Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  Philip certainly saw nothing wrong in handing the baby over to nursery staff. In his own early years, he had effectively been brought up by a nanny himself. So, each morning at 9 o’clock, little Charles would be taken to see his mother. And, in the evenings, engagements permitting, the Queen would join him in the nursery. But that was about the extent of it. They lived largely separate lives. ‘To my knowledge, she never bathed the children,’ recalled Mrs Parker. ‘Nanny did all that.’ It was therefore to his nannies that Charles, a shy and sensitive child, turned to for affection. The most important source of love was Nanny Helen Lightbody – he called her Nana – who got him up in the morning, dressed him, slept in the same room as he did and comforted him when he awoke during the night.

  He worshipped Mummy – but from afar. She was, Charles admitted in Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography, ‘a remote and glamorous figure who came to kiss you goodnight, smelling of lavender and dressed for dinner’. Aside from this nightly ritual, the Queen always found it difficult to hug or kiss her son, preferring to leave such tactile displays of emotion to the nannies. Like her husband, she is by nature physically undemonstrative.

  After King George VI died in 1952, their mother became even more distant when she assumed the role of monarch. Godfrey Talbot, the BBC’s court correspondent at the time, recalled, ‘She had been trained since the cradle by her father that duty came before everything, including her family. She reluctantly had to abandon her family and they virtually didn’t see their parents for months on end. It was very upsetting and bewildering for [them].’

  In 1953, the new Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh left on a long-delayed tour of the Commonwealth, knowing they wouldn’t see their children for six long months. Elizabeth cried as she said goodbye to them. Her long absence exacted its inevitable toll. When they were at last reunited, the Queen recalled later, the children ‘were terribly polite. I don’t think they really knew who we were.’ It was a heartbreaking admission. Most of her 1950s female contemporaries were stay-at-home mums – admittedly with nannies – but the Queen had just inherited the ultimate juggling act.

  Philip had little understanding of his son’s fears and inhibitions and was inclined to laugh at them. Of course, he made fun of Anne, too. But she could deal with that, cheerfully braving his ridicule, saying anything she wanted and even laughing with him. This contrast was reflected in the children’s relationships with their parents. Charles, who sometimes gave the impression of being terrified of his father, gravitated to his mother, who provided him with a sympathetic ear. Anne was close to Philip.

  Whether the Queen ever made much effort to temper her husband’s behaviour with Charles is doubtful: she is a woman who believes firmly in letting a man be head of the family.

  In 1994, Charles revealed to his official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that he felt ‘emotionally estranged’ from his parents and all his life had yearned for a different kind of affection that they’d been ‘unable or unwilling to offer’. They were hurt by these very public revelations, but all that Philip would say on the record was that they did their best. However, according to the opinion of Lady Kennard, also recorded in Dimbleby’s biography, their best wasn’t so bad. Philip, she insisted, was a ‘wonderful parent. He played with his children, he read them stories, he took them fishing, he was very involved.’

  During holidays – Christmas and the New Year at Sandringham, Easter at Windsor and most of the summer holidays at Balmoral – the whole family would play football, with the diminutive Queen acting as goalkeeper. ‘Nothing has the same meaning and soul-refreshing quality that Balmoral can provide,’ Charles noted after returning to Cambridge University for his final year in 1969. He wasn’t always a devoted student. He preferred the outdoors to musty old libraries. ‘Any excuse to escape from Cambridge and plod across ploughed fields instead of stagnating in lecture rooms is enormously welcome,’ he noted after he went shooting while at university in January 1969.

  There would also be endless picnics. ‘We grew up singing on the way to and from barbecues,’ recalled Anne in Ingrid Seward’s book My Husband and I: The Inside Story of 70 Years of the Royal Marriage. ‘Mostly First World War songs – we have quite a repertoire of those.’ The Queen was always a very competent singer. ‘I think we were very lucky as a family to be able to do so much together. We all appreciated that time.’

  Charles clearly had a different perception, allowing the negative to outweigh the positive. For all his faults, the Duke of Edinburgh would later put a great deal of effort into trying to help mend his eldest son’s disastrous marriage. He would also help to provide much-needed stability for his traumatised grandsons after the death of their mother.

  The Queen Mother, who viewed Charles as her favourite grandchild, returned his affection, so much, it now emerges, that she tried to sway his parents’ choice of schooling because she rightly predicted it would bring him misery. Previously unpublished letters written to her daughter, the Queen, revealed that she pleaded for the sensitive Charles not to be sent to Gordonstoun, the remote Scottish boarding school he hated and later described as ‘Colditz in kilts’.

  She argued instead for Eton College, Windsor would have been far more suitable for the sensitive prince. ‘I have been thinking such a lot about Charles,’ she wrote in a missive dated 23 May 1961 and addressed to ‘My Darling Lillibet’. ‘I suppose that he will be taking his entrance exam for Eton soon. I do hope he passes because it might be the ideal school for one of his character and temperament. However good Gordonstoun is, it is miles and miles away and he might as well be at school abroad.’

