by Penny Junor
‘At the back of your mind there’s always anxiety for their safety but as with your own children you wouldn’t want them to see it. What boy isn’t devil-may-care? Any boy who’s got any sporting instinct will be like that. I don’t think it’s good to restrict them too much. They almost have to learn by their own mistakes. If you’re always saying be careful, it’s not very fair. You get on and enjoy life and he’s enjoyed the things he’s done and I’m sure would like to spend more time at them but can’t any more. He’s very competitive but if you’re going to play a sport you might as well be competitive. And he’s analytical about his own performance; he doesn’t like playing badly.’
All the children of local horsey and hunting families are members of the pony club – it’s a rite of passage for them (along with bossy pony club mothers). The five-year-olds start learning to ride and how to look after their ponies, and as they progress they learn jumping, cross-country, dressage and polo. It’s good fun, hard work and makes for very capable, practical children, and for those who don’t go to the local day schools, it’s a great place to make friends in the area. During the school holidays there is a programme of training sessions and rallies, competitions and gymkhanas, camps of varying lengths in the summer and Christmas parties. And the most exciting days for most pony club children is when they are allowed to join the grown-ups and go foxhunting. Even though hunting with dogs was banned in 2005, the Beaufort, like most hunts, still goes out several times a week and still holds special Children’s Meets.
William had already done a bit of riding when they first met but Claire took him up a level. ‘We did a lot of riding and jumping and having fun. He loved jumping. He has no fear, he’d get stuck into anything, but equally he wasn’t completely crazy.’ When he was a little older, she lent him horses to hunt with. ‘It’s nice to have the right sort of horse to get going on. He was growing out of his pony and needed something a bit bigger.’
Prince Charles was passionate about hunting and polo and encouraged the boys from an early age in both sports, although hunting was always going to be controversial. He loved it because of the adrenalin rush and the fact that in the process of trying to stay on your horse, it’s very difficult to worry about anything else. But he also loved it because he saw it as a natural part of the management of nature, and as a great leveller. As a fellow member of the Beaufort says, ‘There’s very little protocol on the hunting field, particularly when you’re covered in mud and being hauled out of a ditch!’ The killing of the fox is almost incidental.
William’s particular enthusiasm regarding hunting was the hounds. Ian Farquhar, Master of the Beaufort, has pedigree records in bound volumes for the Beaufort hounds going back fifty-four generations or more. He is fascinating and passionate on the subject of breeding and bloodlines, knows the name and quirks of every dog in the pack and loves them like children. He once said, ‘Hunting people support their hounds as others may support their football teams.’ Having known William for most of his life, it would be surprising if some of it hadn’t rubbed off. The best part of hunting for William was riding at the front of the field, alongside Ian, and watching the hounds work. Like his father, he was sad to have to stop. For although their friends might have carried on while the ban remains in place, they know they can’t.
But he still has polo, the oldest ball game in the world, said to have first been played in 600 BC. The Royal Family’s passion for it doesn’t go back quite so far, but it is certainly in the blood. William doesn’t get enough practice these days to play as well as he might, but he loves it, and he and Harry use it, as their father did for so many years, as a means of raising serious sums of money for charity. To be a decent polo player you must be an excellent horseman, have good hand–eye co-ordination and be a team player. According to Claire, ‘He’s not an advanced standard of horseman today [he is a one handicap; his friend Mark, now a professional, is a seven] because he hasn’t done it enough, but he’s a very sympathetic horseman. So many people who ride treat their horses like machines, but he has never done that – he treats a horse like a living being which has limits, and he will get the best out of it. He has great empathy with his horses.’
