by Penny Junor
“It was harder than we had expected,” says Ed, “and we played more jokers than I would have hoped to play, but that’s the nature of the place. The biggest single factor was the size of the group that we took down there. It turned out we were the biggest expedition to have ever skied on the Pole—something I hadn’t appreciated at the time—and there were so many different moving parts that needed to be aligned at the same time for everything to go smoothly. It wasn’t just our own little world, but the terrain, the weather, the aircraft, the vehicles; everything needed to be aligned. We were scuppered by the weather, which put a lot of pressure on when we could start; then we were scuppered by the terrain. It was very broken and bumpy through the sastrugi, which are ice waves—it’s the effect the wind has on the snow, it builds little ice ridges which become solid—so that caught us a little bit with our trousers down. We had two people who were exhausted. On top of that it was very cold, which might sound a little bit like, but surely you knew that? But we had this wind for two days where the temperature got down to around -45°C—we were expecting -25°C. When it gets that low, there is no margin for error, your face will get very badly frost nipped within minutes, your fingers will be en route to frostbite after two or three minutes.”
Harry was not alone in suffering from the altitude, and had bad headaches for the first few days into the walk. “I remember saying to him, ‘How are you doing?’ says Ed, and he said, ‘It’s fine; I’ve still got the bloody headache, I wish it would go because I could enjoy it more.’ It was just a bit debilitating, but he was great and immediately became part of the team, as you’d expect, and if you had been a stranger who had no idea who he was and you were dropped in from a high height and told one of those people over there is a member of the British Royal Family: guess. You would never have been able to guess it was him.
“The one thing I really noticed this time is that I think as a leader he’s evolving. He spent time with the other teams, just talking to them, getting to know them, wanting to get a better idea of what their experience was and why they were there—we became a very close group—but then when things were tough, he would be one of the people who would say, ‘You’re doing brilliantly; come on,’ or just try to engage with people when they were having a bad day. We all have bad days down there at some point and Harry… I noticed this time, I just felt he was becoming—it’s an awful thing to say—responsible. It comes to him naturally, leadership. I think he was just part of our machine to encourage people and drive people and he spotted when someone was feeling a bit wobbly. I would think, I’d better go and see so and so and I’d look up and Harry would be there already. So he was an integral part of what we did.
“It’s fascinating talking to the other teammates. Great friendship was developed; I think they consider him a friend. And, huge respect. I remember talking to one or two of them and saying, ‘Do you find it extraordinary that he’s Prince Harry?’ And he’s not to them. He’s Harry, or H, or Spike or whatever it may be—and that’s a hell of a gift to have because I think an awful lot of people in his position don’t give off that warmth and that openness and acceptance and humility. So having him there was great. He’s always good fun; I think he was very relaxed to be away from the eyes of the world.”
Ivan Castro, the blind Puerto Rican, had been a particular worry. He was guided by two aluminum poles attached to the sledge in front of him, and Ed and his American teammates took it in turns to pull that sledge. He had never skied before, often fell over, and found the journey more difficult than anyone else; but repeatedly said, “It might be hard for me but think of the guys with no legs.” He had said he would love to be guided by Duncan Slater from the RAF, who lost both his legs when an IED blew up his vehicle in Afghanistan. “I think Ivan was inspired by Duncan,” says Ed. “No double amputee has ever skied to the South Pole.” So, for the last mile, Duncan guided Ivan. “Symbolically it very much spoke about what we’d done and why we were there.”
They all walked on to the Pole together. There is a symbolic one, a bit like a barber’s pole flanked by a semi-circle of flags, then the geographical one about a hundred yards away, which moves about ten yards every year. “It was a very emotional time for a number of people,” says Ed. For him and Simon it was a huge relief that they’d got there with everyone in one piece, “but I was watching some of the team and for them it was a cathartic moment. There’s an element of survivors’ guilt that these people feel and I think for some of them it was a time when they could say goodbye to those people they had lost. There were three or four of them who were very emotional. Our psychologist had talked to them about this before we went. To me that was very special because they stopped looking back and they started looking forward. There was relief around everyone and a lot of tears and a lot of laughter and a lot of happiness.”
