If Charles was still miffed about the choice he did not show it when he and Harry arrived in a Vauxhall estate car and posed briefly for photographers in heavy rain. On arrival Harry was wearing a favourite light-green sports jacket but that was soon to be swapped for the unique Eton uniform (black tailcoat, waistcoat, white tie and the stiff collar he used to complain made his neck sore) which dates back to the nineteenth century.
Father and son stepped into Manor House to be greeted by housemaster Dr Andrew Gailey, a kindly Irishman, and his wife Shauna who entertained them along with the other new boys and their parents. There they were joined by the no-nonsense house ‘Dame’ or matron, Elizabeth Heathcote, who made her authority known by instructing the Prince to sign the entrance book. Next, Harry was taken to his room which, he was happily assured, would be cleaned and tidied by a maid, a girl who would also make his bed and attend to his laundry. Looking out of the room’s ivy-covered window he noticed that some of the press photographers were still lingering below and Harry, being Harry, obliged them with a bonus picture by waving to them.
His royal protection officer was duly installed in the next room with instructions to report to his superiors if Harry continued to show the worrying signs of distress he had suffered since the Paris car crash. Watching over his younger brother was also a task allotted to William who was lodged close by in the same house. After a year that had tested his parenting skills to the limit, Charles was all too aware that his younger son was particularly vulnerable and the special tasks entrusted to the policeman and the sibling were never going to be easy ones for them to accomplish.
Founded in the mid-fifteenth century by King Henry VI, Eton has a formidable reputation for producing great men. No less than eighteen British prime ministers, including the Duke of Wellington, Horace Walpole and Harold Macmillan, and writers George Orwell, Henry Fielding, Aldous Huxley, Percy Shelley and Ian Fleming did their learning there. Most leavers go on to university, one-third of them to Oxford or Cambridge. All this was well above Harry’s intellectual level.
The college has a language all of its own. William taught him that the cricketers are known as ‘dry bobs’, rowers as ‘wet bobs’ and those who go in for neither are ‘slack bobs’. Lessons are ‘divs’ and teachers are ‘beaks’. Boys who merit positions of special responsibility are marked by different colour waistcoats, trousers or buttons. Fees for the 1,300 or so pupils are now in excess of £30,000 per year. Harry was spared the process of acting as a servant to any of the older boys by the relatively recent abolition of the fagging system, and by the time he arrived the thrashing of offenders with a birch rod while they were stretched over a wooden block had also been done away with. Nevertheless, he managed to annoy several of his fellow pupils by going out of his way to demonstrate that he was just one of them, when he was clearly not. This proved to be quite a problem in the ensuing months and he had difficulty in making friends. He won several over, however, when he demonstrated in more than one playground fight that he had fists as good as the best of them, a fact that was noted in an early report to his father along with a mention of his ‘aggressive’ play when he was on the football field. This one was not to be messed with, was the message, although his bravery when taking on boys bigger than himself was a good indication of what was to come in later years. It was, however, to cause him a nasty injury when, during a soccer match, he collided with another player while jumping to head a ball and landed flat on his back. He suffered such pain in his arm that it was thought he had fractured it. His arm was put in a sling but even that did not prevent him thumping a pupil who dared to laugh at his predicament.
His enthusiasm for Eton’s fearsome Wall Game (where two teams of ten players wrestle and push a ball in a scrum along a 110-metre wall for the chance to have a shot at a garden wall or tree), which had caused fatalities in the past, was a sure sign that he feared nothing or no man. To the Palace’s dismay he was photographed on crutches after kicking in a window following a particularly strident row with another pupil over a girl they both fancied. He soon became a familiar figure in the matron’s office. After persuading a local barber to give him the same haircut that Michael Owen, his football hero of the day, was currently sporting – a ‘skinhead’ – the Palace had to plead with Fleet Street editors not to publish photographs of him taken in the streets of Eton and Windsor looking just like any other delinquent on the hunt for female fodder.