As a teenager, the polo club was the place where William and his friends hung out after matches and games. They would go into the bar where at weekends a rock band called Nobodys Business often used to play. It was made up of two locals, Steve Hoare and Frank McQueen. They were loud and gutsy and rapidly became everyone’s favourites. They also played at two of the pubs polo club people drank in – the Rattlebone Inn, in the neighbouring village of Sherston, and the Vine Tree at Norton. Steve remembers the excitement the first time the heir to the throne stood six feet away from him, dancing to his music – and watching his friends form a protective barrier on the dance floor as some young girls attempted to move in on him. At the end of the evening, he and Frank were introduced to William and a group of them sat around on hay bales chatting.
William started wearing the band’s black T-shirt. Once, he told Steve, he’d been wearing it over the weekend and ‘Granny had asked what the logo was.’ Their music always raised the roof and they regularly ended the gig with the Status Quo number ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. William and a couple of his mates started rocking alongside them one night, belting out the words without a care in the world, and thereafter it became his cue to sing. Afterwards, the landlord of the Rattlebone, Dave Baker, often had an after-hours lock-in, with only friends and regulars. They would all sit around drinking and chatting until the small hours. Increasingly, Harry joined the party, and sometimes their cousins, Peter and Zara Phillips, who lived not many miles away at Gatcombe Park.
Steve and Frank were soon playing at all the local eighteenth and twenty-first birthday parties, and became chummy with the whole crowd. Sometimes William and Harry would act as their roadies, helping them carry their equipment and guitars from the back of the car to set up. Harry used to impersonate their strong Wiltshire accents – at a smart dinner, he once mischievously flung a bread roll at Frank, getting it back double-quick. As Steve said, ‘It’s not every day you get a bread roll hurled in your direction by a member of the Royal Family followed by a handshake and a hug.’
For a bit of a laugh, they all put together a Nobodys Business polo team with William, Mark Tomlinson, Christian Blake-Dyke and Bruce Urquhart, and they successfully played their way through to the final of the Henderson Rosebowl in the summer of 2001. That same year the band played at the Beaufort Hunt Ball, a very grand event. They were not the main attraction – that was a twelve-piece band brought in from London, while Nobodys Business was put into a small side marquee. The minute they started playing, their faithful polo club fans were in there, and very soon the tent was bursting at the seams, as William and Harry, and Mark and Luke Tomlinson sang along at the tops of their voices to all the songs, leaving the smart London band playing to themselves and a small handful of ball goers.
OUT OF AFRICA
About half a mile from the Beaufort Polo Club, the Tomlinsons had a further nine hundred acres at a farm called Hill Court, on the outskirts of Shipton Moyne (home to the Cat and Custard Pot, another favourite watering hole). It was organically farmed and supported two large dairy herds, beef cattle, cereals and nearly two hundred polo ponies. This was where William worked as a farm-hand for four exhausting weeks at the beginning of 2001. On the grounds that he will one day inherit the Duchy of Cornwall with all its tenant farms, his father (who, like his father before him, has long been a champion of the countryside) wanted him to get an understanding of the rural economy and how those hands-on farmers live. It was something he was keen to do. He always loved spending time at the Home Farm, and David Wilson remembers him as a small child sitting for hours with the animals. But rather than go to a Duchy farm, where he’d be the boss’s son, he chose instead to work for his friend’s parents.
It was hard work, getting up at 4 a.m. each day to bring the cows in from the fields and d
o the milking and the washing down of the milking sheds afterwards and all the other mucky, backbreaking chores that fall to the latest recruit. The only consolation was that he was paid, unlike for everything else he did in his gap year; he got the princely sum of £3.20 an hour. He loved it, particularly the feeling that he was ‘just another guy on the farm’.
Next came Africa, the final and in many ways best part of the gap year. Africa has a way of getting into people’s blood and it had already started to seep into his. He had been there once before and was smitten, as so many people are. It’s the sheer size of the continent, the miles of nothingness, the friendly, laughing people, the adventure and the incomparable thrill of seeing wildlife in its natural untouched habitat.
