Times 2 - UK (2020-11-16)

the times | Monday November 16 2020 1GT 7

what’s true — and what isn’t?

The Prince and Princess of Wales

went on a tour of Australia and New

Zealand in March 1983. Did Diana

throw a tantrum and demand to

change all the plans so as not to be

separated from baby Prince William?

FALSE

It was a new idea for the Waleses to

bring baby William with them on tour.

Diana did not wish to be separated

from her son, born the previous

summer. But, no, the tour was not

rearranged. In order that they could

be with William, the outgoing

Australian prime minister, Malcolm

Fraser, asked a philanthropist, Gordon

Darling, to lend them his sheep

station, Woomargama, which was

situated between Sydney and

Melbourne and close to Canberra

(by Australian standards). Albury

airport was near by and they were

able to fly everywhere, returning each

night to be with the baby.

They took about 27 flights during

their visit. The Waleses stayed at

Woomargama from March 20 to

April 17 and they had an entourage of

23 British staff travelling with them,

including a private chef. Those staff

who stayed at Woomargama made a

significant dent in Darling’s cellar.

Did Prince Charles feel

overshadowed by Diana on

that Australian trip?

PARTLY TRUE

This was one of the early examples

of “Di-mania”, but since the Waleses

were getting along well and the trip

was considered a great success, the

prince was more concerned as to how

it would affect her. She was partly

elated and partly exhausted. He wrote

that she was a great support to him at

times when he felt gloomy.

There was a part of him that did not

like being upstaged by his wife. At this

time his annoyance was matched by

his pride in her, but it is true that later

he came to resent how people were

only interested in her clothes, and did

not listen to his speeches.

Were the Queen’s cousins, put away

in a state lunatic asylum to save the

monarchy?

FALSE

This has no basis in truth. In this

episode Princess Margaret visits a

therapist due to her “sidelining” and

is told of the existence of her two

cousins shut away in Earlswood

mental hospital. In real life she took

no interest in them.

Next they have the Queen Mother

telling Princess Margaret that these

girls had to be shut away because had

it been known that they existed, it

would have had serious consequences

for the monarchy after the abdication.

The implication is that the world may

have feared that a strain of lunacy had

entered the family.

The reality was that these two

girls and three cousins had inherited

a defective gene from the Trefusis

family from which all five descended

through their mothers. Nerissa and

Katherine were the daughters of

Fenella Trefusis, who married the

Queen Mother’s brother, Jock Bowes

Lyon, so this had nothing to do with

the Queen Mother’s bloodline.

Continued on page 9

husband’s wallet on honeymoon. She

believed that his relationship with

Camilla never ceased. Clearly there

were acute differences between the

newlyweds right from the start of the

marriage. On their honeymoon on

Britannia, Diana chatted up the sailors

and cooks, and he remained, as he

wrote at the time, “hermit-like on the

verandah deck, sunk with pure joy into

one of Laurens van der Post’s books.. .”

Did Prince Charles call Camilla

every day during the early years

of the marriage?

FALSE

Prince Charles had virtually no

contact with Camilla at all for the

first five years. Yet since Andrew

Parker Bowles (the husband of

Camilla) was commanding officer of

the Household Cavalry Mounted

Regiment from 1981 to 1983, then

colonel commanding the Household

Cavalry and Silver Stick from 1987 to

1990, there must have been a few

formal encounters. Dimbleby dates the

resumption of contact between them

to 1986, by which time Charles’s

marriage had, as he put it,

“irretrievably broken down”.

Hugo Vickers’s The

Crown Dissected

(Zuleika) is available

on Kindle and from

other ebook retailers

Was Diana cooped up in

Buckingham Palace during the

months before the wedding?

TRUE

In The Crown we see Diana dancing

alone to her Walkman, rollerskating

in the state rooms and confronted

with trolley-loads of flowers and

letters from the public. It’s here we

first see her bulimia. As soon as she

was engaged, the real Diana left her

flat in Earls Court, first went to

Clarence House, then moved to

Buckingham Palace a few days later.

She lived there for about five months

until her marriage in July.

The palace is more of a huge

office/Edwardian hotel than a cosy

home, and it is understandable that

she felt gloomy there. The contrast

to her life with her flatmates must

have been sharp. One of the pages,

working there at the time and looking

after her, used to go out and buy

her takeaways. So the loneliness

and isolation portrayed in The Crown

is accurate.

It is also true that Diana did not

see Prince Charles much before the

wedding. She called him “Sir” until the

day he proposed.

Did Prince Charles give Camilla a

special bracelet before his wedding?

TRUE

In The Crown we see Diana coming

across the designs for a bracelet that

the Prince of Wales intends to give his

mistress shortly before the wedding.

It is marked with the initials “F&G”,

which Diana told her author, Andrew

Morton, she thought stood for “Fred”

and “Gladys” — Charles and Camilla’s

pet names for each other.

In reality, in the run-up to the

wedding, the four private secretaries in

Prince Charles’s private office became

aware that Diana was preoccupied by

suspicions concerning the prince’s

relationship with Camilla. A bracelet

was commissioned as a way of the

prince saying goodbye. It had the

initials “GF”, which stood for “Girl

Friday”. Diana discovered the bracelet.

She confronted Prince Charles and

was not mollified. Nevertheless, he felt

he should hand over the bracelet in

person. The Jonathan Dimbleby-

authorised version is that this was

the only time he saw Camilla between

his engagement and his wedding.

Diana later told Morton that

photos of Camilla spewed out of her

DES WILLIE/NETFLIX

FALSE

The Queen wished the world

to know that she thought

Margaret Thatcher “uncaring”,

and placed a story in The Sunday

Times expressing this

TRUE

After her engagement, Diana left

her shared flat and was cooped up

inside Buckingham Palace, where

she lived until her marriage

times

Emma Corrin as

Princess Diana, and

Gillian Anderson as

Margaret Thatcher in

The Crown