by Penny Junor
Tom Bradby was asked to conduct the engagement interview, in which the public heard their future Queen speak for the first time. Wearing royal blue, as Diana had on the day of her engagement to Charles in 1981, and wearing the very same diamond and sapphire engagement ring that Diana had worn, comparisons were inevitable. It was a tricky assignment for Tom. As a respected political editor he couldn’t afford to be asinine, but neither could he be rude and aggressive. The three of them chatted it through for half an hour before they began. “My main aim is not to fuck up your happy day,” he told them, and William said, “That would be really helpful, Tom, thank you. Do try not to.”
William had chosen his mother’s ring, he said, because: “I thought it was quite nice because obviously she’s not going to be around to share any of the fun and excitement of it all—this was my way of keeping her sort of close to it all.”
But there the similarity ended. When Charles had been asked whether he and Diana were in love he had said, “Yes, whatever love is.” There was no need to even ask the question of William and Kate. Nervous though they were, their body language spoke for itself.
The wedding on Friday 29 April was everything William and Kate wanted it to be—given that they couldn’t be married quietly in Bucklebury Church. “What we want,” William told his team, “is a personal day that’s going to be special to us. We want a day that is as enjoyable as possible, for as many people as possible.” Those exact words drove the entire event. The task was to create a day that was intimate for them and their families, but which would give the British people a suitably royal and memorable celebration. And they succeeded. “What made it an intimate day was nothing that we did. It was the two of them, the smiles they gave one another, the comments: ‘You look beautiful, babe’ and to Michael [Middleton], ‘Just a quiet family wedding…’ The perfect choice of words to a man, unaccustomed to the limelight, who had just walked his daughter for three long minutes up the aisle in Westminster Abbey to give her away to the second in line to the throne, in front of forty television cameras, thirty journalists, scores of clergy and swathes of guests that neither of them knew.
Harry, as best man, helped to keep the mood light and informal in the midst of all the formality. He arrived with his brother, the pair of them looking immaculate in their full military get-up—Harry’s with pockets specially sewn into it to keep the rings safe. His grin and his relaxed manner immediately put everyone at their ease. There was an audible chuckle from the congregation when Kate and her father arrived to Hubert Parry’s soaring anthem, “I Was Glad,” and Harry had a quick peek over his shoulder, before turning to his brother, and playfully whispering in his ear. Whatever he said, Kate looked glorious and beamed when she saw William. Her dress, which had miraculously remained a secret until the day, was close-fitting satin and lace with a nine-foot train, and a veil of ivory silk tulle, held in place by a tiara loaned to her by the Queen. She had four little bridesmaids and two page boys, and her sister Pippa (whose bottom became an overnight sensation) was maid of honor.
The two brothers had spent the night at Clarence House, and at 8:30 in the evening had surprised and thrilled the hundreds of well-wishers camped in the streets outside, by suddenly appearing among them. For ten minutes the Princes wandered up and down, joking, laughing and shaking hands, thanking people for being there. The press called it a PR masterstroke, but it had nothing to do with the Household. It was the Princes’ idea entirely, and William told the police they were going to do it just five minutes before they left the house. Afterwards, the groom had sensibly had an early night; Harry hadn’t. He had been at the Goring Hotel round the corner, which the Middletons had taken over in its entirety, and hadn’t left until the early hours.
After the marriage ceremony, the carriage procession and all the magical pomp that the British monarchy does so well, and not one but two kisses on the balcony, the Queen hosted a lunch for 650 people. Afterwards there were speeches, the cake was cut, the champagne was drunk and everyone was ushered into the garden at the back of the Palace to see the couple off. And there, waiting for them, was the Prince of Wales’s dark blue Aston Martin DB6 Mk II, with the roof down, tastefully decorated by the best man. Harry had been out and bought a whole lot of stuff, some of which he wisely vetoed at the last minute. What survived the cull were heart-shaped balloons and colored streamers and rosettes, a learner’s L plate on the front and a specialized number plate on the back—JU5T WED. To the delight of the crowds outside, who had not expected to see the couple again, the car emerged from the gates of Buckingham Palace, with William at the wheel and Kate beside him—the newly created Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. As it made its way slowly down the Mall and into Clarence House, a yellow RAF Sea King helicopter appeared and hovered noisily over their heads—the groom’s colleagues had come to wish them well.
