The Aristocrat Who Was Always Welcomed

Wherever she went, she was recognised, and usually applauded. Her tragic death at the age of 36 in a car crash in Paris in the early hours of Sunday morning brought normal broadcasting around the world to a standstill as the stations sought to recast their programmes to report the news, record the reactions and pay tribute.

No one had expected the end to come like that. Until her divorce from the Prince of Wales in 1996, Diana was in line to be the next queen at Charless side. After the divorce, as the mother of their two sons William and Harry she was still likely one day to be the mother of a king. The Hon Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1961 at Park House, part of the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. The family rented it from the Crown. Her father was Viscount Althorp, her mother the Hon Frances Roche. The Queen and Prince Philip had attended their wedding in 1954 and Althorp was a royal equerry.

 

Althorps wife left him when Diana was six. He succeeded to his fathers title, Earl of Spencer, in 1975 and married Raine, formerly Countess of Dartmouth and daughter of Barbara Cartland, the novelist, the following year.

The family was thus aristocratic but not royal - a fact that was to have some bearing on the choice of wife for a future king, who was encouraged to marry neither a commoner nor a Catholic.

Much of European royalty was ruled out because it tends to be Catholic. Besides, as the managing editor of Debretts pointed out, Diana would bring a little Stuart blood back into the royal family as she was descended five times from Charles II - four times on the wrong side of the blanket, and one on the right side. Diana had a fairly conventional upbringing for a girl of her background.

She went to Riddlesworth Hall, a boarding preparatory school near Diss in Norfolk, then to West Heath boarding school in Kent.At 16 she moved to finishing school in Switzerland. When she returned to England she lived with a group of girlfriends in Londons South Kensington and worked variously as part-time cook, a nanny and a teacher.

She began teaching infants at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico. Diana first met Charles in 1977 through her eldest sister Sarah, a close friend of the Prince, at her fathers estate, Althorp Park. She usually wore jeans and was sometimes described as one of natures tomboys, and full of fun.

The Prince gradually took to her. At the same time, reports were emerging from around Buckingham Palace that the Prince should marry, if only to establish an heir. Prince Philip, in particular, is thought to have urged that Charles should either choose Diana or drop her.

The wedding took place at St Pauls Cathedral in July 1981. Diana was 20 and Charles was 32. For the rest of her life the Princess of Wales was seldom out of the public eye.

Whatever people thought of the history of the marriage and the future of the royal family, she was always noticed and always welcomed.

She was aware of the Princes previous attachment to Camilla Parker Bowles, and thought - rightly as it turned out - that it might be renewed.

Foreign trips together became a nightmare as the cameras would snap them on clearly less than friendly terms. Still, there were two sons. Prince William was born in June 1982 and Prince Harry in September1984. Clearly the Queen hoped that the marriage could survive.

Yet from about 1987 stories began to appear in the press suggesting that Charless aloofness was to blame. Public sympathy, though divided, was moving towards Diana. There was a particularly damaging book by the journalist Andrew Morton - Diana: Her True Story -which relied, if not on the Princess as a source, at least on her close friends, and described her condition as far from happy. With hindsight the book can be seen as the beginning of a public vendetta between them. Prince Charles was later to give his own account of affairs to Jonathan Dimbleby, whose book The Prince of Wales - A Biography was published in 1994. Subsequently, both the Prince and the Princess gave television interviews in which they spoke of infidelities. The press, including the broadsheets picking up from the tabloids, continued to print anything it could find. By the autumn of 1987 a pattern had been established: the couple tended to spend their time apart. The final separation was announced by the then prime minister John Major in the House of Commons in December 1992, with the remarkable rider that it did not affect the succession and that there was no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned Queen in due course. But there were many who believed that such a situation was not tenable. The Queen took a hand and the Prince and Princess of Wales were divorced in August 1996. The Princess became known as Diana, Princess of Wales. Speculation moved to whether Charles would eventually marry Camilla Parker Bowles. Since the divorce Diana was rarely out of the news, partly because of her friends, partly because of her striking appearance, but also because of her work for charities. She was one of the earliest public figures to help the victims of Aids, not just raising funds but talking to sufferers and touching them. She was always attached to childrens causes and most recently had become identified with the campaign to eliminate landmines, travelling the world to publicise the cause. Almost her last public trip was to Bosnia.

Copyright Financial Times Limited 1997. All Rights Reserved