An ocean of GRIEF
Charles, William, Harry — they have all learned from Diana’s compassion...
THE sudden death of Princess Diana sparked an astonishing outpouring of grief. In fact, one of the few people not mourning, it seemed, was Princess Margaret, who said the hysteria was ‘rather like Diana herself’. Here, some of Diana’s closest friends give their insights into her death and its aftermath in the final part of our series . . . DEBBIE FRANK Astrologer
‘The last time I saw her properly was a month before her death, and we had a very long, free-ranging conversation about everything. It was extraordinary because it was like the epilogue. Then she called me on August 12 or 13, and we spent a couple of hours talking. She was flying off and in good spirits and wanted to tell me she had a new telephone number and just to check in with me.’
DANIEL GALVIN Hair colourist
‘Two hairdressers would go to the palace every morning — she had to have her hair blow-dried every day. But after she got back from holiday, she breezed into the salon on the Friday before she was due to go back to France with Dodi and sat in the chair. She was always telling me off for being too brown; it was just because
I’d been in the sun, not because I used tanning products. She was concerned for my health. But this time she said: “Daniel, I can’t believe it but I’m now browner than you.” She seemed so happy and had that sun-kissed glow about her. Those were the last words she ever said to me. Then, days later, came the terrible news of the accident.’
NISH JOSHI Holistic health practitioner
‘In Diana’s quest to be happy, healthy and fit, she sought lots of treatments and advice from all sorts of people. That was because she was bored. It was something to do. Just before she went to France with Dodi, she saw me at the Hale Clinic. I was going to Calcutta to see someone she had introduced me to and said I would see her when she got back. I was still in India when I got the dreadful call that she had been killed. I tried to get back for her funeral but couldn’t. I came back the following day to discover in my diary I had made a note that we were due to have lunch.’
JAYNE FINCHER Photographer
‘The last time I photographed her was when I was asked to do a special for Hello! magazine of her visiting the English National Ballet. She was so incredibly sad; there was a horrible vibe around because she was so unhappy. She had a dark trouser suit on; it was one of those days. She was doing her best but she wasn’t very animated.
‘Obviously something wasn’t right and as she walked out the door she said, “Oh, sorry Jayne” because she knew I was having trouble getting the pictures I needed. The pictures were published but they were a bit dull. That was the last time I saw her and that was the last thing she ever said to me. I feel sad that it ended like that, because my overriding memory of her is having a lot of fun and of hearing her laugh. I can still hear her laughing in my mind.’
DR LILY HUA YU Acupuncturist and herbalist
‘She had planned to go to Hong Kong on 26 September. She said she wanted to be the first member of the Royal Family to visit China – it was all arranged and she wanted to explore the culture and medicine. She was happy with Dodi but she never planned to get pregnant. She never indicated she wanted to get married. She had been badly let down and was still angry; so when Dodi came along she was happy to lean on him.
‘When newspapers suspected she was pregnant when she died I felt I had to say something because she came to see me just ten days before the tragedy and had just had her period, so she could not have been pregnant. She never said she wanted a baby – and I know she was on the contraceptive pill. She was sensible in that way.’
LADY ANGELA OSWALD Former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother
‘One particularly nasty side of the outpouring of emotion for Diana is that when people feel grieved, they have to blame someone — that’s been shown throughout history. And there were so many wicked things laid at the Queen’s door at the time of Diana’s death. ‘When the Princess of Wales died, the Queen was at Balmoral with the two little princes, whose mother had been killed, and yet she was castigated for not leaving them and coming to London to mourn in the streets with people who had never even met the princess. That was wickedly cruel. ‘And the other extraordinary thing was that on the day of their mother’s death, the princes decided to go to church as usual — if you’re a Christian you find a comfort in going to church. But the Queen was accused of making the princes go to church that day, and she was vilfied for it in certain sections of the Press, which was so unfair.’
LORD ARCHER Author and former Conservative MP
‘The Royal Family were stuck in Scotland and physically didn’t see what was happening, and probably would have even missed it if they were in London because they would have been enclosed within the palace. They would only have had to walk the streets to know what was happening; they don’t walk the streets. The moment they did walk the streets — the first time in their lives, from St James’s Palace to Buckingham Palace — they just couldn’t believe it.’
