Revealed, 60th birthday gift that left Diana’s brother in tears
TURNING 60 can be reason for celebration. But Earl spencer, who reached the milestone yesterday, was, I hear, overcome with emotion.
Princess Diana’s younger brother gave a party at Althorp House, his ancestral home in Northamptonshire, and one particularly poignant present left the historian in tears.
‘I had 30 friends and family to stay over the weekend,’ Charles spencer explains. ‘I was brought down to the lake at Althorp by a friend on saturday. Her husband hand-made this astonishingly beautiful canoe for me, as a surprise, over many months. I cried on seeing it. It’s almost too exquisite to paddle.
‘the husband said, “I just thought it would be useful when you visit your sister”. such an overwhelmingly beautiful thought.’
the canoe is pictured on the bank next to the Oval Lake at Althorp, the 13,000acre estate where Charles and Diana grew up with their two sisters.
Diana was buried on a small island in the middle of the lake, which can be reached only by boat.
Althorp is open to the public in July and August, the anniversaries of Diana’s birth and death. Visitors can leave floral tributes and letters to Diana at a memorial near her resting place.
Lord spencer has explained: ‘ It has been decided to bury Diana, Princess of Wales, in the grounds of Althorp Park, where her grave can be properly looked after by her family and visited in privacy by her sons.’
He had originally planned to lay Diana to rest in the family tombs at a local church, but said he was ‘worried’ about her safety.
spencer’s relationship with Diana was strained at times. she asked him for a
cottage on the estate, the Garden House, as a ‘bolthole’ in 1993, and his refusal to grant her request came as a shock.
He feared, possibly with good reason, that his family would suffer from police and media interference. In fact, he offered her several alternative houses on the sprawling estate, none of which she accepted.