Royal drama brings back real life memories
The huge popularity of the Netflix drama, the Crown, has got Martin Hesp thinking back on some rRoyal visits to the Westcountry, including the first time Charles and Camilla headed West as man and wife
THE Crown TV series on Netflix took a lot of flack recently after it portrayed Prince Charles’ relationship with the person who was then known as Camilla Parker Bowles.
It seems obvious that HRH always had enormous affection for the woman who is now is wife, but many have balked at the way in which the series saw fit to describe his somewhat disastrous marriage with Diana.
Even a neutral viewer like myself felt the writers had gone in with too heavy a hand – I found it hard to believe that she was so isolated within the Royal Family and that he acted in such a spoilt and unreasonable way.
Be that as it may, the portrayal took me back 15 years to a sunny day on the Isles of Scilly. I travelled to the islands to cover a rather special royal visit – the first Charles and Camilla made in public as a married couple.
It was said royal minders had chosen the Scillies as the safest public place on the planet, mainly because the Duchy of Cornwall owns almost all the islands. Fair enough. But the Duchy doesn’t own the streets of St Marys and the world’s press were there to cover the visit and beam satellite images around the globe.
However, we at the WMN had oneup on all the other media. We had written to the royal press office pointing out that although the afternoon visit to St Agnes was private, this was unfair on the 70 or so islanders who’d love to have their very special day recorded for posterity in the region’s main daily newspaper.
To my amazement word came back from Clarence House that the WMN would be allowed to send one writer and one photographer to St Agnes. It was a lovely afternoon and I was enjoying the crossing. I talked to a few local dignitaries on board - everyone in Scilly knew me back in those days and I guess to the Duchess I may have come across as an islander because she came across and had a chat. We media types aren’t supposed to speak with royals on official visits – unless spoken to, of course – so with some trepidation I replied the Camilla’s questions and soon was telling her a couple of stories about the surrounding islands.
At some point a minder came over and removed the Duchess and a few minutes later I thought I could see HRH giving me a rather old fashioned look. That may have just been a case pauper’s paranoia, I don’t know.
Anyway, we reached wonderful St Agnes where the royal couple proceeded to stroll up the main road - the thin track which winds up past the pub and into the island’s hinterland. Not far along the track I knew the primary school kids would be waiting for their big moment - all five of them.
After a quick chat with the headmistress I got out of the royal couple’s way and went down to the little harbour area in Piriglis Cove, which I knew would be their next port of call. There was a young boat builder there called Josh Hicks and, having known him for some years, I called in to see if he’d be going out to greet the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall – to which he said: “Blimey, I forgot! They’re coming here to see the boat I’m working on.”
With that HRH and his minders turned the corner. The young boatbuilder seemed to be caught a little unawares, so he spluttered: “Oh, hi there - do you know Martin Hesp?”
And so it went on. The royal couple making their way around the heavenly island in the sunshine, and me trying to keep out of their way while interviewing various locals as the afternoon went on.
Later I was writing an opinion column, which for some reason I based on the TV programme Desperate Housewives, and this is what I said…
‘Exactly a week ago I spent several hours watching the woman who is, arguably, Britain’s most famous housewife. And, perchance, I was able to observe Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, at unusually close quarters. She was with her husband visiting his fiefdom in the Scillies, and it was a truly enjoyable occasion for one and all.
However, I couldn’t help noticing the rather unique body-language the royal couple display towards one another. Camilla tends to follow Charles about, walking a few feet behind. This was particularly true in the narrow lanes of St Agnes, where he constantly paced some 20 feet ahead of his beloved.
But what surprised me was the way in which the Prince tends to enter buildings, or passes through narrow spaces, without stopping to usher his
wife through first. On St Mary’s, for instance, they came to the cottage where Camilla’s sister had recently redesigned the interior… In went the Prince leaving his wife, momentarily, out on the street.
I can only assume this is part of some archaic formality which dictates he must go first because he is a Prince and she is only a Duchess. If it is not, then poor Camilla – who went up hugely in my humble opinion during the tour – has every right to be peeved.
She may have become accustomed to lurking in the shadows during the unmarried years, but now they are wed she surely has a right to expect Charles to open the occasional door for her?
Not that Camilla is ever going to be a desperate housewife. She is, one imagines, made of sterner stuff. Which she’ll need to be, because if anyone’s got a right to be desperate it is the royal wife who – unlike American TV actresses - will never, ever, be out of the limelight.
