Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Princess of the people dies
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles.
TWENTY years ago this week the world woke to the jarring and barely believable news that Princess Diana was dead, an event which, in the days that followed, left “not a dry eye in the world” as the headline of September 3 had it.
The global audience of her funeral was estimated to be a staggering 2.5 billion people, and the flowers that heaped up – and not just in London – in a worldwide tribute to the elegant, complex and troubled Diana reflected a degree of popular adulation that was unexpected and at Buckingham Palace at least, sorely misjudged to begin with.
The errant, if now deceased, princess looked as if she was about to usurp the affection and regard usually reserved for the Queen. And who could doubt that the once shy and awkward Diana had managed to steal the people’s hearts.
Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair captured this with memorable feeling when he said: “She was the people’s princess and that’s how she will stay, how she will remain, in our hearts.”
But Diana has always had her detractors. Only this week the fiercely unsentimental, acclaimed novelist, Hilary Mantel, depth-charged the Di mythology, noting the revered princess was neither clever, nor “especially good, in the sense of having a dependable inclination to virtue”.
She was, Mantel went on: “Quixotically loving, not steadily charitable: mutable, not dependable: given to infatuation, prey to impulse”.
Mantel’s sentiments are certainly in accord with republican incredulity at the display of emotion at Diana’s death, a moment in which Britons – along with devotees elsewhere around the globe – briefly lost their minds, as the Guardian recently suggested, submitting to “a late summer fit of national hysterics”.
Yet it could be that it was precisely the flaws and foibles of the doomed princess that made her the “queen of people’s hearts” her stumbles and mistakes demonstrating a kind of affinity, despite her royal elevation, with ordinary people. To them, these qualities made her lovable and perhaps, in the strange way such things work, they also made her admirable.
The unprejudiced affection that Diana earned emerged from the comment of a “dreadlocked mourner” who said: “She was different from the rest. She was the only one of the royals who you felt was in touch with things”.
The feted and famous were quick to acknowledge her, too. A “devastated” Nelson Mandela, who had met Diana just months earlier, described the princess as “very graceful, highly intelligent and committed to worthy causes”. The leaders of the superpowers were similarly moved, US president Bill Clinton and Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin adding to the glowing tributes from around the world. Tennis star André Agassi wore a black ribbon at the US Open, Bosnians laid wreaths to a woman who campaigned against landmines, Canadians presented bouquets at a Toronto theatre named after her, and even Afghan Taliban leaders signed books of condolence.
The special poignancy of her death – with her lover, Harrods heir Dodi al-Fayed – in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma underpass in Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997, was that she seemed to be on the brink of a happier life after years of torments and troubling episodes, welling in part from her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles.
Dodi, it is believed, was about to propose to her, and had already bought the ring.
Their stopover in Paris en route to London came at the end of a nine-day holiday on the French and Italian Rivieras aboard his family’s luxury yacht. One of the reports on September 1 told readers: “Princess Diana declared just hours before she died that she had found true happiness with Dodi al-Fayed and planned to withdraw completely from public life.”
Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay, who had talked to Diana by telephone just six hours before she died quoted her as saying, “I’m coming home tomorrow… I will have a few days with them before they’re back at school”.
Close confidants were reported to have said they had “never known her so content and fulfilled now that she had a new man in her life. Wedding bells were being forecast”.
“Andrew Morton, whose best- selling book on Diana first revealed the heartbreak behind her failed marriage to Prince Charles, said the princess had been ‘just a fingertip away from the happiness she craved’.” It was widely believed the accident that killed her was, at least indirectly, a consequence of the paparazzi.
This was bitterly underscored in a report from Cape Town, no less, when Princess Di’s brother, Charles Spencer, spoke to journalists outside his Constantia home.
The headline, “Blood is on their hands today”, placed the media in the firing line. Spencer said he “always believed that in the end the press would kill his sister”.
He told journalists: “But not even I could believe they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case. It would appear that every proprietor and every editor of every publication that paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, has blood on his hands today.”
What gripped most people was a quiet, disbelieving grief.
It was no different in Cape Town, if on a much smaller scale. The report, “Mother City weeps with the whole world”, told of how, “one by one, makeshift wreaths formed a colourful tribute to the ‘Queen of Hearts’ at the doors of the British High Commission’s office in Cape Town and at the Constantia home of her brother, Earl Spencer”.
“Constantia businessman Grant Pollard left a bouquet of fynbos flowers at the gates of Earl Spencer’s house with a message reading: ‘We loved Diana so much. We’re so sorry she is gone. Take up her cross, William and Harry.’
“At the British High Commission in Parliament, 20-year-old Clarence Anderson said a tearful farewell to his princess as he laid a bunch of yellow roses on the doorstep. ‘She was a flame,’ he said. ‘In every aspect of her life she shone like a star.’”
For many, these two decades later, the radiance is undimmed.