Harry

by Chris Hutchins

  Two other nannies came and went: Ruth Wallace, an attractive and fun person who enjoyed a drink but could not stand the tension between her charges’ parents and left Kensington Palace in 1990 to take a long trip up the relatively peaceful Amazon, and the motherly Jessie Webb who had previously worked for designer Nina Campbell. Charles did not like the fact that Harry was picking up cockney rhyming slang from Jessie and finally gave in to Diana’s wish that Mrs Powell be made the principal nanny. Throughout, Diana regarded her more as a friend than a servant and Powell remained with her for fifteen years. It was Olga Powell, not butler Burrell, who was the true rock in the Princess’s life, the one whose shoulder she could cry on in times of stress – and there were many such times to come.

  Even Mrs Powell, however, found it hard to control Harry’s excesses: she blanched on one occasion during afternoon tea at Windsor when he said to the Queen, ‘Ooooh … that’s a pretty dress,’ causing the monarch to blush. Although in normal life it would have been a perfectly reasonable remark for a small boy to make to his grandmother, the Queen is, after all, the Queen. Mrs Powell also blamed herself when Harry, covered in mud from his outdoor frolics, ambushed his formally attired father as he made his way across the lawn to a waiting helicopter of the Queen’s flight. The young Prince jumped on Charles’s back and yelled, ‘Stay put. You’re captured,’ causing his father to tell his pilot, Commander Barry Kirby, that take-off would have to be delayed while he went back into the house to put on a fresh suit. Life for the Wales family, Mrs Powell complained at one point, was never going to be normal and she was told by a doctor treating her for stress (a common malaise in royal servant circles) that working for them was going to shorten her life. Nevertheless she stayed dedicated to the job for which she was initially paid £3,500 a year – £10,000 in today’s money.

  There can be no doubt that Harry Wales was born into a dysfunctional family. Apart from excess drinking there were accusations of sexual promiscuity which went as close to the top as it was possible to go. Princess Margaret’s home on Mustique was little more than a bordello and her fascination with the private parts of a well-known London villain was the talk of the island. As for her husband, Lord Snowdon, most of the girls who worked in his Pimlico studio thought that he was gay to which he responded: ‘I didn’t fall in love with boys but a few have been in love with me.’ In his 2009 memoir, Redeeming Features, leading British interior decorator Nicholas Haslam claimed to have had an affair with Snowdon (then plain Antony Armstrong-Jones) before the latter’s marriage to the Queen’s sister, and he also alleged that Snowdon had previously been the lover of another interior decorator, Tom Parr.

  Although royal scandals abounded during his formative years and he, too, had his moments, Harry learned from an early age that there was much to do if he was to help repair the damage of the past. He was never likely to endorse the adage once expressed by his father: ‘I’ve learned the way a monkey learns – by watching its parents.’ Rather, Harry learned much by avoiding the mistakes he had witnessed his parents – and other relatives – making.

  As and when Harry becomes a father himself, he is unlikely to put an infant through what I, as a journalist travelling with the royal couple, saw when he was taken to Italy by his parents on his first royal tour in 1985. He screwed his tiny face up in fear at the sight and the noise of the flocks trying to catch sight of the royal couple, but Diana had insisted the trip would help her baby ‘get used to the crowds’.

  In private, Harry showed his adventurous side from an early age. At just fourteen months he was allowed to share the saddle when William – who learned to ride at the age of three at his father’s insistence – rode one of the two ponies Charles had bought him and, showing signs of demanding his own way, Harry threw a tantrum when it was made clear to him that he was too young to handle the horse on his own. To his mother’s horror he made his first parachute jump at an early age, leaping from a kitchen table. Alas, his landing was not good and he sustained an injury which required stitches. The staff were sworn to secrecy about the accident; even some of their own team back at Buckingham Palace did not know about it. Harry, however, was proud to display his war wound at the Westminster Abbey wedding of his uncle Prince Andrew on 23 July 1986 and even declared that the jump had made him want to become a parachutist when he grew up. Even the memory of this minor accident would not daunt him when Diana’s subsequent lover James Hewitt told him later that the average life of a paratrooper descending into combat was about four minutes. Even at that age Harry Wales knew no fear.

  What he did know, however, was loneliness, something he experienced when, in September 1985, William went to nursery school. He wept buckets when he was parted from his brother, whose bed he had often crept into when he had ‘bad dreams’. But his time at the same school would soon come.

  3

  WHO AM I?

  ‘Who am I?’ a puzzled Harry asked his father after one of his first days at nursery school. He had himself been asked the question by a fellow pupil at the Notting Hill school, who merely wanted to know his name, but at the age of just three and struggling to integrate with strangers for the first time, Harry had begun to wonder what all the fuss was about whenever he was seen (and photographed) in public. The question moved Prince Charles to sit his younger son down and tell him exactly who he was.