Antarctica is the last pristine wilderness in the world and they left no trace of their journey. Every day when they camped they would take it in turns to build a communal loo out of blocks of ice carved with a wood saw. Harry was particularly good at the task and decorated his with ramparts, but the following morning the building would be flattened and everything solid taken away. “We all had to do it,” says Ed. “It freezes but it’s still a bit unpleasant.” That said, they did leave one semi-permanent reminder of their visit. They built an igloo at the side of the Pole, and blocked up the door to make it last longer.
Disappointingly, the Pole itself is not pristine. “You’ve been in this wilderness for three weeks, you don’t see a sign of anyone and then, on the penultimate day in the afternoon, we saw this tiny black speck on the horizon; so very exciting, we’re almost there. We camped that night and the next day skied and this black speck slowly became bigger and bigger. The South Pole is one of those places that you would consider to be almost sacrosanct, yet there suddenly is this American science base. It’s a proper, proper mess—it’s hideous. They very kindly invited us in to be shown round and we went there and were told a little bit about the science and we walked past the canteen and we all thought, well, a cup of tea might be nice, but we weren’t offered so much as a glass of water.”
As Alexis says, “They let you use a proper toilet, a flushing toilet, that’s like wow, then they take you into the canteen which has got steaks, burgers, salads, lasagnas, all this stuff lined up; and all we’ve been eating is this freeze-dried rubbish every day—breakfast, lunch and dinner—and they take you past all this and go, ‘Right now, you’ve got to go, bye bye,’ and lock the door. Actually, before that they take you into a shop and they’ve got bottles of Jack Daniel’s, Pringles, Mars bars, crap food but stuff that we haven’t had for a month and you go, ‘Oooh…’ but they won’t let you buy any of that. You’re allowed to buy souvenirs and to put a stamp in your passport, which is cool, but nothing off the shelves. They explain it by saying everything that is flown in is subsidized by the American taxpayer and if they catered to all the crews and explorers and tourists… It’s just mean.”
Ed was very unamused by their attitude, especially since they had four American wounded veterans with them. What’s more, a couple of days later, a photograph of Harry, Alex Skarsgård and the doctor appeared in the Mail Online. It had been taken by a woman who’d shown them round. “They’d said can we take photos and we’d said, ‘Yes but this is a private tour.’ When the photo appeared I thought, you know what? You’ve got this wrong. You think down there you’re away from the world.
“They were telling us about some quite interesting science they’re doing there. Harry had a very good question. He said, ‘Why have you built the base here? Why haven’t you built it 20 kilometers away—you could still do the same research.’ And the guy said, ‘Because the runway’s here,’ and Harry said, ‘Well, move the runway.’ ”
While the tired but triumphant teams waited for a plane to take them home, they celebrated with champagne, using Duncan Slater’s upturned prosthetic leg as an ice bucket—and a couple of guys stripped off and danced
naked in the snow. Then there were fond farewells. As Ed Parker gave Harry a big hug he said, “Thank you very much.” Whereupon Harry said, as he had in the North Pole, “Well, thank you for having me.”
“That’s a very gentle, very ordinary thing to say, but actually it means a hell of a lot. It resonates; there’s some humility there and I like that.”
A FLURRY OF PHONE CALLS
“It was all a bit of a shock to the system,” says Sir David Manning, of Harry’s announcement at the Warrior Games with the implication that next year they would be coming to London. “But I can’t say I was surprised. He was very fired up; his enthusiasm was enormous.”
