HowCamilla’shusband savedrivalCharles’slife

SPRING 1980, a year before his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer, and the Prince of Wales was on his way to Rhodesia for the hand-over ceremony which would herald its rebirth as independent Zimbabwe.

Arrangements for the royal visit had been made by one Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles and he had invited out his wife Camilla who, as the newspapers wasted no time in pointing out, was the Prince’s former girlfriend.

‘ Charles’s old flame lights up darkest Zimbabwe,’ the Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster reported. However, it was Andrew Parker Bowles whom the Prince should have been most grateful to see.

The 40-year-old Army officer had taken it upon himself to double-check every section of the royal itinerary.

This included a trip to the Henderson Veterinary

Research Station at Mazowe, where the vets were so convinced that they had found a way to tame the notoriously irascible African buffalo, a creature responsible for at least 200 deaths each year, that they were going to invite the Prince to ride one.

Fortunately for Prince Charles, the gallant Lieutenant Colonel decided to test-ride a buffalo himself, only to be thrown off and gored through the right thigh. A few inches further up and he would have been killed.

The royal riding trip at Mazowe was now off. Had the Prince followed the Foreign Office plan, though, he would have been in grave danger.

‘I always remind him that if it hadn’t gored me and had gored him, things might be very different these days,’ laughs Brigadier Parker Bowles.

‘He gives me a wry smile and, rightly, takes it quite lightly.’