The evening party, hosted by Prince Charles, was a far more intimate affair, with 300 of their closest friends and family—with the exception of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. They had excused themselves to give their grandson and his friends “the run of the place.” Prince Charles had made a touching speech at the lunch in which he’d reminisced about William as a teenager, sitting in his room, playing his music loudly and refusing to come down for hours on end; and giving him advice about what he was wearing or telling him not to slouch and getting a two-fingered response. “He is a completely loving and close father,” says one of their team, who was there that day and who has watched the relationship between father and both sons over many years. “He has had a unique relationship with them in some respects—and went through a hell of a period with them—but it’s very close. They are very straightforward with one another and loving and supportive as well.”
After a magnificent dinner and fine wines in the ballroom, Harry took over. Acting as compère, those there say he stole the show with flawless comic timing and hysterical one-liners. Guests were crying with laughter as he recounted tales from their childhood. His brother had beaten him up, he declared, and shot him with air rifles. Now it was his turn and he teased William about everything from his romantic style to his receding hairline. But alongside the jokes, there were emotional moments too—and a moving tribute to their mother. He introduced the other speakers: Kate’s father, then William, giving his second speech of the day, and finally a double-act from Thomas van Straubenzee and James Meade, William’s closest friends, who delivered a series of quick gags about the groom, which again had the audience in fits of laughter.
Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, whose son, Billy, was a pageboy, felt sorry for the other speakers. “Talking to three hundred people without a note—and there were some people in that room who slightly believed the press about Harry before; well, they certainly didn’t afterwards. He was absolutely brilliant, cryingly funny, and held everybody and built everybody up with his speech but still made everybody howl with laughter.”
After dancing until three o’clock in the morning, the bride and groom made their second and final departure of the day, in David Linley’s bright yellow Fiat 500, which William had secretly borrowed. Their guests then noisily saw them off, as they stood with their heads through the sunshine roof for the drive round two corners of the building to be delivered to another door. The Queen had given them the Belgian Suite for the night, which President Obama and his wife had stayed in.
Harry led those who were still up for more onto a waiting coach, which took them to the Goring Hotel. He and William had discussed how best to organize things. The last thing they wanted was to have their friends, full of good wine, spilling out of the Palace into their usual Mayfair haunts, which would be crawling with journalists. So, much to the disappointment of the media, it was some days before even halfway accurate stories began to appear about the party. The after-party went on until just before first light, at about 5:00, when Harry slipped out unobserved and made his way home.
Harry had outwitted the press over the stag weekend too—nothing gave him greater
pleasure. He, Thomas van Straubenzee and Guy Pelly had organized it between them, and the tabloids had repeatedly got it wrong. The Sun did eventually get the right location, but by then the party was over. A group of about twelve of William’s closest friends had driven down to north Devon a month before the wedding, and stayed at Hartland Abbey, which was the setting for the BBC’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. It is a secluded twelfth-century former monastery, owned by William’s friend George Stucley and his family, and surrounded by magnificent gardens and parkland leading down to the Atlantic coast. They were spotted surfing at Spekes Mill, a beach along the coast, but otherwise how much they drank and how they spent their time remains between the twelve of them.
FOUR DAYS ON THE ICE
In July 2009, Edward Parker’s twenty-six-year-old nephew, Harry Parker, a Captain in The Rifles, lost both his legs in Afghanistan. He had stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED). One of his legs was blown off in the explosion; the other had to be amputated after it became infected. Ed had been a soldier in the same regiment for ten years and served in Northern Ireland. Edward’s brother and Harry’s father was General Sir Nick Parker, then Commander of Regional Forces—a very senior figure in the military.