No one who knew or worked with Harry was surprised. The shock was in the timing—and it threw more than a few into a tailspin. “The Warrior Games suddenly became this enormous opportunity and challenge,” says Nick Booth. “We returned from the U.S. trip to a flurry of phone calls from government and other people saying, ‘Er, what did His Royal Highness say?’ So we went quiet for a while and over the summer did a feasibility assessment, which I co-chaired with the Ministry of Defence on Prince Harry’s behalf to say, ‘Was it possible; if so, which countries, how big, how small?’
“One of Harry’s observations, which was absolutely accurate, was that this could be brought to a much, much larger audience, and it’s so powerful that as we approach the end of the Afghan conflict there is this sort of page-turning moment where we need to move the story on—this is really why he’s interested in it—from being one of kinetic injuries, battlefield injuries, repatriation, very much a hard-edged conflict-based story to one that says, ‘There are thousands of men and women with physical injuries who’ve been involved in the conflicts in numbers of countries who will now be with us as civilians for ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years to come and they have, in some cases, very special needs, and in some cases they just need what everyone else needs which is a career that gives them the same stimulation, income, family security that they had when they were in the services.”
Bryn Parry is only too conscious of this. “When you’ve got coffins coming back through Wootton Bassett and there are films and photographs in the media, people are inspired to do something. When the politicians say to us the war is over, for our guys the battle continues. The guys who have been physically injured are still going to be injured. It’s not like they’re going to get better, legs don’t grow back and public support will wane. More people will be caught having fights in pubs or whatever and the soldier becomes Tommy this, an’ Tommy that [after the Rudyard Kipling poem]. The young man who’s twenty-two and glamorous and walks around in a Help for Heroes T-shirt and has prosthetic legs—someone buys him a pint in the pub at the moment. When he’s fifty and he’s got a shaven head and tattoos and a big stomach, is he still going to be as glamorous? So your boys walking to the South Pole—are they still going to be walking to the South Pole in ten years’ time? What are those guys going to be doing? They can’t spend their lives being wounded soldiers doing amazing things. That’s not an endgame. So we will have the cohort of the wounded that we have at the moment, plus the ones who will start coming to us with the mental issues, plus, a third point is that the Armed Forces break people all the time, even if we’re not fighting battles.
“Ninety percent of what we do is not glamorous. I think with the Paralympics, people went, ‘Gosh, being disabled is no longer a disability, somehow it’s almost heroic,’ which it is, but that is the physical face of something; you’re seeing someone being incredibly brave. What you don’t see, is them at two o’clock in the morning when they can’t sleep, or a girlfriend who’s had to go and shut herself in the car because the guy is so angry he’s beating up the house. And that’s the reality and it will still be the reality and it will be even more of a reality when that boy is fifty.”
As soon as the government gave the Games the final go-ahead in January 2014, Harry left his job with the Army Air Corps to devote himself to the Games. It was announced that he was moving to Horse Guards, to a Staff Officer job at HQ London District, which organizes ceremonial occasions like Trooping the Colour. Before he left Wattisham, he had qualified as an Apache Aircraft Commander—which was as high as he could go—and he had flown in an Apache display team at an air show at RAF Cosford in June 2013. He was indisputably at the top of his game—he had “achieved the pinnacle of flying excellence,” as his commanding officer put it—but with British forces withdrawing from Afghanistan, he would not be going back to the desert. He had loved flying, but he had found a new passion, helping the wounded make new lives for themselves, and he knew that with his profile and title he could do something big. While he was sorry to leave his friends in the squadron, he was not sorry to leave Wattisham. It had been neither the most convenient nor congenial location—a giant, windswept wasteland, miles from Kensington Palace and the other strands of his life.
“Harry’s focus has been on making the Games become a reality,” says an aide, “and the most amazing team has come together—the whole of LOCOG [the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] under Sir Keith Mills. It’s so exciting, and because it’s Harry’s vision, that needs to suffuse the whole organization and be in every message. Every department needs to know why this is happening, including the MoD, which partners with the Foundation. It’s quite an interesting situation: the generals who are orchestrating the MoD input are taking vision from a captain in the Household Cavalry. But when he’s in a coffee meeting with them, he’s Prince Harry. So it’s very convoluted; it’s one of those ones that, if it works, you don’t want to think too closely about lines of command and so on, otherwise you start to fry.”
