The cloud over Diana's cherished boarding school
Mohamed Al Fayed's disgrace brings to mind her "very happy" days at West Heath and the recollection of her mentors there
I’ve had a pebble in my shoe since late September, when I wrote Princess Diana and the Al Fayed family: Her last lover was the son of a sexual predator.
As revealed in a BBC documentary on September 19, Mohamed Al Fayed was accused of sexual assault and rape by more than twenty women employed by the Harrods department store he owned from 1985 to 2010. Since then, the number of women who have described his sexual abuse and intimidation has grown to several hundred.
“She was quite extraordinarily concerned”
The pebble in question is Al Fayed’s purchase of Diana’s former boarding school, West Heath, located in Sevenoaks, Kent, less than a year after she and Al Fayed’s son Dodi died in a horrific car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997. The girls’ school had run into financial difficulties due to declining enrollment and had been forced to declare bankruptcy. Ruth Rudge, headmistress of West Heath for thirty-seven years, told me that Diana “had written to me about the closing of West Heath, and people said she had written or asked about their children. She was quite extraordinarily concerned.”
In late May 1998, Al Fayed paid $4 million for the school and announced that it would serve children suffering from the trauma of physical and sexual abuse, mental disabilities, and chronic illnesses. He described it as “a living memorial” to Diana and Dodi and criticized her family’s memorial fund for failing to save the school. He said his acquisition was “a far more fitting tribute to her work than putting her name on tasteless souvenirs.” Those comments were tame compared to the conspiracy theories he began spreading in early 1998 in an effort to blame the royal family for conspiring to kill Diana and his son—accusations that were thoroughly disproved after an exhaustive four-year investigation by the Metropolitan Police.
Al Fayed made a well-publicized visit to a fund-raising event at West Heath in 2010, rather bizarrely with Madonna in tow—images that feel disquieting in retrospect. On Al Fayed’s death in August 2023 at ninety-four, West Heath’s principal, Photini Bohacek, praised him for his “passionate interest in the welfare of young people.” But Al Fayed’s sexual misconduct had been cited in press accounts and TV documentaries since 1995, including allegations from a fifteen-year-old girl in 2008 that the authorities failed to prosecute. Four days after the BBC’s revelations, the West Heath website said that “we have no further information other than what is currently in the news” and “we do not tolerate abuse or harassment in any form”—its only statement on the matter.
“My years at West Heath were certainly very happy”
West Heath’s current mission is certainly worthy, and it has helped many young people who couldn’t be educated by mainstream schools. Yet given what one lawyer for Al Fayed’s victims called the “horrifying” scale of his actions, I think West Heath should now distance itself if not disavow its “founding patron.”
In a speech a decade before her death at age thirty-six, Diana said her years at West Heath were “certainly very happy ones.” It seems a good moment to explore what made West Heath special for Diana, and to revisit my conversations with Ruth Rudge and Violet Allen, the school’s matron, during my research for my book, Diana In Search of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess, published in 1999. I contacted both women through West Heath friends of Diana who kindly wrote on my behalf. They had appeared briefly in an ITV documentary broadcast at the end of December 1997 but had otherwise kept their thoughts to themselves.
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