On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary

by Dickie Arbiter

  The only thing I really missed was the opportunity for sport. At Holme Grange, I relished both football and cricket, though I wasn’t particularly brilliant at either. I also now realised that being able to play organized sport of some kind every day was a luxury. All that was on offer at Clark’s College was a couple of hours a week; I was anxious to find a substitute.

  We were living in Notting Hill Gate, in Kensington Park Gardens, and my mother had been giving my inactivity some thought. In her case, it was probably with a more prosaic ambition – to keep her suddenly very present son out of mischief. With Queens Ice Rink a mere bus or tube train ride away, she hit upon a plan.

  ‘How would you like to try ice skating?’

  Seeing how readily I took to the idea, she was very supportive of my new endeavour, even encouraging me to start taking lessons. This was thrilling, and when she said she would buy me my own boots, I couldn’t have been more excited. No more wriggling my feet into the smelly, battered rink rentals. There was just one unfortunate detail – she thought I’d look best wearing white ones.

  ‘I can’t go in these!’ I moaned, aghast, when she presented them to me. ‘White boots are for girls. Boys wear black ones!’

  But my mother wasn’t one with whom to argue. I was given one choice – wear white boots or forget the whole thing. I realised I loved ice-skating more than life itself. I duly trooped down to Queens and reluctantly put them on, much to the amusement of my fellow junior skaters and the consternation of my lovely but formidable ice-skating teacher, Gladys Hogg.

  Gladys was something of a celebrity at Queens, having been a pairs roller-skating champion in the 1920s and an ice-dancing champion in the 1930s. She was also notching up some success as a coach when I arrived. She had trained the brother and sister pair skating champions, John and Jennifer Nicks, and a couple who would go on to become European and World ice dance champions, Courtney Jones and June Markham (ice dance didn’t become a Winter Olympic discipline until 1976). Perhaps her best-known prodigy was Olympic gold medalist, Robin Cousins.

  Now she had me to lick into shape. ‘Ah, Dickie,’ she said, as I appeared on the ice, my beet-red face contrasting with the snowy leather on my feet. ‘Are these your boots?’ Stifling her guffaws, she added, ‘I see. Well, well, how… erm…nice.’

  I did what one would at that age, and burst into tears. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the crying set off a second reaction – I wet myself, creating a yellow puddle on the ice beneath me.

  After such a humiliating experience most would have abandoned the whole idea, but such was my love of the sport, I continued. Before long, my feet outgrew the hated white boots, and though I had no idea where the money came from, my mother gave me five £5 notes with which I was finally able to buy a pair of black skates.

  I soon began learning to ice-dance with another brilliant teacher called Janet Smith, and by the time I was 13, I had put the whole Holme Grange nightmare behind me. I was going to the rink three or four times a week, sometimes more. I couldn’t have been happier, but my mother’s enthusiasm began to wane. What had begun as an activity to keep me occupied when not in school had become something of an obsession and, in my mother’s eyes, not a healthy one. She grew increasingly concerned that I seemed to do nothing else, including my homework. She tried to have rink manager Harry Lauder ban me, but I had earned a free pass by sweeping the ice between sessions, and fortunately I was a favorite of his.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me. ‘Let’s put it this way. If I don’t actually see you, I can’t ban you. Get me?’

  Needless to say, I became Queens’ own Scarlet Pimpernel.

  Sadly, the relative idyll of those years wasn’t to last. As night follows day, so my GCE O-Level examinations followed after several years of academic diligence, but it appeared I wasn’t going to be allowed to take mine.

  I had always been a hard-working pupil at Clarks College. I was regularly in the top three in my class, and served as deputy captain of both the football and cricket teams. By my final year, I was also Head Boy. My only drawback was that I point-blank refused to do my homework. Not just because it ate into my skating time, but because I didn’t believe it should be given at all. In my mind, when one left school for the day, that was it. Time out of school should be free.

  Looking back, I am tickled by my commitment to this belief. I don’t recall being particularly defiant, but there was clearly a streak of self-determination in there somewhere because I never bent in my resolve. As a result the headmaster informed my mother that it would be pointless for me to take any O’ Levels. ‘Your son is wasting our time and your money,’ he said.

  That was that. In April 1957, I was cut loose from school. When I awoke the following morning I lay in bed wondering what on earth would come next, but the period of freedom proved to be extremely short. Unbeknown to me, my mother had an uncle who lived in Southern Rhodesia. Quite out of the blue, he sent us two tickets with an invitation to visit him for a holiday. Again this was 1957, another age in terms of travel. No-one in his right mind travelled 6,000 miles just to take a holiday, even to a place he really wanted to see.

  And I didn’t want to see Southern Rhodesia. Though I had left school, I had no wish to travel. I had my friends and I had my skating. I certainly had no inclination to visit what was then generally described as ‘darkest’ Africa.

  My mother wrote to my great-uncle explaining that she was grateful for the offer, but that our coming to visit was out of the question. I was wrong to assume that that was the end of it. I have no idea what else she wrote in that letter, but a month or so later, she called me to her.