  She added, ‘All your friends’ sons are at Eton and it is so important to be able to grow up with people you will be with later in life. And so nice and so important when boys are growing up that you and Philip can see him during school days and keep in touch with what is happening. He would be terribly cut off and lonely in the far north. I do hope you don’t mind my writing my thoughts on this subject, but I have been thinking and worrying about it all (possibly without cause).’

  She had cause, but Prince Philip was adamant that his firstborn would attend his own alma mater, a place Charles described as ‘hell’. Author William Shawcross, who reproduces the correspondence in his book Counting One’s Blessings, details how the Duke of Edinburgh argued Eton College was far too close to Windsor and the prince would be ‘harassed by the media’ there.

  Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip saw their children only after breakfast and after teatime. This certainly doesn’t sound good, but it doesn’t mean the Queen and Philip were dreadful people. ‘She had been brought up in that style herself,’ author Robert Lacey, the historical adviser for Netflix’s The Crown, and author of The Crown: The Official Companion, explained to Town & Country. He further added that the Queen thought it best to have nannies raise her children while she was travelling, rather than bring them along.

  In contrast, the Queen Mother knew how to nurture him. I think the key to their relationship is that she saw in him the same sort of insecurity she saw in her husband George VI. In other words, she knew Charles needed to be given a lot of support and to be bolstered emotionally, which is what she did very well, rather better than his parents.

  In his book Charles: A Biography, royal author Anthony Holden says Charles took every opportunity to escape Gordonstoun and visit the Queen Mother at her Scottish home, Birkhall. There, says Holden, ‘The Queen Mother listened to Charles’s plaintive outpourings about his loneliness, his homesickness, the impossibility of blending into school like other boys.’

  ‘She provided a much-needed shoulder to cry on,’ respected royal writer and the Queen Mother’s biographer Hugo Vickers wrote in his excellent biography Elizabeth: The Queen Mother ‘You must remember that, when the Queen was away on her tour of the Commonwealth from November 1953 until May 1954, the Queen Mother was really Prince Charles and Princess Anne’s guardian. They were very young then and they would share weekends at Royal Lodge in Windsor Grea
t Park, and they spent a long Christmas holiday together at Sandringham. I think it was then that Charles in particular bonded with his grandmother.’

  They had a completely mutual adoration. Their sense of humour was the same, they enjoyed the same activities and the Queen Mother instilled a love of culture in him, taking him to the ballet when he was very young and walking him through the corridors of Windsor Castle explaining all the paintings.

  Until her death she kept a boyhood photo of Charles on her desk and her letters about him radiate affection. ‘Charles is a great love of mine. He is such a darling,’ she says in one, later telling the Queen, ‘He is intensely affectionate. I’m sure that he will always be a very loving and enjoyable child.’

  Her personal letters to the prince are perhaps the most doting. She is thrilled when he sends her flowers after an appendix operation in 1964, saying, ‘My darling Charles, I can’t tell you how touched and delighted I was.’ He in return tried to make light of his misery. Even when down he would joke about the masters and teachers and his own inadequacies. On his attempt to learn the trumpet he recalled, ‘I can hear the music teacher now …She would put down her violin and we would all stop and she would shout – she had a heavy German accent and somehow that made her more agonised – “Ach! Zoze trumpets! Ach! Zoze trumpets! Stawp zoze trumpets!” So I gave up my trumpet.’

  But mostly his memories of the place filled him with dread. ‘I hate coming back here and leaving everyone at home…I hardly get any sleep at the House because I snore and get hit on the head the whole time. It is absolute hell,’ he noted about boarding at Gordonstoun, in a private letter of 9 February 1963.

  One incident to this day irritates him, by the severity and unfairness of its consequences. It is the so-called ‘Cherry Brandy incident’. When Charles arrived, his housemaster warned the other boys that to be caught bullying the heir to the throne would risk expulsion. This had, unsurprisingly, the opposite effect. Charles was picked on at once, ‘maliciously, cruelly and without respite’. A prince – let alone an insecure prince – would have found it hard enough to befriend his peers. ‘Even to open a conversation with the heir to the throne was to court humiliation, to face the charge of “sucking up” and to hear the collective “slurping” noises that denoted a toady and a sycophant,’ Dimbleby observed in his book The Prince of Wales.

  The prince took this thuggery on the chin, without complaint. He was far too proud to let it show. But privately he was miserable, and hated returning. He described it as ‘absolute hell’. Charles wrote in a letter home in 1963, describing the tough time he was having, ‘The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness, they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul.’

  As Charles grew older, and his peers became more mature, so things began to improve. His school life was still not to his liking, but nor was it all misery. There was an unusually wide range of extracurricular activities to choose from. This allowed him to spend many happy hours in the art room painting, or at the potter’s wheel, or swimming. He also became so proficient in a canoe that he could paddle from Hopeman Beach to Findhorn Bay – a distance of twelve miles, but about double that when allowing for wind and tide.