He and Harry were taken to Kenya by old family friends, the van Cutsems, shortly after their mother’s death. Hugh van Cutsem had been at Cambridge with Prince Charles and he and his wife, Emilie, had been close friends of his ever since. Their four sons, Edward, Hugh, Nicholas and William, were almost like brothers to William and Harry – all but William, older than them – and although there was a brief rift in the relationship between Charles and Hugh and Emilie because of Camilla, the children remained firm friends. Emilie had been particularly good at scooping up the boys after Diana died and they had spent many happy days at their beautiful home in Norfolk. When William went to university, he gave them his black Labrador, Widgeon, to look after.
Their guide in Kenya was Geoffrey Kent, founder of the luxury travel company Abercrombie and Kent, a polo player, adventurer and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He had grown up on a farm in the Aberdare Highlands of Kenya and been educated in Nairobi. He knew the country like the back of his hand and his company specialised in up-market safaris to the most breathtaking parts of the continent.
He took them to Lewa, a game reserve on the northern foothills of Mount Kenya, which is as breathtaking as anywhere in Africa. The skies are big, the earth is red and scorched, the smells and the sounds are like nowhere else in the world and at night the stars are so bright and so close you feel you could reach up and stir them with your hand. And the place is bristling with wildlife.
Lewa was owned by the Craig family, whom Geoffrey knew well; he introduced them to his royal party. Ian Craig, like Geoffrey, was second generation; his father had gone out to Kenya from England in the early 1920s to farm cattle and owned about 35,000 acres of land, where game roamed freely. Poaching had always been a problem in Africa; elephants were killed for their tusks and rhinos for their horns, but in the late 1980s it became an epidemic. In ten years the estimated number of black rhino had dropped from 20,000 to fewer than 300. But they had a champion in a remarkable conservationist and philanthropist called Anna Merz. She persuaded Ian’s father to give over part of his ranch to a rhino sanctuary.
Together they worked to track and capture every remaining wild rhino in northern Kenya and relocate them to the sanctuary for breeding and safekeeping. Over the next ten years it grew until the Craigs decided to give over the whole property to the rhinos and enclosed it with high, electrified fencing. Since then, the government and neighbouring landowners have added to it, bringing the total acreage to 61,000. It was renamed the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and has become a flagship not only for Kenya but for the whole of Africa, and a catalyst for conservation. A number of endangered species have sanctuary there, including the Grevy’s zebra, sitatunga and oryx antelope.
The van Cutsem party stayed in a magnificent tented camp – a far cry from the sort of tents William had occupied in Chile. This was the height of luxury: the tents were raised up on little stone decks, with proper beds and bathrooms and stunning views over the bush, which began just feet away. And for escaping the heat, there was a swimming pool. It was bliss. They went on early morning game drives, in open jeeps, wrapped in blankets against the cold, bouncing across the rough tracks in the grass, everyone’s eyes peeled for the twitching of a tail in the half light, or the flapping of an ear that might reveal a herd of elephants emerging from the bush, or a cheetah quietly slinking through the trees. This is one of the best times of day to spot animals, before the sun comes up, and with it the heat, when they find themselves a shady spot to rest in after a night’s hunting. Another good time is late afternoon. And because the animals don’t see jeeps as a threat, provided no one makes a noise or a sudden movement, it’s possible to get very close. William loved it.
But more exciting still was when Charlie Wheeler, one of Ian Craig’s colleagues on Lewa, a fellow conservationist and another second-generation Kenyan, took them walking through the bush for a day’s expedition on foot, with camels. Armed with a rifle, he took the lead – everyone who leaves the safety of the camp, whether on four wheels or foot or horse, goes with an armed ranger just in case they meet an angry buffalo or get between a rhino and her baby. On this occasion they had two armed PPOs as well, although their training was more to deal with would-be kidnappers and assassins than hungry hyenas or malevolent bull elephants. Everything needed for the perfect lunch was carried on the camels, and when they stopped at noon in the middle of nowhere, a makeshift camp was conjured up in the bush and lunch was served as it might have been in a five-star hotel, with a troop of Africans to prepare and serve it. On their way back, the sun suddenly set; and in Africa there is no twilight. They went from sunshine to moonlight and unexpectedly walked into a herd of elephants. It’s the sort of experience that either thrills or terrifies. Harry, aged twelve, was hanging on to Charlie’s shirt but William was exhilarated. They rendezvoused with some vehicles and returned safely to camp, but the day and the holiday as a whole made a big impression on William and inspired a determination to go back.