“This is Harry’s big project for 2014,” says Nick Booth. “Really exciting but a crazy amount of work. The Olympics took eight years to organize and we’ve given ourselves less than one, so there’s a little bit of ‘Hold your nose.’
“Sir Keith Mills said to me, ‘About hotel accommodation, you know we booked the hotels for the Olympics eight years ahead?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ Everywhere you look, security, diplomatic relations, sport management presentation, broadcast, litter, traffic—and there are twelve of us! So we’re putting a dedicated project team together. Our job is to get it done, not to do it, that’s the really important role of the Foundation. It will be great for Harry too, because in terms of his passion for the subject, this is a dial-moving exercise, this is saying to the world, ‘These are very special people and they have talents to bring them together in a sporting context which is great—we fought together so we’ll rehabilitate together.’ This will be part of that process of moving on to the next stage of their lives as individuals, as well as in the team sense. The government are very excited about this one.”
So, in March 2014, at the Copper Box arena at the former Olympic Park in London, Harry went public. The Invictus Games would take place right there in September 2014, and he made a passionate plea for Britain to come out and support them.
“It’s not about supporting the conflict in Afghanistan, it’s not about supporting war, it’s not about supporting the Forces themselves, but come along and show your support, look at the journey these guys have been through.
“And also take the opportunity, if you haven’t done so already, I’m sure there is a lot out there, come and sit in these iconic Olympic and Paralympic venues where we won a hell of a lot of medals back in 2012.
“It’s not about winning or losing, the fact that the guys have got to this stage to be able to take part in these events, they’ve already won in my mind.
“The Games itself is an excuse to bring attention to the legacy part. We want to try and get as many of these servicemen and -women back into society—giving them jobs and making sure that all the core values that they’ve been taught in services to make them amazing, wonderful, strong, inspirational people—that they bring it back into the community for the younger generation, why wouldn’t you do that?”<
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In explaining his original thought process, he said, “It was such a good idea by the Americans, that it had to be stolen; it’s as simple as that.”
Invictus is the Latin word for unbeaten or unconquered, evoking William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem of the same name. “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” The logo cleverly picks out the letters “I AM.” The Games are designed to showcase more than 300 people from thirteen nations in eight adaptive sports, including athletics, archery, wheelchair basketball, road cycling, indoor rowing, wheelchair rugby, swimming and sitting volleyball.
These Games are a perfect example of what the Royal Foundation is all about; what Nick Booth calls “catalytic philanthropy.” “We can bring three things to any problem or opportunity: seed capital, awareness-raising, and the third one, which is probably underestimated, is bringing people together—convening and leverage and partnership building.”
United For Wildlife, which William and Harry launched together in February 2014, is another example. The Princes, via the Foundation, have brought together and are collaborating with the seven largest wildlife and conservation charities, which have never previously spoken to one another, to use their combined clout to put a stop to the illegal killing of wildlife. “The poachers are now killing humans as well as killing animals,” says Nick. “This is not just about an isolated guy shooting a rhino and selling it; they are coming in in helicopter gunships with rocket-propelled grenades. This is organized multinational crime on a global scale. The U.S. State Department is mobilizing, the UK government is mobilizing. People are getting very focused on this, not just because it’s bad to kill those animals but because that money—$60,000 a kilo or whatever it is—is funding a whole bunch of activities that you really don’t want it to fund. So it is a human as well as a wildlife issue. Going back to first principles, what can we uniquely do as a Royal Foundation? If we can play that kind of catalytic philanthropic role to bring together very big organizations—those seven have north of a billion-dollar annual revenue—so mobilize those resources with a bit of help from these few rooms here [at the Foundation], then the multiplier effect to the return on our investment could be quite significant.”