“Having been a soldier myself and having seen men who were wounded before, I thought it would be something I would very much take in my stride,” says Ed, “but of all my family, I think I was the one who was most affected by it. I remember going to the hospital [Selly Oak] with my wife and saying, ‘Just go in and grin and try not to look at the injuries; just be there for the boys and girls who are in there.’ It was the first time Harriet had ever seen anything like that and she was brilliant. I went in there, and my nephew, who used to be six feet, had suddenly become four feet. He looked awful and I remember thinking, this isn’t very good. It had more of an effect on me than I would ever have guessed, and that was the trigger.”
What it triggered, ultimately, was Walking With The Wounded (WWTW), a hugely successful charity that has taken amputees to both Poles and three-quarters of the way up Everest, to prove there is a life beyond injury. Ed and a friend, Simon Daglish (known as Dags), whom he’d known at Sandhurst, had been planning a trip to the North Pole; Ed was by then in the wine business and Simon was commercial head of ITV. “Subsequent to Harry being wounded,” says Ed, “Dags turned round to me and said, ‘Well, why don’t we do this with wounded servicemen instead of a group of middle-aged old idiots and try and make it worthwhile?’ He always maintains it was after the first bottle of red wine. I think it was after the second! And so the seed was sown. And if Harry Parker hadn’t been wounded, none of this would ever have happened.”
First they found a guide, Inge Solheim, a Norwegian who had worked with disabilities in the Arctic. Next, Ed phoned Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, who’s a friend. “I fished and said ‘Do you think one of the principals might be interested?’ and, to give Jamie his credit—he’s a very dear friend—half an hour later he phoned back and said, ‘I think Harry might be interested.’ This would have been September 2009 and, as soon as that happened, it suddenly had momentum. Simon and I could see that with royal patronage we could go and talk to people.” Among those people they spoke to were filmmakers. They envisaged a documentary to raise money and profile, and the production company they chose was Twofour, based in Plymouth, and specifically Alexis Girardet, who had made a number of adventure films and had recently been to the South Pole with Ben Fogle. Alexis works with a sound man, but is effectively producer, director and cameraman. Next they looked for wounded servicemen or -women to take part in the expedition. To their surprise, they had 120 applicants, which they narrowed down to twenty, then four: Guy Disney, a Captain with the Light Dragoons, who was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and lost a leg below the knee; Steve Young, a Welsh Guardsman, who broke his spine when his vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb; Martin Hewitt, a Captain in the Parachute Regiment, who was shot in the chest in the midst of a firefight and has one paralyzed arm; and Private Jaco van Gass, another Para, a South African whose arm was ripped off by a direct hit from an RPG.
Jaco’s injuries went way beyond the straightforward loss of a limb, and he was still at Headley Court and very ill when he first met Ed, Simon and Inge. He was hoping to be one of the team. Jaco remembers the conversation. “They said ‘Can we see your injuries?’ and when they’d seen them they looked at me and said, ‘Are you serious? You want to take on one of the toughest challenges in the world with those injuries you’ve sustained?’ ‘Yes, why not?’ They said: ‘We’ll get back to you.’ ” Their decision was disappointing but, as Ed told Jaco: “ ‘Yours were the worst injuries we’ve ever seen. We admire you for even thinking of coming but, sorry, it’s too big a risk.’ ”
When Jaco had woken up in Selly Oak, after seven days in an induced coma, he was on morphine and having vivid dreams. He was convinced he was still in a firefight in Afghanistan and was angry that his family had been allowed to visit. His mother, who had flown from South Africa with his father and sister, asked how he felt, terrified that he didn’t know about his injury. “I feel like a guy who’s lost an arm,” he said, and they all burst out laughing. He had known very soon after the explosion and had tried to tie a tourniquet around the bleeding stump. “The first guy on the scene to help me said, ‘Shit, Jaco, you’ve lost your arm,’ and I remember so clearly, I just went calm and collected. ‘No shit, Sherlock!’ ” What he didn’t realize was that the blast had also ripped a third of the muscle and tissue from his leg, shrapnel had ripped through his body and punctured a number of internal organs, he had a fractured knee and an ankle broken in several places. And for the first seven months he had to wear a colostomy bag. He was twenty-three years old and all he wanted was to get back to his mates in Afghanistan. Gradually the reality dawned on him that it wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
