Despite Diana’s generosity, several who knew the family at the time testify that Harry was even closer to his father than William was to their mother. Diana was never keen for either of her sons to risk their later lives with military careers, while Charles listened attentively to his younger son’s admiration for the soldiers and their smart uniforms. Father and son sat together for a first viewing of the movie Zulu, the story of a small band of British soldiers who defeated thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift in South Africa more than a hundred years earlier. Harry had to wait until he was ten before Charles took him to visit the Royal Engineers, one of the regiments involved in the Rorke’s Drift campaign, but he never stopped reminding Charles of his promise to do so. The movie, which he watched every time it was shown on television, had sown the first seeds for his ambition to take part in what he considered a courageous adventure.
Furthermore he listened attentively to stories of the heroic war actions of the man Charles admired more than any other, his great-uncle and mentor Earl Mountbatten, Admiral of the Fleet and the last Viceroy of India. Speaking to this author six weeks prior to his death in 1977, Mountbatten had said,
I do so hope that Charles gets married soon and has one or more sons. I have told him that, and that if and when they arrive he should steer them towards military careers. Serving their country is the best thing the family can do to sustain its reputation as rulers.
With Charles having answered Harry’s ‘Who am I?’ question, the Queen decided it was time she taught both boys something about what it was like to be royal and how to behave in the roles fate had carved out for them. She invited them to have tea with her once a week at Windsor Castle. Her Majesty made the occasions as informal as possible and during walks in the grounds deliberately stopped to chat to estate workers, showing the princes that they should never try to be ‘too grand’. Although Charles and Diana were excluded from this regular event, Prince Philip would occasionally join them and lighten the atmosphere by pulling faces and telling reasonably funny stories he made up as he went along. Although they were never allowed to forget that ‘Granny’ was Queen and this was her castle, the weekly visits offered some relief from the growing tensions at Highgrove.
To the outside world they were the perfect family who had everything, but behind the scenes Charles and Diana were drawing further and further apart. Speaking frankly in the grounds of her Victorian mansion in Wiltshire Lady Tryon said one of the reasons the marriage was falling apart was that
Diana will not make any effort to share Charles’s hobbies or his other recreational pursuits: she makes it clear that she is not interested in fishing or polo, yet she had been more than happy to join him on the banks of the Dee and to cheer him from the edge of the polo field when he was considering asking her to marry him.
It’s no wonder the boys enjoyed the calm behind the walls of Windsor Castle so much.
Always an adventurous boy, however, almost from the moment he could walk Harry took to exploring his parents’ country estate. Walking hand-in-hand with his brother he would venture to the 900-acre farm Charles had bought to test his conservation theories and the princes would fearlessly chase the cows with sticks. The presence of armed police protection officers nearby ensured the boys were never in any great danger but, one said later, ‘Harry was fearless even as a toddler. His mother would want to know how he had acquired the scratches and bruises he picked up on some of these expeditions, but all I could tell her was “boys will be boys”.’ She would hear that a lot in the years to come, as Harry demonstrated little of the caution his brother displayed. ‘Being one of them’ was never at the forefront of his mind.
4
THE DIANA INFLUENCE
Harry’s serene, pleasant and especially polite nature today owes much to the good manners instilled in him and his brother as small boys by their mother. Diana did a great deal to steer them away from what she considered the arrogant ways of some male members of her husband’s family.
Staff at both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace remember Harry being particularly taken by his mother’s friendly manner towards them and assert that he has followed in her footsteps despite the contrary behaviour of others that he witnessed.
‘Diana would often bring William and Harry down to the kitchen to say thank you after a meal they’d enjoyed,’ says Darren McGrady who moved from Buckingham Palace to be senior chef at Kensington Palace. ‘Fergie – who was always trying to copy her – would do it with Beatrice and Eugenie but it was too late and [it was] so obvious that she was just trying to be Diana. Plus she’d get the names of the chefs wrong.’
