by Sue Corbett
In the early years of the marriage the Waleses normally undertook joint engagements. This was the period of the Princess’s apprenticeship. But it soon became clear that of the two it was her that the public most wished to see, and Prince Charles was to some extent reduced to a male dancer supporting his glorious ballerina in her pirouettes.
While the popularity of his bride should have delighted him, it added a sense of pointlessness to his slightly frustrated life. Equally, he was irritated when he tried to make an important speech, and the next day the papers merely reported his wife’s outfit. He failed to grasp that one of the things the world wanted was a recurring series of images of a young couple enjoying a happy family life. He always appeared reluctant in such photo-calls, fearing that this diminished the import of his more serious endeavours. The Princess, on the other hand, fulfilled all such demands to perfection.
The respective backgrounds of the Prince and Princess of Wales were an additional challenge in the creation of a happy family atmosphere. She had come from a broken home, while his upbringing had been formal to say the least. His early companion had been his nanny, and he lacked any close involvement with his parents.
The love of solitude to which the Prince adhered even after marriage, combined with his love of polo and hunting, inevitably left the Princess on many occasions without him. But both parents shared an adoration for their children.
Even as the world rejoiced on their wedding day, the Princess was aware that she had not entirely captured Prince Charles’s heart. Yet she always felt that she would win him. He most probably felt that the marriage was akin to an arranged one, and some have said that he did not enter into it in the same spirit as his bride. When the Princess realised that Prince Charles was never entirely to reciprocate the love she felt for him, she, like many mothers, transferred much of her devotion to her sons.
The Princess celebrated her 21st birthday in July 1982, and that September she represented the Queen at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco in the cathedral at Monte Carlo.
The Princess was soon busily involved in the world of public duty. As the years went by, she evolved into a deeply committed member of the Royal Family. She swiftly became better informed — in the early days of her marriage a Fleet Street editor was surprised to hear Prince Charles explaining to her at lunch that Chancellor Kohl was the leader of West Germany. She also learnt the tricks of the royal trade, speaking easily to individual members of the public of all ages and possessing a good instinct as to what to talk about.
Yet in the early days she seldom made speeches in public, and when she did they were of the most formal sort. As she gained confidence, she began to write her own speeches, delivering them from the podium with calm assurance. She spoke of the importance of the family in everyday life, the rehabilitation of drug-users, and urged more compassion for those dying of Aids. When she and the Prince of Wales appeared together in television interviews it was not long before she was the more articulate of the two, leaving him almost monosyllabic, despite an earlier reputation for fluency.
The modern manner is for members of the Royal Family to be actively involved with any organisation of which they are patron or president. Until she gave up most of her charitable commitments at the end of 1993, the Princess was never merely a figurehead, but served directly as fundraiser, promoter, chairman of meetings — and, of course, as public spokesman.
She gave her support to an enormous number of charities, in a wide range of fields. Among her key presidencies or patronages were Barnardo’s; the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children; Centrepoint; English National Ballet; RADA; the Royal Academy of Music; the Leprosy Mission; the National Aids Trust; the Royal Marsden Hospital; Help the Aged; and the National Meningitis Trust.
An exhausting round of overseas travel was also a feature of her marriage. Her first big overseas tour occurred in March and April 1983, when she accompanied Prince Charles on a visit to Australia. The infant Prince William went with them. They travelled extensively from the Northern Territory to Canberra, through New South Wales, Tasmania, Southern Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria. At that time the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was a committed republican, but he was forced to concede that the Princess was “a lovely lady”.
The Australian trip (followed on that occasion by 12 days in New Zealand) was the first of three such visits. In June they went to Canada where there was an outbreak of “Di-mania”, a 1980s equivalent of Beatlemania.
In February 1984, the Princess made her first major solo visit abroad, to Norway to attend a gala performance of Carmen by the London City Ballet. Arriving in the snow, she was at once dubbed “The Snow Princess”. In the spring of 1985 she and the Prince of Wales went to Italy, a 17-day tour which included a visit to Sir Harold Acton at La Pietra, and to the Pope in Rome. Venice was perhaps the highlight of the tour, and here they were joined by Prince William and Prince Harry.
In October the Princess spent two days with the 1st Battalion The Royal Hampshire Regiment (of which she was Colonel-in-Chief until she relinquished her military commitments on her divorce in 1996) in West Germany. Following their second Australian visit, they paused briefly in Fiji, and rested in Hawaii before visiting the Reagans in the United States. The White House dinner and dance was typical of the mid-Eighties bonanza-style entertainment favoured during the Reagan era, and the highlight of the evening was when the Princess accompanied John Travolta in a sensational dance to You’re the One that I Want (from the film Grease), an experience which both enjoyed and which served to resurrect Travolta’s flagging career.
Other destinations during these years included Austria, Japan (where there was more “Di-mania”), the Gulf states, Portugal and France.