During his stay in Selly Oak, Prince William and Prince Harry both happened to visit the hospital. “They went to every patient and sat for ten or fifteen minutes with each guy, which was fantastic. I’ve got the photo still of me with my leg in this massive cast and this machine that moved my leg so I didn’t lose all my muscle, and he’s sitting next to my bed and I’m there with my hair shaven off. I was extremely excited, I didn’t really know what to say and I thought: no one at home will believe I’ve met Prince Harry and Prince William. Both of them were so sweet. I think we spoke a little bit about the Army and about what happened to me, which regiment I was in, there’s a bit of banter between the Paras and any other regiment. We call the rest of the Army ‘Hats’ or ‘Crap Hats.’ It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the Household Cavalry or The Rifles or the Artillery or the Air Force, if you’re not a Para, you’re a Hat.”
Jaco’s recovery was helped by seeing on TV—while he was lying in his hospital bed—an Australian woman who had been paralyzed. “She said, ‘Life is 10 percent what happens to you, and 90 percent how you respond to it.’ And I thought, that’s very true. Once you make peace with something, it’s amazing how everything in your body changes, your spirit, your will to do something else, your health, your wanting to get better. If I’m still fighting to be a frontline soldier and I keep getting disappointed, I am just holding myself back, but the moment I knew, right, I’m not going to have my arm back, this is probably the end of my career as an infanteer, but there must be other stuff I can do; I’ll find out what it is…”
At Headley Court his fitness increased by leaps and bounds. He learned to ski, to play golf, and when the opportunity to run a marathon in Kenya arose, he leapt at it. Just before the race, he saw Martin Hewitt, who had been selected for the Pole and told him two spaces remained. “He said, ‘Are you still interested?’ ” Ed and Simon were so impressed by Jaco’s progress that they gave him a place. Then, in February 2010, it was announced that Prince Harry was to be patron of the expedition.
“The next thing we knew we were doing this press conference at the Rifl
es Club in Davies Street, which Prince Harry had agreed to come to,” says Ed. “Four huge news satellite trucks were parked outside, and as soon as it was over, the phone started ringing. On the drive back to Norfolk it rang and rang, with corporates saying they’d like to be involved, and production teams saying they’d like to make documentaries, and newspapers saying, ‘Go exclusive with us—we’ll give you the real thing.’ I got home to Norfolk and it was completely beyond anything that I understood. I remember talking to Simon the next day and saying, ‘We do one of two things. We either pretend it never happened and we crawl back under our stone and people will forget us quite quickly, or we really go for it.’ ”
Alexis started working straight away; for him it was an eighteen-month project, with all the soldiers’ back stories to be filmed, as well as the group as they prepared and trained—most of which was in Norway—and occasionally working with Harry. Trust was an initial hurdle to be overcome. “Harry was obviously cautious; he didn’t know who I was or who Rob, my colleague, was, but as we’ve done more and more we’ve built a relationship that, fingers crossed, so far has worked.” Along the way was a photo-shoot with David Bailey for GQ magazine. The great man, famous as much for his combative nature and rich vocabulary as his iconic photographs, had charitably waived his fee, and Harry had agreed to take part, so a studio was rigged up at a hangar in Chilbolton, near Middle Wallop in Hampshire.
“Harry turned up and—to be honest—David Bailey was more scary than Harry and all of his team. I said, ‘Can I film, is that all right?’ And he said, ‘You point that fucking camera in my fucking face and I’ll bite your fucking nose off, you fucking c***!’ Okay sir! I thought, who gets David Bailey saying that to them?”