His behaviour was a concern for all, but there was light at the end of the tunnel, as one (now retired) housemaster relays:
We used to say that Harry was like a firecracker and when other pupils saw him coming they used to pass a by-now familiar warning: ‘Don’t light the blue touch paper’, in other words don’t give him the slightest excuse to vent his spleen. He needed some outlet for his anger and he found it when he discovered the Combined Cadet Force. Eton has a long-standing military tradition and he became an enthusiastic recruit of the well-disciplined Force. That, for a while, curbed his frustration and diverted much of the aggression he had been displaying outside the classroom. We knew then that he was destined for a career in the military, where he could channel that aggression usefully.
Never a truer word…
Nevertheless, it was hard to reconcile the image of a grief-stricken Harry standing behind his mother’s coffin with Harry the Hellraiser who emerged during his time at Eton. One balmy summer evening he was being driven along King’s Road, Chelsea, in a 4x4 with his bodyguard and some friends on their way to a party. Music blared from the vehicle’s sound system as it pulled up at traffic lights next to an open-topped sports car. Harry lowered his window and began lobbing chips into the other car to the obvious annoyance of its driver. When a newspaper columnist upbraided Harry in print for being a lazy, disdainful and privileged yob, Paddy Harverson, Prince Charles’s then spin doctor, wrote an angry letter to the paper:
Like any other nineteen-year-old fortunate enough to be able to spend time travelling and working abroad, Harry should be allowed to benefit from his experiences without being subject to this kind of ill-informed and insensitive criticism.
Despite Harverson’s protest, Harry would be the first to admit that from an early age he was a seasoned imbiber of vodka and it was not for nothing that he earned the nickname Pothead Harry. Unfortunately he was often ‘out of it’ in public: on one occasion it was left to his younger cousin Beatrice to restrain him when, dressed in jeans and wearing a reversed baseball hat, he lost it during a wild scene at a party in the Chinawhite marquee after a Guards Polo Club event, lobbing water and cans of Red Bull at his friends. The contrast between his overwrought excitement and Beatrice’s ladylike dignity could not have been more pronounced.
Chinawhite owner Rory Keegan says:
The princes were young men growing up. They were not doing anything wrong. They had a right to have fun. Couldn’t we let them have their youth without invading it at every turn? Harry doesn’t have a bad bone in his body and it’s important to us to protect him.
Harry’s first serious experience with alcohol had come about during the Mediterranean holiday with his mother and brother as Mohamed Al Fayed’s guests in July 1997. Each time the yacht pulled into a port, Harry would go ashore with whoever he could round up from the small cruise party and, as Diana herself was later to put it, ‘got into mischief’. One of those who went along told his own father that they all felt ‘happily squiffy’ after sampling a local brandy.
Things were to take a turn for the worse, much worse. Harry and his brother had helped arrange a Highgrove party ahead of their father’s fiftieth birthday. The outside of the house had been decorated with wildflowers and Greek statues had been erected in the Prince’s favourite spot – his beloved walled garden. The boys had gone to great lengths to persuade Camilla to join the gathering to show they bore her no ill feeling. Guests included the actors Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson, whom he and William had persuaded to stage some comedy sketches poking fun at
their father along the lines of Atkinson’s Blackadder – charging the audience £30 a head for the pleasure. The young hosts had also chosen the musical entertainment – including remixes of DJ EZ and Norris Da Boss Windross, neither of whom most of the guests had ever heard of. The finale of their ‘sounds’ programme was the ’70s hit ‘Y.M.C.A.’ by the Village People, which the guest of honour was obliged to dance to. Although he had no idea of the gay connotations Charles was instructed by his sons to try and imitate their movements. It was not long into the night, however, before a drunken fourteen-year-old Harry stripped completely naked and ran around the surprised – to put it mildly – distinguished guests. One present says:
Charles was visibly shocked, in fact he turned crimson but he told a group of us later that it was just teenage high spirits and he himself had done much the same. It was the only time in my life that I didn’t believe him.