When plotting his gap year he contacted Ian Craig and asked whether there was any work he might usefully do on Lewa. He planned to go first to Botswana, which Mark Dyer knew well, but then wanted to return to the place he had so fallen in love with, but he made it absolutely clear he did not want a joy ride. Ian assured him he would be usefully employed and welcomed him with open arms.
Charlie Mayhew is the founder and Chief Executive of Tusk Trust, a charity set up in 1990, dedicated to halting the destruction of Africa’s wildlife. Five years later he hooked up with Lewa, where the guiding philosophy so perfectly matched his own, and he became good friends with Ian Craig and his family. Their concern was not only the wildlife; it was also for the local communities and the need to educate them so that they could appreciate and manage the assets they had and profit from the tourism they brought. William heard about Tusk during this visit, and it was one of the first charities of which he agreed to become patron.
Charlie happened to be at Lewa the day William and Mark, shrouded in secrecy, arrived in March 2001. He was there with Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stones guitarist and painter, plus a photographer and a journalist from the Daily Mail. Ronnie was a patron of Tusk and had painted a series of wildlife pictures at Lewa to raise money for the charity. The publication wanted to see Ronnie in situ and so Charlie had taken them all. Ronnie stayed with Ian and his wife, Jane, while the journalists were accommodated in a lodge.
‘Before I got there,’ says Charlie, ‘Ian sent me an email or phoned and said, “You are leaving on such and such a date and you will be gone by 11 o’clock won’t you?” This was so unlike Ian to be so precise, very unKenyan. I said, “Yes, okay, we’ll be gone.” I was taking Ronnie up north for more interviews. When we arrived, Ian apologised and said, “You might have thought me a bit odd, but we’ve got William coming and the fact you’ve got a Daily Mail journalist in tow put everyone into a spin.” And as William flew in, we flew out and the poor journalist never realised that he had the biggest scoop under his nose.’
William and Mark stayed with the Craig family for a couple of months while he worked on the Conservancy and they became very close. It has long been asserted that the Craigs’ daughter, Jecca, was an early girlfriend, but friend is much closer to the mark. The Craigs were another normal, easy-going
family by which William was happy to be embraced on his trips to Africa. Jecca was like a sister to him and their son Batian like another brother. In Kenya he could disappear; very few people knew who he was, and those that did, didn’t care.
‘You can see exactly why William has become so close to Ian Craig,’ Charlie said. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s a father figure but they have a very close relationship. He’s very down to earth and has a lovely family, a wife and two children. They’ve all become close friends and what’s interesting about William and his friends is how closely guarded they are and protective over that relationship and the privacy, and one can’t help but admire it.’
‘William was much more relaxed when he came back the second time,’ says Charlie Wheeler. ‘On that first trip his mother had just died and he was very quiet and reserved. This time he was a normal boy, and was treated like all the kids.’ Charlie has two sons of his own of much the same age and his late wife, Carole, like most Kenyans, black and white, was completely unfazed by the royal tag. It meant nothing to them, which is at the heart of why Africa is so special to both William and Harry. It’s the anonymity that they both crave. To her, William was just another boy, who should pull his weight, and she made no distinction between any of them.
While William was there, a big bull elephant had to be captured and transferred to another national park. He was causing huge damage on Lewa, breaking trees and being generally destructive because of the limited space. It was a major event in the local community and dozens of people were involved and lots of photographs were taken because the Craigs always liked to record these transfers. William was part of the operation and remarked that for the first time in his life, the cameras were not focused on him.