  It was a highly emotional encounter since the father had to tell his son that he was two people: to him, Diana and his brother William he was Harry, a much loved little boy who enjoyed playing with his toy soldiers and pretending to help out with the garden at their country home. But to the outside world he was something quite different: he was Prince Henry of Wales, fourth grandchild of Queen Elizabeth II and HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, third in the line of succession (behind his father and his elder brother) to the thrones of sixteen independent sovereign states known as the Commonwealth realms – not just the United Kingdom but Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Granada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Kitts and Nevis. He is also third in line to the position of Supreme Governor of the Church of England. He was always to be addressed as ‘Your Royal Highness’ and one day he would be a duke as well as a prince.

  What he also told him was that his mother came from a family with grander heritage than his own. Charles’s ancestral grandmother was a member of the Germanic House of Hanover, which didn’t take over the British throne until the succession of George I on 1 August 1714, whereas Diana’s family, the Spencers, date back to the 1400s as leading members of the British aristocracy, although they had started out in pre-Tudor times as sheep farmers – something Earl Spencer was reminded of while speaking pompously in the House of Lords. Spencer was interrupted by the Earl of Arundel who said, ‘When the things of which you speak were happening, your ancestors were keeping sheep.’ To which Spencer retorted, ‘Yes, and when my ancestors were keeping sheep, yours were plotting treason.’

  Diana’s noble family descended in the male line from Henry Spencer who claimed to be a descendant of the cadet branch of the ancient house of le Despencer and the male-line ancestor of the Earls of Sunderland, the Dukes of Marlborough and the Earls Spencer. In addition to Diana, another prominent member of the family was Winston Churchill, whose family had been linked to the Spencers by the marriage of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, to Lady Anne Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. Althorp, where Diana is now buried, has been the family seat for 500 years.

  Quite a lot for a three-year-old to take in and especially confusing for him when his mother challenged the grandness of Charles’s proclamation by telling him he was a human being who was growing up in a position to help ‘ordinary’ boys – something Harry has never forgotten.

  The Prince had arrived at 8.50 sharp for the first of his twice-weekly mornings (graduating later to five) in September 1987 wearing blue shorts, a blue p
olo sweatshirt and carrying a Thomas the Tank Engine school bag over his shoulder. Prior to leaving home he had cried about being separated from his mother despite an enthusiasm to follow in his brother’s footsteps. But, placated by his police guardian, he dried his tears and grew excited by the waiting crowd of photographers, making faces at them before he stepped inside. Then, anxious to please, he had bounded forward to shake the hand of his headmistress but, following protocol, she reached over his head to shake the hands of his parents,. It was left to his father to pat him on the back and reassure a confused Harry that all was well. He had become accustomed to asking, ‘What have I done wrong now?’ whenever he was chastised.

  Harry started his school life as a Cygnet. His coat peg was marked by a red card simply saying ‘Harry’, as he was to be known to the other children. The blue work smock hanging from it, however, was labelled Prince Harry. On either side were pegs for classmates Jessica and Beatrice. Harry had a picture of a duck above his peg, Jessica a deer and Beatrice a pen. Other classmates (none of whom are the source of information that follows) include Natasha, Lucy and Alexander von Preussen, who just happened to be the great-great-grandson of the late German Kaiser.

  Diana was particularly pleased to see that Harry’s classroom had a view of the garden and was decorated with pictures of balloons to illustrate different colours and numbers. There were shelves of games, farmyard toys, play bricks and a stack of children’s books. Charles noted that this was a world away from the nursery in which he had spent his infancy. Nearby were classrooms for twenty-four older children – Little Swans and Swans – and the corridor was lined with school activity photographs, including one of the previous year’s nativity play with Prince William playing the innkeeper.

  Although Harry was showing early signs of being more of an outgoing boy than his brother, the experience of his first school days had clearly unnerved him. Still, the fatherly talk did much to boost his confidence and he went on to sing solo at the school’s carol concert that term and to star in its nativity plays, lapping up the applause with which his performance was received.

  One subject Charles always avoided, however, was the unhappy family his sons had been born into. Although Diana did her best to shield her sons from marital tantrums, on the rare occasion he did witness her in a state of distress, her younger son would suffer worrying screaming fits and have to be calmed by his brother. It was of sufficient concern for her to discuss it with the psychiatrist whom she herself was consulting: Diana had to be told more than once that he would ‘grow out of it’.

  Whereas most of his playmates at Mrs Mynors’ school lived in ordinary – if expensive – houses in the Chelsea and Notting Hill areas, home for Harry was the wing of a splendid London palace, built in 1689, where Queen Victoria was born and raised. Some say the Wales’s wing was haunted by the ghost of a previous occupant but although Mummy was scared on the rare occasions she had to sleep there alone, Daddy had assured him there was no such thing as ghosts. Meals were usually taken in the nursery unless Diana was around; she would take him down to the kitchen and let him choose what he wanted for tea – fish fingers or beans on toast were the favourites and he delighted in eating them from a table covered in plastic ‘so Mummy won’t have to have the tablecloth cleaned’. Visitors greeted by the butler Harold Brown would be asked by Harry who they were and if they had to wait for Charles or Diana to appear he would invite them to follow him into the drawing room where his parents kept his favourite gadget – a video recorder used to tape favourite children’s programmes he missed when he was at Mrs Mynors’ school or travelling with his parents. If he considered them ‘special’ he would invite them to follow him up the stairs and show them his secret room – the nursery. Even then, Harry was never shy in the company of strangers.