  ‘Dickie…’ she said, in a tone usually reserved for when I had done something wrong.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Uncle Walter in Rhodesia…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Were we going on holiday to darkest Africa after all?

  Apparently not. Not for a holiday, anyway.

  ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘he’s written back and suggested we go out there to live. And after much consideration, I have agreed. He’s sending us two sea passages. In the meantime there is a lot to do because we have to apply for residency.’

  She had lost me on ‘live’. I didn’t want to live in darkest Africa. I wanted to stay in London. How could she agree to something like that? I was 16. Did she not think to consult me?

  It would be a while before the ramifications of such a move began to sink in, but for the moment I felt nothing but outrage. I knew better than to question her, so I just pushed off to the ice rink.

  We were emigrating to Bulawayo, the second largest city in Southern Rhodesia. Once I recovered from the shock, I became both excited and disappointed. Disappointed because it meant I would now have to give up my beloved ice-skating; I didn’t imagine they had ice rinks on the African continent. At the same time a delicious feeling of anticipation began to settle in. Being rootless meant there was no sense of ties being severed…and I have been criss-crossing the globe ever since.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Bite of the Big Apple

  February 1989

  The Royal Family spends a large part of its year conducting engagements. As a press secretary with responsibility to the Prince and Princess of Wales, I knew my job would be as peripatetic as it had been for all of my working life.

  It would take me to places I never imagined I’d go. Now, my first overseas trip with a member of ‘The Firm’ would have me accompanying Diana on an official royal tour to New York.

  I was already a seasoned traveler, but I had never traveled like this. As I packed my dinner jacket on the eve of my flight to JFK, I felt like a novice. This time around I would not be a part of the media scrum, but rather serving as a courtier attending to my principal. At the same time, I would be required to play the media game, ensuring that the press saw all that I had organized.

  I had been to Canada several times, but never to the US. The Princess of Wales’s first solo visit abroad
was to Oslo in 1984, but her first solo tour was a first for me too. The time had come for me to put into practice all that I had learned with regard to the planning of royal tours.

  And they did take a lot of planning. Overseas tours don’t just begin upon arrival. Months of preparation are involved from the time an invitation to visit a country is received. Dates, itineraries and accommodation all have to be arranged ahead of time.

  All royal engagements require some degree of reconnoitre prior to the event. In the case of overseas visits, a small team, usually led by the private secretary – who reports to the particular royal involved – heads out on a ‘recce’. Accompanying him or her is an equerry – a member of the Army, Royal Navy or Royal Air Force. The equerry is generally on a two-and-a-half year secondment to the Royal Family, and is charged with overseeing all of the logistics.

  Next up is the PPO (Personal Protection Officer), whose job it is to liaise with the local police regarding security. Finally, there was my role as press secretary, which was to ensure that both the UK and the host country’s media covered the event with minimal disruption.

  It is a multi-faceted role. I arranged hotels for the media, and if the tour was moving across country I organized transportation between locales. Ground and air transportation was planned with the assistance of our Embassy or High Commission. Air travel was always charged to the individual UK media outlets, not the public purse. I would then send out an advisory note to all the media organisations, which would allow journalists, broadcasters and photographers to decide whom they wanted to send on the tour.

  With so much experience on the other side of the fence, giving the media what I knew they wanted felt instinctive. I loved the organisational aspect of a royal visit. It was very satisfying to see it all come together. By nature the media is never fully content with what it is provided, but it was always satisfying to see the pack reasonably satisfied.

  Recces were tightly conducted. There was no slack, and they were never longer than the proposed visit itself. A four-day tour meant no more than a four-day recce. They were also fine examples of diplomacy in action. We always worked alongside our own embassy or High Commission and with representatives from the host country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or, in the case of New York City, the State Department.

  That said, we didn’t actually do the recce for the Princess’s first solo trip to New York. Diana’s private secretary, Anne Beckwith-Smith, undertook it the previous December in order to kill two birds with one stone. Along with Diana’s PPO, Anne was going to recce Necker Island (Richard Branson’s private island), for a proposed holiday with William and Harry, which Diana was planning to take immediately after her visit to New York.

  Press secretaries didn’t recce private visits. Private meant private, and as we were paid by the civil list, we weren’t allowed to undertake any unofficial duties. Holidays such as this were strictly off limits. I didn’t necessarily agree. Private it might have been, but as the Princess was to learn, had there been a press secretary on hand to manage the hordes of press that descended upon Necker, her holiday might have been significantly more private than it was. Instead, the papers were filled with pages of grainy pictures taken by photographers bobbing in boats a hundred metres off shore for the duration of her break with the boys.

  It was strange to be packing for New York’s sub-zero temperatures, as I had only just returned from a recce in the sweltering heat of the Gulf 48 hours earlier. I’d been doing the groundwork for a forthcoming joint visit by the Prince and Princess to Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

  Coming from the temperatures of 40ºC back to the UK was shock enough. Now I’d be heading straight into the brutal New York winter, two days in advance of the Princess.