In 1989 the Princess returned to the United States, this time for a less glitzy trip to New York, where she visited centres for the homeless and dying children in the Aids ward of Harlem Hospital. She was dubbed, in American parlance, “Bigger than Gorby, Better than Bush”. There was a visit to Kuwait (where security was intense following the Salman Rushdie affair), and the United Arab Emirates. In June she and the Prince revisited Australia, and in November they went on a Far East tour, taking in Indonesia and Hong Kong.
Visiting Nigeria in 1990, the Princess saw much suffering at first hand, and pointedly shook hands with the chief of a leper colony. In May the same year she and the Prince paid the first royal visit to a Warsaw Pact country, when they travelled to Hungary. In October the Princess went alone to Washington for a ballet gala and to further understanding of Aids. In November she and the Prince went to Japan for the enthronement of Emperor Akihito (a visit surrounded by controversy in Britain). There were also visits to Brussels, to British troops in Germany, to Prague, and to Expo 92 in Seville.
Besides the birth of her two children, there were other events of significance in her years of marriage. She much encouraged the union between Prince Andrew and her friend Sarah Ferguson, and she was delighted when they married in 1986. For some years they remained close friends and confidantes, and it was a cause of distress to her when that marriage came apart in the spring of 1992.
The Duchess of York had appeared to be a good ally at court, never as glamorous as the Princess, never likely to threaten her place in the esteem of the general public, but certainly her friend. But the arrival of the Duchess of York was, in retrospect, a damaging thing for the Princess of Wales, for she began to be tarnished by the new Duchess’s fun-loving and sometimes irresponsible attitude.
The two may have seemed alike in character, but they were essentially different, the Princess being a great deal more dutiful and less interested in the perks. But the Duchess of York influenced her somewhat and it was during the time when they were close that the two then Royal Highnesses prodded their friends with the tip of their ferrule at the Royal Ascot meeting, one of a number of incidents that caused Establishment eyebrows to be raised.
Each girl represented an alternative fantasy
for the young: to be like the Princess of Wales was to diet rigorously and undertake regular aerobics. The Duchess of York, on the other hand, made few concessions and her attitude was more one of “Take me as I am”. In 1988 they were both in Klosters when their friend Major Hugh Lindsay was killed in an accident skiing off-piste with the Prince of Wales. This tragedy long dampened the spirits of all three.
For many years a small circle was aware of the not altogether happy state of the Princess of Wales’s marriage. Much was written about this over the years, but the situation continued until The Sunday Times adopted the story in 1992 and blew it up to sensational proportions. The public was left with another dream shattered, and the monarchy’s image was tarnished.
The 1992 revelations suggested that the Prince and Princess of Wales had failed to establish a mutually happy rapport during their marriage. There were many obstacles to natural happiness. With nearly 13 years between them, they were almost of different generations, he being born in the late 1940s, she in the early 1960s. The Prince was always of a serious disposition, inflexible in his way of life, not noted for his willingness to accept change. The Princess was initially more light-headed, though she developed considerably in the first decade of the marriage. She certainly entered the union with a more generous heart than her husband, who did not disguise his anxiety that the taking of a wife was an additional burden in an already busy life.
Despite her enormous popularity with the public, the differences in their interests seemed to divide them increasingly as the years progressed. Though they were both energetically and successfully involved in public life, the framework of their home life gradually eroded. He began to entertain separately. She spent more time in London, frequently away from Highgrove. Their problems were the focus of more attention than any couple could bear. Not only did they have to face their respective difficulties, but they had to do so in the full blast of media attention.
The strain began to show. The Prince of Wales had resumed his earlier association with a former girlfriend, Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. The Princess’s name was linked with those of two men nearer to her age, the Old Etonian James Gilbey and the Life Guards officer James Hewitt. There were clear signs of marital discord during a visit to India in February 1992, when the Princess spent time alone looking miserable at the Taj Mahal, and during a four-day trip to Korea in November that year, when the Prince and Princess, clearly unhappy in each other’s company, were dubbed “The Glums” by reporters.
By the end of 1992, speculation about the state of the royal marriage had come to a head, fuelled by the release of a tape of an intimate conversation between the Princess and James Gilbey. There was talk of separate living arrangements, and a suggestion that reconciliation was now impossible. In December, John Major confirmed to the House of Commons that the couple were to separate.
Separation did little to reduce public interest, particularly after the discovery in 1993 of another intimate tape recording, this time of a conversation between the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles. In December 1993 the Princess tearfully bowed out of public life, severing her links with most of the charities she had supported and begging to be left alone by the press. In 1994 Prince Charles admitted his long-standing and continuing relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles in a television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby.
Despite her pleas for privacy, the Princess remained very much in the public eye. As she set about putting her life in order during the period of personal confusion that followed the separation — visiting gymnasiums one day and psychotherapists the next — her every step was dogged by photographers and reporters. Yet her relationship with the media was always more complicated than she was prepared to admit. She may have been unhappy about some of the press ambushes, and about speculation on her association with married men such as the art dealer Oliver Hoare and the England rugby captain Will Carling, but there were undoubtedly occasions when she courted the attention, in an attempt to influence perceptions of her marriage and its breakdown.