A few weeks after that I got a phone-call from one of the editors at the WMN saying he’d heard from high places that the column had been frowned upon. So there goes the MBE, or OBE, or whatever was in the offing…
Which is a shame, because I have often written the most kindly things about Charles and other Royals. Like this…
If we didn’t have a royal family, we’d have to invent a good working alternative. That is my considered opinion after working for a leading regional daily newspaper for over a decade - and as someone who, for a long time, couldn’t understand what royals were for.
Indeed, I used to work with a press photographer who had anarchist leanings and he’ll be turning in his grave if the Western Morning News somehow gets delivered to the Great Hereafter.
My old friend Randolph Priddy used to roll about with mirth talking about the pomp and ceremony associated with royalty. He used to love winding royalists up by telling the story of a big brown bear shot in a Canadian forest, where it is relieved of his furry backside so that it can be cured and sent across the Atlantic to Britain where its destiny was to be shaped into a dome and placed on the head of a red-jacketed soldier outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.
Prid’ had a lateral way of thinking about busbies and everything else which was royal. But we wouldn’t amount to much if we didn’t watch and learn - and years later, as a veteran who’s covered countless royal visits to the Westcountry and elsewhere, I’ve been left admiring the constitutional system we’ve inherited.
Such were my thoughts as I sat on a graveyard wall the other day. I was watching the great-and-the-good of the Somerset Levels gathering at much-flooded Muchelney where they were attending a special reception attended by Prince Charles.
As they filed in, business folk and others who’d been hit by the Great Somerset Flood of 2014 told me they’d felt grateful to the Prince of Wales ever since he turned up at the inundated village to draw attention to their plight.
And here he was returning on a mission to ask the locals how things were faring post-flood, and also to thank those who’d helped during the disaster.
You might shrug: ‘So what..? that’s what royals do.’ They visit places. They hear about stuff. They congratulate achievers. They show sympathy. Their mere presence gives things credibility. A royal nod marks events and ensures they’ll be added to the history books.
And that is my point exactly. Someone’s got to do it.
Here’s my report from Muchelney when Prince Charles visited after the terrible Somerset Level floods.
Somerset was living up to its name yesterday - the long grass in the Land of the Summer Meadows waved green and luxuriant as a prince and his cavalcade sparkled a blur of blue lights and car-polish in warm sunshine which was continuing to dryout an area that, not so long ago, was the biggest new lake in Britain.
Before the Levels flooded so infamously this winter and villages like Muchelney became, fleetingly, the focus of the world’s TV cameras, the Somerset lowlands used to be the Westcountry’s best kept secret. The off-the-beaten-track zone was - and is - a place of graziers, birdwatchers and butterflies, not of royal personages.
As a village wag put it: “For us moor-men, the Royals are like London buses – you wait over a thousand years for a visit, and then you get the heir to the throne turn up twice in five months.”
It was, of course, King Alfred who frequented the Levels 1,136 years ago - and back then, as he burned the cakes at Athelney just a few miles downstream from Muchelney, he was only too pleased the area was an impenetrable flooded bog, given the fact that marauding Vikings were after his blood.
Prince Charles was not expected to tend to any baking - nor was he afeared of marauding Vikings - on the contrary, right across the flattest place west of Bristol, the locals were thanking him for his interest in their dampish plight.
“It took Charles to come here and visit during the floods to get the politicians moving,” shrugged the humorist who, like some 30 other people, was waiting for the royal visitor on Muchelney’s graveyard wall.
World famous potter John Leach was one of the locals whose businesses had been hit and so was one of the people invited to meet Prince Charles at a reception in the village…
“This visit means a terrific amount,” he told the WMN. “Prince Charles is very high profile wherever he goes - and we are grateful to him because this new visit publicises the fact that all the businesses are open around here.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but a lot of people think we’re still shut,” said Mr Leach. “We get regular phone-calls saying: ‘How do we get to you? Are you still flooded?’” The potter and his wife Lizzie were not only forced to temporarily close their business during the floods, they also had to evacuate their home for over two months…
Just up the road the village of Thorney was even worse hit by in January than Muchelney.
The man who invited the WMN to visit his inundated home at Thorney - and took us in and out of the village by boat - was retired eel-smoker Michael Brown, and while the royal reception was underway yesterday we returned to see how he and his wife Utta were faring…
However, Mr Brown did have one major piece of good news: “We are going to get our bund here at Thorney - an earth bank put on top of one that’s already there,” he said of the flood defence he and other villagers had been calling for.
“It’s going to be a metre high and stretch about 350 metres – and all of us in the village think it’s going to be the silver bullet.
Mr Brown agreed that Prince Charles’s first visit to the area helped raise the profile of the flooding problems: “It is good that he has taken an interest in us because people have sat up more and taken notice.”
That’s the royals job. They do it well.