On the occasions when Harry was in the royal kitchen with Prince Andrew, he would pull a face if his uncle behaved in a way that he knew Diana would regard as rude. ‘Andrew always came straight to the point and [told] you exactly what he wanted,’ says McGrady.
Whereas Harry had been taught to say, ‘Please may I have…’ Andrew would bark, ‘Where are my mangos? I want my mangos!’ Now there could be twenty chefs in the BP [Buckingham Palace] kitchen at the time and the chances are the one he picked on wouldn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. His father was the same. Prince Philip would come into the kitchen and have tantrums telling people to ‘fuck off’ if he wasn’t satisfied. […] He had that sort of temperament. Diana made sure her sons did not follow in those footsteps. She was always very polite and caring. At Balmoral she would ask after my family and how much I was missing them while we were up there in Scotland for long periods, and you knew she meant it whereas you got a clear impression that if the others did it they were just going through the motions, that to them we were just servants. I’m not surprised that Harry has turned out to be the same as Diana. She doted on him.
Harry’s desire today not to get involved with the media any more than he has to owes much to the chatter and gossip he experienced when he was growing up. The journalist Tim Carrol, who was once sent by a newspaper to McGrady’s home in Isleworth to check out a rumour that Diana was having an affair with the cook over candlelit dinners he prepared for her, says that when he expressed surprise at McGrady’s candid – albeit negative – responses to his questions about his employer, McGrady replied,
I didn’t do it [break her confidentiality] until she did. She’s on the phone to the Sunday Mirror every Tuesday morning. We hear her. When a story circulated about an alleged romantic interest in Prince Philip’s life whose identity the investigating newspaper was unaware of, Diana said, ‘I know who it is. Shall I tell them?’
Carrol used McGrady as a regular source and when McGrady didn’t have the information the journalist required, he asked butler Paul Burrell to get the answers. For example, when Carrol phoned to check out a story that Diana might be pregnant again Burrell went to her bathroom and reported back that the Princess had taken her birth control pills right up to date.
If, when growing up, Harry needed any demonstration of his mother’s common touch then he witnessed it when a butler named Jarrett died after forty-four years in royal service. The family sent a wreath, but Diana alone attended the funeral service. Two weeks later when the Queen was being served her breakfast by a butler she was not familiar with, she asked, ‘Where’s Jarrett?’ On being reminded that he had passed away the never-unnecessarily-sentimental monarch said, ‘Oh yes, of course he did,’ and got on with her meal.
The arrival of ‘Uncle Ken’ in 1986 heralded a new era in Harry’s life. Although he was only two, the youngster saw in Inspector Kenneth Wharfe – his and William’s new police protection officer – a man who was neither royalty nor of the non-royal kind who would fawn over his parents or, indeed, over any member of the Queen’s family. The straight-talking Canterbury-born policeman had joined the Metropolitan Police as a cadet at the age of seventeen and following training with the SAS was selected to join Scotland Yard’s elite Royal and Diplomatic Protection Department, SO14. He was not to know that his job would involve far more than guarding
the princes and later their mother.
By the time Wharfe was drafted in to protect Harry and William, the younger royal was already showing an adventurous side not seen in his brother. ‘You never knew quite what to expect with Harry,’ says Wharfe, whose first memory of the three-year-old was watching him trying to pull the stamens from a table display of lilies, managing in the process to bring the antique vase crashing to the ground in pieces while William peacefully played the piano on the other side of the room.
‘Oh dear,’ said Diana,
Harry’s always having accidents, only the other day he was bounding on my bed and somehow managed to crash on to the bedside table. My framed pictures went flying and he even managed to break the glass of two of them. I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with his boisterous behaviour.
As Diana’s mother-figure friend Lady Annabel Goldsmith recalls: ‘Harry was always the more mischievous of the two.’ That’s a view reflected by the society interior director Nicky Haslam: ‘Harry is obviously fun. He’s sort of irresistible in his naughtiness and William seems to be good and rather more serious.’