  Diana travelled on Concorde, which meant that she’d touch down in New York earlier than she had left London. Our team, including Graham Smith, her lead protection officer, and Lieutenant Commander Patrick Jephson, her equerry, flew in on a British Airways 747. Along with the State Department and the New York Police Department (NYPD) – who would be in charge of convoys – our task was to revisit all of the venues that would be hosting the Princess before she arrived.

  While we weren’t royal ourselves, we did enjoy many royal privileges. The length of American immigration queues was legendary, but there was to be no standing in line for us. State Department officials, along with Sally O’Brien from our Washington Embassy, met us at the gate and whisked us through the airport. It was left to a British Consulate official to get the appropriate entry stamps in our passports and transport our luggage to the five-star Hotel Plaza Athenée on East 64th Street. Free of baggage concerns we had only to be responsible for ourselves and the clothes on our backs.

  New York certainly lived up to its reputation. I was so excited that it was all I could do not to stick my head out of the window and burst into song. I expect my colleagues were immensely grateful that I didn’t.

  Long haul travel had become the norm for me, but for the Princess, the 1989 visit to New York was going to be something of a milestone. While she was a well-travelled royal by this point, the tour was to be her first solo engagement outside the UK. The eyes of the world would be upon her to see how she would cope. Everyone may have had an opinion about her, but for most, the information was gathered second hand.

  I had had a chance to get to know her, and in doing so began to understand the kind of person she was. In a word, she was complicated. If things were going her way, she was fine. If anything out of the ordinary occurred – anything that conflicted with what she wanted to do, and in her way – then you were frozen out and left to stew until she decided to invite you back into the fold. The freeze could last days or even weeks, and no-one was immune.

  I was subjected to one or two myself.

  When Patrick Jephson was invited to serve as Diana’s Private Secretary, after completing his two-and-a-half-year stint as her Equerry, she decided that she wanted to hold a weekly programme meeting with him and me. On one occasion Patrick warned me that the Princess was hoping to arrange a reception at Kensington Palace for the England football team.

  ‘Why?,’ I asked. ‘They lost their recent game.’

  Agreeing, he replied, ‘Then why don’t you tell her that, Dickie? It would be better coming from you.’

  As her private secretary, Patrick needed to keep her on side. It didn’t matter if she froze out the press secretary.

  ‘Okay, Patrick,’ I said. ‘But you know what’ll happen. She’ll sulk and won’t speak to me until she wants something.’

  Moments later, the Princess walked into Patrick’s office. We discussed the events of the previous week as well as what was to come.

  It was then that Patrick said to Diana, ‘Wasn’t there something you wanted to ask Dickie, Ma’am?’

  Thanks a bundle, Patrick.

  ‘Dickie,’ Diana said, ‘I want to host a reception for the England football team. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a lovely idea, Ma’am, but why? They lost. If you go ahead, then you’ll have to give one to the cricket team, the equestrian team, the hockey team, the rugby team, the list is endless.’ I continued, not willing to let her get a word in, ‘No, Ma’am, it just won’t work.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she said.

  With that, the meeting was over.

  Patrick smiled…and I didn’t hear from Diana again for the next two weeks.

  Eventually, I learned not to take the freezes personally, but during those early days, I was on the same learning curve as everyone else.

  That is not to say that she was any less engaging or fun to be with. This solo trip was a chance to see her in action first hand. From the minute she stepped off the plane, I recognised how much of a natural she was, and how much potential she had as a roving ambassador for the UK. She was a true professional – warm, approachable and incredibly charismatic. It was as if she’d been doing it all her life.

  The tour began in down
town Manhattan. I had spent the better part of the day with the media, ensuring that the British press had been given the right positions. I was also on hand to brief HRH (Her Royal Highness) of any untoward changes to the itinerary. I tended to stick with the media, believing I could best do my job in the thick of the press pack, as opposed to loitering with the straphangers traipsing along with the royal party.

  Not that I minded traipsing along with the royal party when it was required. The NYPD handled our motorcade. Travelling in such a convoy was a mind-blowing experience. Not since my national service had I seen so many guns. As our motorcade progressed through the cavernous city streets, menacing secret service SWAT teams scoured the rooftops while those escorting us on the ground jumped out of their blacked-out SUVs at each red light. It was the New York of my every childhood imagining.

  As everyone expected, the Princess was off to an excellent start. America really took to her. She was soon to seal her position as the country’s favourite and most famous royal.

  The trip included a visit to the Henry Street Day Care Center on the Lower East Side, one of the city’s poorest areas. She also met a group of children suffering from AIDS in the pediatric ward at Harlem Hospital. At the time AIDS was still greatly misunderstood. It was therefore sure to be a high-profile visit, and we were concerned about how it might go. The head of the unit, a no-nonsense, outspoken Dr. Margaret Haegarty, was of Irish descent, and known for her republican sympathies. Regardless, Diana was masterful when it came to exploding the then-famous ‘do not touch’ myth.

  We needn’t have worried. There was no sense of antagonism towards the monarchy. Far from it. When asked by the Princess if Americans were educated about AIDS, Dr Haegarty’s reply was as pleasing as it was unexpected. ‘Our own royalty,’ she said, ‘whatever that is – being a democracy or a republic or whatever – hasn’t done anything nearly as symbolic as what you have done here today.’