by Tim Clayton
* * *
Jayne Fincher had thought hard before going to the Abbey:
I felt very uncomfortable going with a camera. I really in my heart of hearts did not want to do it. I felt like a leech. But my father said to me, ‘Look, you were there at the beginning, it’s very historic. You’ve photographed her all those years. You must go and photograph the end.’ So in the end I went, but I didn’t want to be seen walking around with a camera, I remember having them in my bag and being very discreet.
She took up position alongside her colleagues, with real paparazzi among them, on a wooden platform raised above the crowd opposite the Abbey. The people below were hostile. Police stood nearby in case of trouble. The photographers began to snap the guests arriving at the Abbey. Victor Adebowale was one of them:
My abiding memory was queuing outside the church with Sting, Tom Cruise and all these people, queuing to enter the church: and we were levelled, we all had to queue to go in. I thought to myself, She would have liked that. That would have made her smile.
It was a strange gathering. Stars of politics, show business and fashion mingled with charity workers and people that Diana had once personally helped.
As the funeral cortège left Kensington Palace, the crowd, lining the road by Hyde Park, was twenty deep. The muffled Tenor Bell of Westminster Abbey tolled once every minute as the procession travelled past Buckingham Palace, up the Mall and Horse Guards, along Whitehall to Parliament Square and then to the Abbey – the same route, more or less, that Diana and her friends had taken in their little car on that exciting engagement night sixteen years before.
There was silence but for the hooves of the horses, the wheels of the gun carriage and the weeping of the crowd. The service began conventionally enough with the National Anthem and ‘I vow to thee my country’, the hymn Diana had chosen for her wedding. Her sisters and the Prime Minister read lessons. Then Elton John sang a version of his song, ‘Candle in the Wind’, with the lyrics altered to suit Diana rather than Marilyn Monroe. Then her brother, Charles Spencer, made his tribute, an electric moment, partly because he was so close to tears. He spoke of the tens of millions who were mourning Diana and of the qualities in her that had caused them to mourn, of her childhood and her bizarre life afterwards. Then he turned on the press, describing how she had wanted to leave England because of the way she was treated by the newspapers and how she had never understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media.
The speech was broadcast through speakers to the crowd outside. Jayne Fincher listened in horror.
They all turned round and hissed at us. It was horrible. I just wanted the earth to open up and be swallowed by it because I didn’t want to be seen there. I didn’t want to be seen looking through a camera at the children in their time of grief, and I just found it really unpleasant and horrible, the whole thing.
* * *
Spencer reached the climax of his tribute, promising that Diana’s blood family would look to the interests of her children and implicitly criticising the Windsors for depriving her of her title. Then emotion finally got the better of him. The crowd outside began to clap, making a noise that was audible within the Abbey. People began to clap there too. The Queen looked straight ahead.
More hymns and prayers, ‘Cwm Rhondda’ and the Commendation. Echoes of the music bounced off the buildings on the fringes of Hyde Park, and slowly dissipated down empty streets. London had never felt so quiet nor so dignified. The Welsh Guards took up the coffin once again and the cortège left the Abbey as the choir sang John Taverner’s haunting anthem ‘Flights of Angels’. The hearse set off northwards to Althorp, and all along the route people stood at the side of the road and on bridges. By the time the car reached the north of London the driver had to stop and clear the flowers off the windscreen.
Afterword
Spring 2001. Under the guidance of Mark Bolland, Prince Charles has made his peace with the newspapers that once tormented him. With Camilla Parker Bowles at his side, he smiles for the camera alongside Diana’s old showbiz friends. He visits AIDS wards and Centrepoint. He looks happier than he has for years. Tabloid reporters complain to us that their editors won’t print stories about Camilla for fear of antagonising the Palace and losing what they call ‘William points’, for it’s William they all want.
The young Prince has appeared on television, the image of Diana at eighteen. He’s seen performing voluntary work in Chile, accompanied in Britain by TV commentaries so reminiscent of the unctuous 1970s that we are shocked to be reminded that we have seen little like it in years.
But the new royal performer is impressive. Charming, uninhibited, he kneels to play with children and pulls on the yellow Marigolds to do the washing up. We recall his mother doing the same thing in her kindergarten days. This could be the face of the reconstructed, modernised monarchy that she dreamed of.
The Press Complaints Commission celebrates its tenth anniversary with a huge party. Persecutors and persecuted mingle with the conviviality that characterised the cocktail parties of the early Charles and Diana tours.
Then a twist. The Countess of Wessex, Prince Edward’s wife, is secretly recorded and quoted as making disparaging remarks about the Queen and the Labour government as well as appearing to exploit her royal connections in the interests of her PR company. The press rail against the commercial activities of the minor royals. The Daily Mail calls for reform, the Guardian calls for a republic.
William will be going to university at St Andrews in October. There will be a well-ordered photo call and the Palace and the Press Complaints Commission will issue a joint instruction to ‘leave the young man alone to study’. But what about those long university vacations? And what happens when he leaves? It is difficult to believe that the press will leave him alone then, never mind any of his real or imagined girlfriends.