Nowhere was this more evident than in her extraordinary decision — taken without consulting the Royal Household or even her own advisers — to appear on a special edition of the BBC Panorama programme in November 1995. She spoke frankly about her unhappy relationship with the Royal Family, her eating disorders, and her own and her husband’s adultery. She announced her desire to be seen as “a queen of people’s hearts”. On August 28, 1996, the Prince and Princess of Wales divorced.
Throughout her marital difficulties, the Princess had remained devoted to her sons. After the divorce, when she and the Prince were given joint custody, she continued to invest considerable energy in their upbringing. She was an adoring mother, and there were many images of mother and children together, the most celebrated when the children ran to their mother’s arms on Britannia after a period apart. The devotion was reciprocated, and her boys were a great source of comfort to her.
After her divorce the Princess made a return to public life, associating herself particularly with the work of the Red Cross, and taking a leading — and sometimes controversial — role in the international campaign to ban landmines. Earlier this year she auctioned many of her dresses to raise money for charity. She also seemed to find new happiness in her private life, spending much of the past few weeks in the company of Dodi Fayed, who died with her.
When she married the Prince of Wales, Diana said on television that she saw her life as a great challenge. Realistic though she was at 20 years of age, she underestimated how great that challenge would prove and at what cost to personal happiness it would be met.
The Princess made a lasting impression on the public. On the whole, they loved her; and even when she tried their patience, she remained a source of fascination. Outwardly shy, she had no lack of inner strength and common sense. Before her marriage she cast her head down, hiding behind her fringe. After the marriage she gained confidence, the head came up, and she began to acquire that star quality that drew all eyes in crowds and preoccupied fellow lunchers in restaurants. That quality, and that strength of character, saw her through her marital difficulties, and remained with her once the marriage was over.
Soon after her marriage to the Prince of Wales she was given the Royal Family Order by the Queen, but she was never given any other honours, such as the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, which she perhaps merited. On her divorce she assumed the title Diana, Princess of Wales, and remained a member of the Royal Family. She received various foreign orders on state visits.
Her two sons survive her.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was born on July 1, 1961. She died on August 31, 1997, after a car crash in Paris, aged 36
MOTHER TERESA
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ROMAN CATHOLIC NUN WHO FOUNDED THE ORDER OF THE MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY DEDICATED TO THE WELFARE OF THE POOR
SEPTEMBER 6, 1997
More than anyone else of her time, Mother Teresa came to be regarded by millions as the embodiment of human goodness. By her compassion, humility and, it also has to be said, shrewd eye for publicity she raised public concern for the destitute; by devoting herself with single-minded vigour to the relief of human suffering, she galvanised individuals, both believers and non-believers, and even governments into action. Not since Albert Schweitzer has any one person had such an inspirational effect.
Mother Teresa’s simplicity of purpose and approach hid a formidable personality and a determined strength of character. Despite a seemingly frail stature, she was physically strong and exercised a sometimes stern, unbending authority over her followers. Her personal philosophy was of a distinctly conservative kind, and she caused some disquiet in more liberal quarters by her highly public stance in opposition to abortion.
Her magnetism built the order she founded in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity, into a global movement. Without the benefit of image-makers, she captivated the attention of the international media, but was never herself captivated by it — or by the attentions of politicia
ns. During a visit to London in 1988, she visited both Downing Street and the homeless of the capital; she praised Margaret Thatcher for supporting her sentiments, but when no progress was made against the homelessness problem, she spoke out against the Government’s inaction.
Mother Teresa first became aware of the absolute deprivation of India’s poor in the bustees, the slums of Calcutta, in the 1930s when she was involved in taking girls who were members of the Sodality of the Virgin Mary, together with some Hindu girls, to visit the sick in hospital. At the time she was a teacher at St Mary’s, a Roman Catholic school in Entally, a rich residential area of Calcutta. They visited a few of the thousands of bustees hidden from the view of the rich residential houses and offices in Calcutta.
The contrast between the bustees and the oasis of beauty and security of the well-established community of the Congregation of the Loreto nuns where she lived gave a new direction to her vocation. “I knew that I belonged to the people of the bustees,” she said. “The problem was how to get there and live with them.”
It was on a train journey back to Darjeeling, on September 10, 1946 (a day now celebrated annually by her missionaries and co-workers), that Sister Teresa, as she then was, received what she described as “the call within a call” — a directive from God, that she was to have the courage to fulfil her ambitions and work with the poorest of the poor. “It was a command — I had to obey,” she said.
By this time she had become the Principal of St Mary’s. She then began applying for permission to leave her congregation, which she dearly loved. It took two years before this was granted by the Roman Congregation. On August 16, 1948, just before her 38th birthday, she exchanged her habit for a cheap white sari with a blue border, pinned a cross on her left shoulder and with five rupees in her pocket left the safety of the convent walls.