  When other children talked about their parents’ weekend cottages in the country, Harry could boast about the nursery wing at a mansion estate in Gloucester, Highgrove, with its staff quarters, nine main bedrooms positioned above four grand reception rooms and a view of the spire and tower of Tetbury church as well as a working farm – ‘Mummy doesn’t have to go to Sainsbury’s for our fruit and vegetables, we have our own farm.’ Then there was Daddy’s famous (though rarely seen) walled garden where Harry could copy his father with a set of toy gardening tools. It was in that garden that Charles and his younger son bonded, often sitting on a bench as the sun set, supping a tot of brandy or, in Harry’s case, a plastic cup of orange squash. Halcyon days indeed.

  ‘And who is that man who stands directly outside our playroom all day long?’ one boy asked Harry. ‘That’s my policeman. My brother William has one too and Mummy and Daddy have several.’ The boy who had asked the question was one of a handful of Mrs Mynors’ pupils who subsequently formed what became known as ‘Harry’s gang’, for he soon proved himself to be a natural leader even in the playground and especially when it came to breaking rules. He also had no qualms about telling his new pals how generous his extravagant mother was: she bought him a child-sized police motorbike costing several thousand pounds – though somewhat less than the £60,000 she paid for a scaled-down Jaguar car for William one birthday. And each of them got a £1,000 go-kart as compensation after they witnessed a particularly upsetting row between their parents. Their father – who had once been sent back on a family walk by his mother to find a dog lead he had dropped, being told, ‘Leads don’t grow on trees, they cost money’ – was not pleased and pointed out to Diana how it would go down with the parents of one in four children in Britain living in relative poverty, but in her mind it made up for the paternal love her sons seemed to be going short on.

  Harry had an easier infanthood than William as a result of an action taken by Charles and Diana before he was born. They had summoned a dozen or so editors to a meeting in an upstairs stateroom at Buckingham Palace. Whenever William was taken to the park, accompanied by nanny ‘Baba’ Barnes and a detective, the paparazzi would swoop. A curious crowd would gather around the Prince’s pushchair and it was at these times that Charles and Diana felt their first-born was at risk from a possible kidnap attempt, even a terrorist attack. If newspapers, particularly the tabloids, stopped buying pictures of William’s visits to the park, the paparazzi would move on and focus on another member of the Royal Family. Logical though this sounded to press officer Michael Shea and his royal clients, it was like asking a fox to walk past the open door of a chicken coop. Even if Fleet Street agreed, the paparazzi could still sell every picture to magazines in Europe and the United States.

  After a briefing from Shea, the guests were split up into small groups while Charles and Diana ‘worked the room’ under the vigilant eye of Palace officials. ‘If it doesn’t stop we’ll have to cancel my son’s trips to the park,’ Diana told one group. ‘This would be a pity because I want him to mix with ordinary people. I don’t want him to be brought up behind the Palace walls.’

  Her voice was soft and well-modulated, not at all strident like most Sloane Rangers, who could easily compete against a combine harvester. Some sentences were punctuated by a nervous giggle. Nevertheless, it was evident that she was ill at ease and painfully conscious of her height, which, at six-foot-plus in shoes, made her very nearly the tallest person in the room. Much of her body language made her seem taller; she hunched her shoulders, hung her head and looked up, eyelashes fluttering, in the same coquettish way that made men swoon. She said in an aside to one of the editors, ‘Oh my goodness, they’re all so SHORT.’

  On the other side of the room, Charles had seized the chance to give his views on intrusion. He became locked in conversation with David Montgomery, then editor of the News of the World, and it was apparent to those in earshot that he was becoming angry. Immaculately turned out, his hair neatly clipped and his cheeks glowing pink with the health of the super-fit and very rich, Charles kept his voice, and his composure, under control. But his cheeks turned a brighter shade of pink as he made some strongly held points about the reporting
of his marriage. It was the trivia he found most offensive. What he ate for breakfast or what his wife bought when she went out shopping could be of no conceivable interest to anyone. Much to his annoyance, Montgomery listened politely but remained unrepentant. ‘People are interested in everything you do,’ he told Charles in a soft Ulster accent. ‘We give people what they want to read.’ The Prince did nothing to hide his annoyance at the response and made it clear to Montgomery that he and his fellow editors were there to listen to his and Diana’s concern for their son’s safety, not to hear what sounded like a sales pitch.

  The experiment worked to a certain extent. There were no more park-walk pictures of William in the British papers and when Harry came along the editors kept to the code of conduct they had more or less agreed to at the Buckingham Palace meeting. To this day he is probably unaware of the crucial meeting his parents called that helped to spare him the fear of photographers instilled in William at a very early age. Still, their presence was enough of a disturbance to him that, when photographed re-entering Kensington Palace, he once used an expletive learned from his mother; Princess Margaret, who overheard the remark, was later to say to Charles, ‘That boy should learn some manners or he will never be one of us.’