More than one so-called royal watcher suggested that a likely reason Harry had become so inebriated was Camilla’s presence. They could not have been more wrong for by this time both boys had accepted Mrs Parker Bowles’s part in their father’s life and they were happy that she made him happy, especially since he constantly reminded them that he had truly loved their mother. No, Harry’s drunken behaviour was a sign of things to come and there never had to be a reason – he drank when he was happy, he drank when he was sad. He just liked the effect.
On another cruise in August 1999 – this time with his father – he drank heavily aboard John Latsis’s yacht, the Alexander. He was often found weeping for his mother in the arms of Tiggy but such emotional demonstrations owed much to the alcohol he had put away.
During a shooting party on the Duke of Westminster’s estate he was sick across the bar at the Duke’s home, Eaton Hall in Cheshire, and a disgusted member of the catering staff was ordered to clean up after him while the ‘legless and speechless’ Harry was put to bed. The same year he threw cider bottles and drunkenly abused teenage girls while holidaying at the Cornish resort of Rock. One of the girls he targeted said, ‘He was vomiting behind the wall. He’s one of the most revolting people I’ve ever come across.’
Invited to Spain the following year to play in the annual Sotogrande Copa de Plata polo tournament, he spent his nights in Marbella clubs, often staying at his table until the cleaners arrived around dawn.
The big trouble started once he joined William at Eton. Fellow students swear he did not drink during term time but made up for it when he invited a number of them to Highgrove during the school holidays. He founded Club H with a well-stocked bar in the cellars (converted in Charles’s time to a bomb-proof shelter) and it became the venue for wild parties with various mind-altering substances reportedly being handed around. All the new friends he had made at Eton were welcome with one exception: a particular boy, who was gay, had become infatuated with Harry, would follow him everywhere and wrote him ‘affectionate’ notes, becoming the bane of the Prince’s life as a result. According to another student:
Harry has nothing against chaps who bat for the other side as long as they don’t try and involve him. This particular fellow persisted, he would not leave him alone. I think Harry was too nice to tell him he simply wasn’t interested, that he liked girls too much to be interested, but on the second occasion that he turned up at Club H bringing a bunch of flowers – most people brought a bottle – he was asked to leave. In fact he left Eton soon after. Harry was sad about that, too. He hated the thought of being responsible for someone else’s academic downfall, but if it hadn’t been him it would probably have been someone else and they were more likely to have given the chap a good hiding.
Girls as well as drugs were allegedly brought to Club H by Harry’s long-standing drinking buddy (still to this day) Guy Pelly, then a nineteen-year-old student at nearby Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. Harry’s chat-up line for the girls he met in surrounding pubs and clubs was, ‘How would you like to come back to my palace for a drink?’ – a close runner-up to the Playboy boss’s immortal ‘Hi, I’m Hugh Hefner’. He had fewer problems than most men of his age in getting the girls to accept his invitation to party. Although she never went to Highgrove one 24-year-old, occasional model Suzannah Harvey, accepted the seventeen-year-old Prince’s invitation to ‘step outside’, during a hunt ball at Badminton House and was later to tell her story to a Sunday newspaper showing how wild he was when it came to necking and fondling members of the opposite sex.
All went well at Club H when he and William had Highgrove to themselves but when Prince Charles was in residence he made it clear that the noise emanating from the stereo sound system below stairs was intolerable. A new venue had to be found.
Just six miles from Tetbury lies the Wiltshire village of Sherston and in its midst sits a particularly attractive Cotswolds pub, the Rattlebone Inn. The sixteenth-century pub is named after eleventh-century Saxon warrior John Rattlebone, whose ghost is said to haunt it, and it had a fine reputation, as indeed it does today having been restored to respectability since what is referred to locally as the Harry episode.
When Harry and his cronies discovered the pub (William was away on his gap year around this time) it was about as decadent as could be. Underage drinking was rife, late-night lock-ins were a regular thing for those who wanted to get drunk after hours, cannabis was openly smoked at the bar and behind a hut at the back of the building a dealer sold cocaine although, by all accounts, the quality of the product was not the best. According to the News of the World one of Harry’s acquaintances, 29-year-old John Holland, who was caught in a sting, made it known that in addition to supplying weed he was able get cocaine for £30 a gram but he had to go to Shoreditch in London to get it. Even so, it was half the price charged in the West End.