  In his second year, he joined the crew of Pinta, one of two ketches owned by the school. On his first trip in the summer of 1963, he sailed into Stornoway Harbour on the Isle of Lewis. He and four other boys were given shore leave to have dinner and then see a film. Naturally, the four were accompanied by the Prince’s detective, Donald Green. As they walked towards the Crown Hotel they began to attract a small crowd. By the time they were in the lounge, a larger crowd had gathered outside the main window and flash bulbs were going off as folk jostled to get a photograph.

  Charles retreated from the room and, followed by his police protection officer, found himself in the public bar. Everybody was looking at him and he thought he should order a drink. He explained, ‘I went and sat down at the bar and the barman said, “What do you want to drink?”

  ‘I said the first drink that came into my head, which happened to be cherry brandy, because I’d drunk it before when it was cold out shooting. Hardly had I taken a sip when the whole world exploded round my ears.’ At that very moment a female journalist walked into the bar and the ‘incident’ was destined to make headlines around the world.

  At first, the palace denied the story. But two days later the palace was forced to withdraw its denial with press secretary Commander Richard Colville claiming that he had been misled by the prince’s protection officer. Once back at school, Charles was sent for by the headmaster and was demoted a rank in the school system. His Scotland Yard PPO Green fared worse and was removed from royal duties. Charles still smarts about it to this day. He said, ‘I have never been able to forgive them for doing that because he defended me in the most marvellous way and he was the most wonderful, loyal splendid man…I thought it was atrocious what they did.’

  Chapter Five

  A SUMMER OF DISCONTENT

  ‘She [Diana, Princess of Wales] understood that there was a real life outside of palace walls.’

  PRINCE WILLIAM, DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE

  Casually dressed with a shirt and no tie and nervously ringing his hands, Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, looked uptight. As he walked into a room to address a select group of journalists to introduce a film about his mother, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, he admitted that the prospect of speaking candidly about her so publicly had been a daunting experience. ‘At least at first,’ he added. In time, however, he said the ordeal for both himself and his younger brother, Prince Harry, had developed into a sort of healing process too.

  In his introduction, which lasted just a few minutes, William also admitted that he didn’t know if cooperating so publicly with such a personal documentary film had been a wise move and even told us, half jokingly, that he hoped he and his brother would not live to regret it. ‘Not only is this the first time we’ve spoken so openly and at length about our mother, it is also the last time.’ As far as both brothers were concerned, this was a one-off.

  I was one of the chosen few invited to watch the exclusive preview of Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, which was to be screened on ITV on Monday, 24 July 2017, at 9 p.m. to widespread acclaim. William and Harry, had not simply endorsed the film, made by Oxford Film and Television, producers of ITV’s Our Queen at 90, they had starred in it. Indeed, the film was built around contributions from both princes, who talked candidly about Diana and paid tribute to the many ways she had shaped their lives. It was intended as a documentary, they said, that in years to come the princes could show their children.

  It was certainly a watershed moment for William, Harry and the royals. Watching Diana’s sons open up so candidly about their iconic mother was, undoubtedly, compelling television viewing. They both gave revealing raw testimony, after both being interviewed for approximately forty minutes at Kensington Palace. At times it was clearly challenging for both William and Harry to deliver and perform on camera. On occasion they looked close to tears.

  Their courage to do so is commendable and the film they have backed and starred in is, undeniably, a touching tribute. Personally, as a Fleet Street reporter who has covered the royal story since 1990, I found it a moving and, yes, emotional too, journey down memory lane as I was there reporting on Diana’s public work and private life as she travelled the world. It was a significant watershed moment for the monarchy. For by backing and starring in the film, the princes had established a very different template for our new constitutional monarchy going forward. It hints at a more ‘touchy-feely’ style of monarchy – with a sovereign (ultimately Prince William) determined to do things his way: a ‘Diana-style’ monarchy.

  Throughout, William seemed happy to abandon the stiff-upper-lip style – ‘never complain, never explain’ – of his cherished and revered grandmother, Elizabeth II, despite her undoubted success in her role. A bastion of consistency, the Queen still hasn’t given a full a
nd frank personal interview and I doubt she ever will. For, when it comes to one’s personal life and media, her view is clear: ‘keep schtum’. It is a policy that has served the older generation well, but it is advice both princes have flagrantly chosen to ignore. By making the film, William and his brother were effectively telling the older generation of royals, ‘That was then, this is now.’

  It was clear that bearing one’s soul didn’t come as naturally to William as it does to Harry – wearing his heart on his sleeve, like his mother. This film brought back memories to those who knew and loved Diana, and introduced this iconic figure to a new, wider audience. It certainly brought a tear to the eye.

  I was astonished by some omissions in the cast list, not least, apart from still photos and television footage, that there was no mention of the father, Prince Charles, who after all had to raise them after Diana’s death. He was kept informed, but he was not asked or needed for the film as it was clearly about his sons’ mother. But, if he had taken part and paid tribute to his ex-and late wife of fifteen years, it would, perhaps, have been a positive, even cathartic, act for the prince.

  One source close to Charles said, ‘I suppose it is about their mother. But, even if the prince were not actually in it, it would have been nice if they had acknowledged his contribution to their upbringing. He was and tries to be a jolly good father after all.’