Wharfe was more concerned for the family’s safety than the Prince’s ‘naughtiness’. To this day Harry recalls being in a car with his mother, waiting to embark on a shopping trip. He heard the police officer instruct her to ‘Fasten your seat belt, Ma’am.’ ‘Oh Ken, do I have to?’ was her coquettish response. ‘Only if you want the car to move as much as an inch from this spot,’ the policeman replied. ‘It doesn’t go anywhere until everyone is strapped in – and that includes you.’
Wharfe knew that he had a difficult act to follow. Diana had been smitten by his predecessor, Sergeant Barry Mannakee, a married man to whom she turned as a source of emotional comfort when she realised that her husband had resumed his affair with Mrs Parker Bowles. Always a lover of soft toys, Diana gave pride of place on her bed to a brown bear Mannakee had given her. Charles never asked where it came from and she kept it there for a number of years.
Even when the servants were around, Harry’s mother made no attempt to hide her warm feelings for the policeman. Once, as she was leaving for a dinner date, Diana wiggled her skintight-miniskirt-clad bottom at him and asked: ‘Do I look all right?’ Mannakee replied: ‘Sensational, as you know you do,’ adding, ‘I could quite fancy you myself.’ Diana giggled and said: ‘But you already do, don’t you?’ A former palace aide confides: ‘Everyone noticed that they just clicked. Whenever she had a problem she would go to Barry, always Barry.’ The balding policeman had been an unlikely companion on Diana’s endless shopping trips. They built up a bond on the Friday night drives from Kensington to Highgrove. ‘They called them their M4 chats, after the motorway,’ says the aide.
She used to like his candid conversations. She found it and him very refreshing. Charles was away all the time. William was a toddler, Harry was a baby and she felt she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. She’d look at Barry being brilliant with her children and wonder why Charles couldn’t be like that.
Soon Mannakee found himself coping with all Diana’s emotional turmoil. On one engagement she threw herself into his arms and sobbed: ‘I just can’t go on any more. I just can’t.’ Rumours about the couple quickly spread around royal staff. ‘It wasn’t just talk, it was a forest fire of gossip about Diana and Mannakee,’ said a family friend. ‘Prince Charles couldn’t just ignore it.’ Mannakee was suddenly moved to duties well away from Diana and from that moment they never saw each other again.
Wharfe is certain that Mannakee’s departure from Diana’s service was brought about by the below-stairs telegraph.
Butlers, staff in general, had ownership of her, inside control. If they wanted to get rid of someone they could. And that’s what happened to Barry. She adored him and she would invite him into her drawing room for afternoon tea – an unheard of practice for a senior royal. One servant would tell another and so on and sooner or later it reached [Superintendent] Trimming who, I believe, mentioned it to the Prince and Barry was out before his feet could touch the ground.
Wharfe is convinced, however, that the couple never had a sexual relationship: ‘I asked her, “Did you fuck him, Ma’am?” “No,” she replied, “you know I would tell you if I had, Ken. Charles got the wrong end of the stick.”’ That’s not what she was later to tell James Hewitt when he asked her where the brown bear on her bed had come from and without hesitation she told him it had been a gift from Mannakee: in Love And War, one of the books he penned subsequently, Hewitt writes, ‘I said it was a bit of a personal present to get from a bodyguard. She replied very simply, “He was my lover.”’
Mannakee was killed in a horrendous accident on 22 May 1987, just eight months after his enforced departure from Kensington Palace. He was riding pillion on a motor-cycle driven by another police officer in Woodford, Essex. Their Suzuki GS400 was struck by a Ford Fiesta driven by seventeen-year-old Nicola Chopp who had pulled out of a side road into their path. Mannakee, a father of two, died instantly. Diana could not control her grief. ‘Charles broke the news to her – albeit unemotionally – as they were on their way to France for the Cannes Film Festival,’ adds the talkative family friend.
