Di becomes voice of ‘unloved’
Diana was determined to use her ‘tremendous knowledge about people’ to do some real good in the world
WEARING a white shirt, beige trousers and brown loafers, Diana, Princess of Wales nervously strapped on body armour and donned a protective visor, before walking across a partially cleared, but still active, minefield in Angola.
With tears in her eyes, she thought of the children maimed and killed every day by these deadly devices.
Determined to bring the Red Cross campaign for an international ban on landmines to the world’s attention, she posed for photos, much to the confusion of the villagers, who didn’t know who she was.
“There was bemusement that the most famous woman on the planet went to the only town where she was completely unknown,” her guide Paul Heslop, now Chief of Programmes for the United Nations’ Mine Action Service, told The Sun this year.
That image, from January 1997, became one of the most powerful photos taken of Diana, more than any of her in designer dresses and tiaras.
“I am not a political figure,” Diana said, “I am a humanitarian.” One, who, after 17 years in the spotlight, knew she could effect seismic change with her campaigns.
So it was bitterly ironic, that in the last year of her life, Diana finally attained the position she had dreamed of — an ambassador of philanthropic causes who could do some real good in the world.
“I’ve got tremendous knowledge about people and how to communicate. I’ve learnt that, I’ve got it, and I want to use it,” she told Martin Bashir in his 1995 TV interview.
“I think the biggest disease this world suffers from … is the disease of people feeling unloved … I can give, I’m very happy to do that. I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts.”
Diana spent her last summer spreading that love. She auctioned off her designer gowns at Christies in New York, raising $4.4m for AIDS and cancer charities. Three weeks before her death she visited Bosnia, again highlighting landmines.
“Nothing brings me more happiness than trying to help the most vulnerable people in society,” she said.
“It is a goal and an essential part of my life, a kind of destiny.” From the moment the then Lady Diana got engaged to Prince Charles, it was clear she would be no ordinary princess, but one who was passionate about effecting real change.
From landmine victims to AIDS sufferers, lepers, the sick and dying, Diana was devoted to people in need, showing a level of
compassion not seen before in the Royal Family.
In 1987, she famously shook hands with an AIDS patient at London’s Middlesex Hospital.
“A handshake from her is worth a hundred thousand words from us,” said a specialist at the time. In an era when most people were petrified of the condition, Diana hugging and touching patients was revolutionary.
No one had seen a royal behave the way Diana did – instead of keeping a discreet distance, her instinct was to hug, touch and kiss people.
She was constantly crouching down to put children at ease while she chatted – something Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge continues to do.
Touching hands with Indonesian leprosy victims in November 1989, carrying abandoned toddlers with AIDS in Brazil in 1991, cradling a young patient in her arms on a trip to a cancer hospital in Pakistan in 1996 — wherever Diana went she enveloped people with her love.
“She came into her own with children and ill people,” said royal photographer Jayne Fincher.
“She’d take their hand, stroke their head and give a child a kiss. She was very tender. The patients were taken aback that she was so physical and the staff were over the moon.”
Diana openly admitted she wasn’t academic, but her friend Rosa Monckton believed she was an “intuitive genius”.
Certainly she had an affinity with the sick, disaffected and marginalised, because she understood what it meant to suffer.
Throughout her turbulent existence within the Royal Family, Diana found salvation in her causes, many of them away from the cameras.
“I’m lucky enough in the fact that I have found my role, and I’m very conscious of it, and I love being with people,” she told Bashir.
Her regular private visits to homeless shelters, hospitals and hospices, gave her the strength to keep going in tough times.
“They weren’t aware just how much healing they were giving me, and it carried me through,” she said.
And while she lost her HRH title post divorce in 1996, she earned it back, posthumously when British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared her “the people’s princess” in an emotional speech as her body was flown back to the UK from Paris. Even in death, Diana’s powerful philanthropy reaped results. In September 1997, the Mine Ban Treaty was signed and that December the International Campaign to Ban Landmines won the Nobel peace prize, with the committee recognising Diana’s commitment.
Sandra Txijica lost her leg to a landmine in Angola and clearly remembers sitting on Diana’s knee in January 1997, aged 13.
“She stroked my face and we talked for a very long time about my accident,” she later said.
“When she left I felt like I was saying goodbye to a friend.” So did the world a few months later.