Royalists hope that the best of Charles and the best of Diana will be united in William. Republicans wonder whether, when the papers first turn nasty, he might say, ‘I can’t hack this, find yourselves a president.’ It would be hard to blame him if he did.
Look at me!
What Diana wrote in a cupboard at West Heath school
Outside the Young England kindergarten, Pimlico, September 1980, taken by Arthur Edwards
Jayne Fincher’s first photograph of Diana, taken after Princess Margaret’s birthday party, November 1980
Diana enters St Paul’s Cathedral with Earl Spencer, July 1981
On honeymoon at the Braemar Highland Games, September 1981
Diana in Brecon, November 1981
Ken Lennox’s long-lens shots of Charles and Diana in the Bahamas, February 1982
Australia’s new princess – with Anne Beckwith-Smith (behind her wearing hat) at the Sydney Opera House, spring 1983
With John Travolta at the White House, November 1985
The puppet from the television series Spitting Image with American tour headlines, November 1985
A family day out at the Guards Polo Club, Windsor, May 1987
Diana presents the Captains and Subalterns Cup to James Hewitt at Tidworth, summer 1988
Her favourite photograph, autumn 1991: Diana greets the children on Britannia in Canada
and the picture the public never saw – Charles hugging them too
To touch is important: the Six Acres day centre, Taunton, Somerset, April 1991
Working alone on her tenth wedding anniversary at RAF Cranwell, July 1991
The winner’s kiss: polo in India, Valentine’s Eve, February 1992
On holiday at Lech, Austria, March 1994
A few days later Diana shows her anger towards photographers, March 1994
‘Why don’t you put your head up and start acting like a fucking Princess?’: avoiding photographers, July 1994
Diana passes Glenn Harvey
Mark Saunders makes way as Glenn Harvey ‘whacks’ her
Diana breaks down as Mark Saunders waits for her to turn<
br />
Two hundred years of royal satire: the People newspaper, 1993
and His Highness in Fitz showing George, Prince of Wales with Maria Fitzherbert, 1786
Lord Palumbo meets Diana outside the Serpentine Gallery on 29 June 1994, the night Charles admitted his affair with Camilla during a televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby
Following Diana’s Panorama interview, broadcast on 20 November 1995, Private Eye commented on the troubled royal marriage
Diana leaves the English National Ballet on the day of her divorce, 28 August 1996
War reporter Christina Lamb’s snap of Diana at a hospital for landmine victims at Huambo, Angola, January 1997
The sea of floral tributes outside Kensington Palace, September 1997
The cover of Private Eye that led to the magazine receiving a record number of complaints
TIM CLAYTON, author and writer/producer of numerous historical documentaries, and PHIL CRAIG, of the award-winning documentary production company Book Lapping (U.K.), are the authors of the bestselling book Finest Hour as well as The End of the Beginning.
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Also by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig
Finest Hour
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Notes on sources
Passages transcribed from interviews for the series are mentioned in the Notes only where the interviewee is not clearly identified in the text. Interviews were also conducted with people who were unable or unwilling to appear on camera or to be named as contributors to the book. Where their views have been consulted, the source is given as ‘confidential interview’. Other sources are noted below. The 1997 edition of Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story is cited for quotations from the transcripts of Diana’s taped recollections and for events that occurred after the publication of the original 1992 edition.
Chapter 1
‘So we had lunch’, Morton 1997, p. 38.
‘We all heaved a sigh of relief’, confidential interview.
‘The Lord Chamberlain ventures’, Pearson, p. 202.
‘She later told her biographer’, Morton 1997, p. 24; reflected in Morton 1992, p. 10.
‘Frances says that this was an idea’, Shand-Kydd interview, Daily Express, 2 September 2000, p. 3, and Saturday magazine, p. 16.
‘When these things were doing’, Pearson, p. 14.
Chapter 2
‘She knew nobody’, ‘fresh and unsuperficial’, ‘She was quite clear about her destiny’, confidential interview.
Chapter 3
Mountbatten’s advice, Dimbleby, p. 248.
‘Mr and Mrs Parker Bowles were there’, Morton 1997, p. 33.
‘From his childhood this boy’, Holden 1978, p. 271.
‘All the world and all the glory of it’, W. Bagehot, The English Constitution, cited in Holden 1988, p. xiii.
‘He had a lot of charisma’, confidential interview.
‘I knew your legs were good’, Morton 1992, p. 51.
> ‘More and more press’, Kay Seth-Smith interview.
‘I do hope he gets a move on’, confidential interview.
‘I couldn’t understand why she kept saying’, Morton 1997. p. 33.
‘feeling of emptiness’, Dimbleby, p. 232.
‘No sooner had Lord Soames’, Private Eye, 4 January 1980, p. 6.
‘HRH is very fond of my wife’, Wilson, pp. 73–4.
‘What a sport’, Private Eye, 18 August 1978, p. 6.
‘She was young, insecure, shy’, confidential interview.
‘I’m afraid we’ve upset the Palace’, R&R interview with Roy Greenslade.
‘She rang up one day’, confidential interview.
‘The people in my dormitory’, Charles correspondence in Dimbleby, p. 78.
‘I do very much want to do the right thing’, Dimbleby, p. 342.
‘The truth is she got swamped’, confidential interview.
