Carried away with a married blonde on the Queen’s Flight
BY HIS late 20s, Charles had learned that while there was huge interest in his love life, if he was seen out with a woman who was married, no one seemed to turn a hair.
One of these married girlfriends was Dale (later Lady) Tryon, a vivacious Australian he’d met at a school dance at Timbertop in Australia when they were both 17.
She’d moved to London and married the merchant banker Anthony Tryon, one of the Prince’s oldest friends and his sometime financial adviser.
Charles had become godfather to their elder son, also named Charles, who was born in 1976. And the Prince was a frequent visitor to all three of the Tryons’ properties — a house in London, a 700-acre estate in Wiltshire and a rented fishing lodge in Iceland.
Dale called him the ‘Bonny Prince’ and he nicknamed her ‘Kanga’. Whenever
he telephoned to say he was on his way to see her, she’d clear the house.
One year, Anthony had gone ahead to the lodge in Iceland while Dale and Charles followed separately in an Andover of the Queen’s flight. So engrossed were they with each other in the private compartment, that they failed to notice the plane had landed at Reykjavik, and that a red carpet and
civic reception awaited, complete with Icelandic military band. Kanga kept their affair secret from no one. She started up a fashion label in 1980, selling one-size¬fits-all dresses, and constantly promoted them and herself by selling stories about her royal connections.
In the end, this was her undoing. Charles started ignoring her, and she became almost demented with the pain of losing him.
‘Kanga adored him,’ says a close friend in the fashion industry who helped launch her brand. ‘Whenever he rang the office, she would disappear. She was very funny and completely outrageous and unbelievably naughty sexually… She was like a spoilt child, living on the edge: everything was extreme and there was always drink in the equation.’
Camilla, of course, was none of those things — and Dale soon came to hate her.