JOE HAINES Journalist and former press secretary to Harold Wilson
‘It’s not uncommon that if you’re prejudiced against someone, everybody shares your prejudice. A beautiful young woman wasn’t necessarily congenial to some of the senior aides at the palace. They didn’t like her; she was becoming a loose cannon; and I bet that somebody, somewhere in the Palace, said “Thank God!” when they heard she was dead. They never understood. The British are said to “love a lord”. Well, they “love a lady” more.
‘They never anticipated the public outpouring. Remember, they were at war: they didn’t like her. There was always the threat she would do something that would upstage the Royal Family. In fact, she did, all the time: if Charles was doing something big in the country, she only had to put her head out the window to upstage him.
‘And she was a different sort. She was going to gyms, she could be seen in restaurants. She went to hospitals, she got on with people — and the Royal Family didn’t like it. Well, they didn’t realise that the British people had a totally different view of her, they sympathised with her and not with him.
‘They got it all wrong. From Crathie Church the first morning when the vicar didn’t even mention the princess’s death. Then, “Well, we can’t lower the flag to half-mast because we don’t do that; the Royal Standard is never flown at half-mast.” That was
‘The Queen was accused of making the princes go to church, and vilified for it, which was so unfair’ LADY ANGELA OSWALD
their mistake.’ DR PAUL OESTREICHER Former director of the International Centre for Reconciliation ‘People were horrified when the Queen was away from her palace, that the grief of the nation was not expressed by flying a flag of some kind at half-mast. There was no flag at half-mast because the Queen wasn’t there. Now that bit of protocol was recognised to be stupid, so now when the Queen is not there they fly the national flag, and when she is there they fly her personal flag. These are not very important things, obviously, but they are changes. And the Queen
agrees to them because their time has come.’
PETER JAY Former broadcaster and ambassador to the USA
‘I was surprised by the outpouring of grief. Not least was I surprised to find myself part of it, and my overwhelming impression was that the public was surprised in exactly the same sense.
‘Obviously, it was an immensely tragic event — a beautiful young person in the prime of life, with children, shockingly killed in this way. So in one sense it’s not surprising that people should be shocked by such an event. But I believe people were, very widely, quite amazed by the strength of their own reactions, not the reactions of others, but their own. They crept up on them; they were really moved. The initial reaction to the accident was immense, spontaneous and genuine.’
LORD POWELL Former diplomat
‘I would not have expected it. That may say something about my own generation, or my own particular attitude. I was sufficiently interested to go down on a couple of evenings to the area near Buckingham Palace, just to walk through the crowd and get some direct sensation of what it was all about.
‘I remember being struck by one or two things. One is that there wasn’t an air of great sadness about it all. I wouldn’t say that it was a carnival atmosphere, but the people were milling around, talking a lot, more the atmosphere of a public event than of great national mourning. Secondly, the crowd was very clearly composed of predominantly younger people, predominantly females, with a very high proportion of ethnic minorities. She was seen as a bit of a rebel, a supporter of minority causes. There weren’t many older people, or people like me in suits, standing around the palace. I stuck out like a sore thumb.’
LORD ARMSTRONG Conservative peer
‘I remember going to look at the flowers outside St James’s Palace and being astonished to read some of the inscriptions: there were several to “Diana, Queen of Heaven” and “Regina Cielo”. In the Catholic Church, “Queen of Heaven” or “Regina Cielo” is a title reserved for the Virgin Mary.
‘Another one I remember seeing was: “To Diana and Dodi, together in heaven.” Well, that seemed to me an extraordinary reaction because the relationship with Dodi Fayed didn’t seem to anybody to be a very attractive one.
‘I was surprised at the extent of the feeling about her, and I wondered whether it added something to the need that people have for a kind of figure like the Virgin Mary — a goddess figure. The Virgin Mary would be the Christian thing; the Goddess Diana, if you look at the Romans — some romanticised female figure becomes an icon in religious terms. I don’t believe it was very healthy.’
LORD GLENTORAN Conservative peer
‘I believe the mourning was not monarchy-related, it was 100 per cent personal. Princess Diana had a serious cult of followers, and she had done it brilliantly. She’d done a lot of wonderful things, and she was an astoundingly good-looking girl. I didn’t meet her very often, but as her marriage was breaking up, she came up to meet us and she was still a staggeringly goodlooking girl. And the way she appeared, and the things she did, she really had a massive following of people, like a huge star of some sort. Somehow she had this magic: she related to all sorts of people. Then there are others who simply thought her terrible. There were plenty of them, but they were very much in the minority.’