The centre of entertainment at the Rattlebone was a pool table and it was often the scene of many altercations. Harry was involved in at least one scuffle with two men during a particularly raucous game and he was thrown out after calling the pub’s French chef, François Ortet, a ‘fucking frog’. Younger than most of the Rattlebone’s customers, Harry was especially vulnerable but royal protection officers were loath to shop him to his father for fear of losing his all-important trust in them.
Reports at the time suggested that it was the staff at Highgrove who informed Prince Charles of Harry’s pot-smoking after they smelled the substance in his room and in the cellar. In fact the truth is far more sinister: unbeknown even to the Prince’s policeman, MI6 had been watching a Pakistani youth who was a regular at the pub and whose mobile phone was being monitored by GCHQ – the government’s listening post, located just thirty-five miles from the Rattlebone at Cheltenham – as part of an anti-terrorist operation. The MI6 report to intelligence chiefs included details of what was going on with the third in line to the throne and was secretly conveyed to Charles in much the same way as news of the Duchess of York’s secret flight to Morocco with her then lover Steve Wyatt was leaked from GCHQ to a journalist, effectively putting an end to the Yorks’ marriage.
Whether or not MI6 ever nailed their suspect in Operation Cotswold Pub, no one will say but one thing is for sure – Harry owes a great deal to that watched man; indeed, the surveillance of one Pakistani individual may have saved his life, for when Charles was given the details of the report in which his son was so damningly named, he acted without hesitation. Harry was summoned to his father’s side and asked point blank if he had been taking drugs and mixing in drug-taking company.
Realising the game was up, Harry came clean. Yes, he told his father, he had been smoking cannabis; yes, he had been drinking too much and yes, some of his more unsuitable friends were into heavy drugs (in fact three of the thirty of those closest to him already had criminal convictions). And yes, again, much of his bad behaviour could be attributed to such indulgences: when, for example, he threw to an aide the skis he was due to return to a hire shop in Klosters, growling, ‘You take them back,’ he was suffering from a particularly punchy ha
ngover. Charles’s belief that Harry’s drinking until he was sick was just a phase he was going through, was shattered in an instant. His distress was clear in a telephone call he then made to his close friend Gerald Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, who responded by saying that he had frightened his daughters, Lady Tamara and Lady Edwina, off drugs by taking them to a rehab centre in Liverpool to see for themselves the horrors of addiction.
Next Charles had a heart-to-heart with his adolescent son explaining that a fondness for alcohol had long been something of a problem in both families. The Queen Mother was known to enjoy her daily tipples, Princess Margaret drank a bottle of whisky a night and four sons of King George V all had alcohol problems – the Duke of Windsor, his brother King George VI and the Dukes of Kent (who was also addicted to cocaine) and Gloucester. Furthermore, both of Diana’s parents were fond of the bottle – Earl Spencer’s fondness for more than the odd dram was cited when he was accused of cruelty during his divorce from Diana’s mother who herself was given a driving ban for driving under the influence – and her sister Sarah was expelled from school for drinking vodka. It was William who heightened the alarm first raised by the MI6 report when he discovered that Harry had gone out of his way to befriend Camilla’s son Tom Parker Bowles who had been arrested in 1995 for being in possession of marijuana and ecstasy and had admitted using cocaine. The Prince’s erratic behaviour on some occasions suggested that he might have tried mind-altering substances, and more than once Charles had to tell him to calm down when he inexplicably went wild – often in front of photographers who were by now ever on the lookout for instances of the young man they now tagged ‘His Royal High-ness’ going crazy. From the smells often thought to be coming from Harry’s room at Eton, he got a different nickname from his fellows: Hash Harry. Certainly there was a culture of joint-smoking behind the college’s hallowed walls at the time so no one could be certain which room the smells of weed being used emerged from, but Harry was high up on the list of suspects.
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