The Princess, in worrying screaming fits, immediately began trying to slash her chest and wrists with her jewellery. Charles did nothing to comfort her. Fortunately her lady-in-waiting was able to rearrange Diana’s clothing to cover the cuts, bruises and tears in the fabric, but it was a close thing.
It was the kind of scene Diana, in her more volatile moments, did her best to shield her sons from. She was aware that Harry’s screaming fits tended to follow her own low moments and that William was forced to calm his brother more and more.
Harry’s distress continued even when he was asleep and he regularly wet his bed as well as suffering dreadful nightmares, even though Diana often slipped into his bed to comfort him. She was all too familiar with what it was like for a young one to suffer marital disharmony: she had cried herself to sleep at a similar age when her own father, the 7th Earl Spencer’s son Johnnie, and her mother had screamed, shouted and even punched each other before heading for a bitter battle in the divorce court. Diana had found herself motherless after the then Viscountess Spencer lost custody of her and her siblings after her own mother, Lady Fermoy, sided with her son-in-law.
This was a situation Charles simply could not understand: how could he? If and when his own mother and her consort ever had disagreements they were never in front of the children.
As the rift between husband and wife grew wider, the rows got louder. When the Queen’s former press secretary, Michael Shea, said of the couple: ‘The only arguments they ever had were over the children,’ Charles was heard to retort, ‘Huh, the only arguments he was privy to, maybe.’
Diana did everything she could to compensate not just for the marital discord but also for the restrictions royal life necessarily placed upon her boys. There were trips to McDonald’s (something Charles disapproved of, saying, ‘I would never have been allowed to go to such places’), visits to the cinema (‘Why? There’s a perfectly good screen at BP and I can ensure you get any films you want’), sitting on Santa’s knee at Harrods (‘When the store was open to the public, for heaven’s sake? What were you thinking of?’) and excursions to theme parks where they could scream on thrill rides alongside the rest of the kids.
She could not, however, be with her boys when they were at school, but Ken Wharfe was and she relied on him to keep her up to speed with what went on, particularly with Harry at Mrs Mynors’ infant academy. He brought home stories of the mischievous son’s activities, which frequently had Diana curling up with laughter. There was the occasion when, during morning assembly, Harry persisted in tugging at the trousers worn by the piano-playing music master, Mr Pritchard. When the teacher finally lost his patience and demanded that Harry stopped pulling his trousers, the young Prince piped up, ‘But Mr Pritchard, I can see your willy.’
Wharfe was
not the only man to arrive on the scene in 1986, for that was the year Diana met the man who was to change her life – and Harry’s: the dashing cavalry officer James Hewitt. It has to be said that Major Hewitt was an instant hit with her younger son. Although he still had his third birthday to come, the young Prince was already showing an interest in all things military, fascinated by ‘Granny’s soldiers’ – as Diana said he called them – and was delighted when after bath time he and William were invited to come downstairs in their dressing gowns and tell ‘Mummy’s friend’ about their day’s adventures. But even more he wanted to know about what soldier Hewitt had to tell him about military matters. He had been ‘excited’ and ‘frightened’ in equal measure, Diana explained to Hewitt, when a cavalry colonel had bowed and yelled ‘Sir’ to him at the top of his voice.
Dining with a friend at the Tai Pai restaurant in Knightsbridge in late summer 1986, Diana had been bemoaning the fact that, having produced a second son, in the light of her loveless marriage she faced a stark choice: to enjoy some pleasure with the bankin’, shoppin’ and dancin’ set, or to stay at home and turn into a palace couch potato. Three evenings later she accepted an invitation to a party in St John’s Wood; this was the night she and Hewitt first set eyes on each other, contrary to subsequent much-quoted reports.
How Diana would have fretted had she known that her affair with Hewitt would eventually result in Harry serving on the front line of the world’s most dangerous war zone. Hewitt claims she told him she would never be able to live with the thought of her sons ever being sent away to war. ‘She said it wouldn’t be fair to her as a mother,’ he records.
Harry Page 5