SARAH BRADFORD Also known as Viscountess Bangor, royal biographer
‘Diana’s friend, the late Lucia Flecha da Lima, told me she found Diana’s coffin lying in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, bare of flowers. She told me: “The first day at the chapel there was not one single flower on her coffin. I said to the chaplain that if he didn’t allow flowers in, I would throw open the doors of the chapel so everyone could see her there without a single flower alongside all the flowers outside that people had brought.”
Every day from then on, Lucia brought not just her own flowers but also those from friends, until they were all around her coffin, representing the flowers of the world. She said to Prince Charles: “These represent the millions of flowers all around the world that people want to give to Diana.”’
JANE PROCTER Former editor of Tatler magazine
‘I got to the Abbey in good time; five or ten minutes later and I wouldn’t have had the view of people that I had. Journalists were penned off and couldn’t see the Queen, but there was a gap, so I was looking straight at the Royal Family.
‘When the coffin, ablaze with the Royal Standard, was finally settled onto the catafalque, the folds of the flag were rucked up. Slipping quietly from her chair, the Queen carefully rearranged the Royal Standard.
‘This was the last time she would have any physical contact with her daughter-in-law, so it was very revealing — one of the most emotional scenes I’d ever witnessed.’
LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Socialite and Diana’s friend
‘The funeral was terribly moving – those young boys, as they walked behind the body of their mother, knowing they would never see her again. It was terribly poignant. As a service it was unflawed. Diana would have loved it.’
CAROLAN BROWN Personal trainer
‘I went to her funeral. It was such a shame her life ended so soon, as she would have adored seeing her boys grow up, and I think her life would have got better. She did go through a difficult time and as she was so young, and probably very young for her age, she felt very much alone which is why she put so much trust in people who worked for her. She relied on people like her hairdressers, therapists and myself, we kept her going. We were her fuel and gave her a reason to get up in the morning and get through each day.’
ELTON JOHN Singer who performed at the funeral
‘What was going through my mind was: “Don’t sing a wrong note. Be stoic. Don’t break down and just do it to the best you can without showing any emotion whatsoever.”
‘I can’t imagine those boys at that young age having to walk in public following their mother’s coffin.
‘And the next time we were in the Abbey it was to see William walking up the aisle with the love of his life. I think Diana would be very happy with his choice — Kate seems such a great girl and they seem so much in love.’
RICHARD WILLIAMS Pallbearer
‘I will never forget glancing at the faces of the royals when we reached the front. Anyone who says they didn’t care about Diana is wrong. I saw they were all visibly upset — there were hankies everywhere.’
WAYNE SLEEP Dancer
‘The funeral was such a fitting send-off. It made me proud to be British. It really hit me when Earl Spencer started talking about Diana and her insecurities. That was when I wept, because that was the person I knew for 14 years.’
FR MICHAEL SEED Former adviser to the Archbishop of Westminster
‘Earl Spencer, actually, in the presence of the entire Royal Family and millions of viewers, said she had proved she had no need of a royal title to generate her magic. It was incredible. You’d have had your head chopped off in the old days! But it just shows that he not only had the freedom to say this, but that he got away with it!’
TIM HEALD The late author
‘Spencer’s speech, which seemed so wonderful to a lot of people at the time, now seems not just vacuous, but actually positively dishonest: if he really believed in doing the best thing for the boys, that was the most divisive thing he could possibly say at that particular occasion.’
MARTIN NEARY Westminster Abbey’s former director of music
‘The thing about Diana’s funeral was that everyone agreed that there should be something for everyone, from all walks of life. The feeling was that the service and music should not have a remoteness, a formality that would make it out of touch, but that it should echo the feeling that she was truly a “Princess of the People”.’
CATHERINE WALKER The late fashion designer
‘The folds of the flag on her coffin were rucked up. The Queen carefully rearranged them’ JANE PROCTER, FORMER TATLER EDITOR
‘I had one last commission for Diana, undoubtedly the saddest and most difficult commission of my life. Being asked to do it made me feel immensely grateful. Paul Burrell rang requesting a dress for Diana to be buried in. I know that had she lived, it is one she would most probably have bought and loved. Paul’s reaction to my dress was: “She will be covered in love.”’