The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
A ‘momentous’, yet ‘personal’ event
Courier columnist Helen Brown was dispatched to cover Diana’s funeral on September 6 1997, when she worked on Courier Features.
She described it as “the biggest story I ever had to cover”.
“I was in London from the Friday afternoon until late on the Saturday of the funeral itself,” she recalled.
“There was an atmosphere like none I have ever experienced before or am ever likely to experience again.
“There has been much talk since of hysteria whipped up by those keen to make a martyr out of the late princess but on that day, there was a sense of great quiet and genuinely deep feeling.
“We had to leave our hotel very early on the morning of the funeral to walk to Westminster Abbey, past the huge, yet strangely silent, crowd.
“Inside the abbey, as you might expect, no concessions were made to the press; we were seated on high scaffolding immediately opposite and above the royal family pews.
“It was rather unnerving but enlightening to be looking, even at a distance, into the faces of Prince Charles, Princes William and Harry and the Queen and Queen Mother.”
Helen said the atmosphere inside and out was “certainly not manufactured or magnified by the media”.
“The emphasis came very definitely from people there as individual mourners and witnesses of a momentous public, yet somehow very personal, event,” she added. “Hardened members of the London hack pack, I may say, were in tears.
“Prime Minister Tony Blair’s reading seems to me now heavily mannered. Elton John’s musical tribute, potentially mawkish or even kitsch, seemed somehow to hit the right note in all senses.
“Earl Spencer’s sentiments were, of course, applauded to the echo.
“At first, we inside the abbey didn’t realise what was happening until someone beside me with a radio whispered that what we were hearing was the crowd cheering and clapping at barely veiled criticism of the royal family and references to Diana’s ‘blood family’.
“The royals looked stunned; the princes, so young and thinking of their mother rather than protocol, joined in.
“But 20 years on, we’re still discussing the Diana effect; William and Harry openly and proudly champion their mother’s legacy.
“Perhaps her ‘blood family’, in the shape of the future king and his younger brother, will have the last word after all.”