outstanding companions.”
Miguel Head, their new Press Secretary, flew out to join them in South Africa. It was the first time he had seen the Princes since his job interview in London, and since he was organizing a press conference about the ride, he was surrounded by journalists and photographers. Spotting William and Harry coming out of a hut in the camp where they’d been staying, he went across to say hello and give them the line of questions he thought the press conference might follow. William was immediately friendly, Harry less so. “I’m really sorry,” Harry suddenly said. “But who are you?” He had thought I was from the BBC and I looked at him and William looked at him and said, ‘Harry, it’s Miguel,’ and he said, ‘Of course; you look completely different out of context here.’
“Coming from the MoD you were trained always to take bullet points to hand to a minister before an interview to remind them—or teach them. I went down to South Africa with a bunch of bullet points about the charity they were working for and I went to hand it to them and I can’t remember which one it was, but he looked at it and said, ‘What’s this?’ And I said, ‘It’s a load of lines to take.’ And he looked at me, totally baffled, and said, ‘I think we’re okay actually.’ I was taken aback and thought, how can you do an interview without lines to take? And that was when the penny dropped for me that, of course, for them this isn’t a job, this is their life. They have to talk candidly and naturally. They can’t for their entire lives use a set of lines that are not theirs and don’t come from their own heart because they’ll soon be found out. And I thought, gosh this is different to what I expected but also far more interesting and rewarding.”
Charlie Mayhew traveled with William from Botswana to Lesotho. “It was extremely interesting to see how much regard Harry is held in within Lesotho, from government level to the little children, in the projects on the ground, in very remote mountain villages. They absolutely adore him there, there’s no doubt about it. Harry’s really good with little kids—babies and kids he’s brilliant. And it was very interesting to see Harry take the lead because he was effectively then hosting us and showing William his work, and that was part of the idea: for William to show Harry his charity’s work and Harry show William his, and the two CEOs would tag along.” He says there was a very definite shift between the brothers in the two countries.
Charlie had been invited to Lesotho, in the spirit of the Forum, to see whether Tusk might be able to get involved in the country. “I hadn’t been aware of the deforestation in the country,” he says, “or the extreme poverty, so I had a really interesting couple of days there, looking at what Sentebale was doing and how we might potentially work with them. I’m sure that will evolve.
“Sometimes, through the Forum, you get a sense that although Harry’s not our patron, he is almost as interested in Tusk as William is and that he is happy to be an ambassador for Tusk if he gets the opportunity and it’s appropriate. It’s not an exclusive patronage. They both wore the logos. I rather nervously asked, ‘Do you think William would be prepared to wear branded clothing during the tour?’ ‘Yes, no problem, he’s there to promote the charity,’ was the reply. ‘Great; then can we have his size?’ At which point Miguel said, ‘What about Harry, he’s going to be there too?’ I hadn’t presumed I could ask both. Harry was so enthusiastic about wearing it, he lived in our fleece, even in Lesotho. It was freezing cold because it was winter there, and at one point Kedge [Martin] who is Sentebale’s CEO, said, ‘Harry, no disrespect to Tusk, but we’re on a Sentebale engagement now, would you mind taking the Tusk
fleece off?’ ‘Drat,’ said Harry. ‘Well you’d better get some Sentebale ones.’ ”
One evening Kedge had organized a Gala Dinner for them with the King and Queen at the Maseru Sun Hotel. “It was all marvelous,” she says, “and we’d done the seating plan and you know for these events you need to get the guest list done and cleared and all the rest of it. In Africa it depends on how anyone’s feeling at the time as to who they bring to dinner, so I didn’t tell the two PPOs that the guest list was a complete make-up of names because that was all one could do. It was a night of terrible, terrible storms because it was June or July, and halfway through dinner the lights went out. We had checked there was a generator but inevitably it didn’t work and I did start to seriously worry that the people in the room were quite vulnerable and this could all go amazingly wrong. And it was all on my watch. That night aged me about fifteen years. Then Prince Harry wanted to go and have a wee and he was gone rather a long time and it was after the lights had gone out and I thought, Should I have told the PPO or not? And time went on and on and on, so then I did tell the PPO and he went and found him and Harry was chatting to someone, but the nerves! I told him later. He wasn’t alarmed by the lights going out at all—this was Africa.”
The tour was a huge boost to both charities but in publicity alone, Charlie discovered that Tusk had been mentioned in 391 articles in publications all over the world. In addition there were hundreds of photographs, two of which appeared ubiquitously. One was of William and Harry with an eight-foot rock python rapped around their necks, the other William attempting to blow a vuvuzela (the sound of the 2010 World Cup) for a child. In both photographs they were wearing fleeces emblazoned with the Tusk logo. “It was a fantastic demonstration of the power of the Windsor brand,” says Charlie. “A good example of how William and Harry can come together and make a big impact.”