The Man Who Showed Diana the Ropes
And a look--for the first time since 1991--at the vanished photograph of Prince Charles hugging Prince William on the royal yacht Britannia--a tender moment eclipsed by pictures of Diana
“The idea that Diana had never gotten any help is absurd,” one of the Queen’s former top advisers told me. “Oliver Everett was recalled from Spain to help her at every moment in every way.” Oliver Everett, who died in late December at age 80, was enlisted by Prince Charles in February 1981 shortly after the announcement of Charles and Diana’s engagement. Charles was set to leave for a six-week royal tour to Australia, New Zealand, Venezuela, and the United States, and he tapped the 38-year-old diplomat who had previously worked for the prince as an assistant private secretary from 1978 to 1980.
Everett had served in India for four years and had recently been appointed as Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Madrid. Charles viewed him as a steady hand who could “show Diana the ropes,” as Everett explained it to me. Everett was gentle and worldly, with a mischievous sense of humor. In the words of Charles’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, Everett was “courteous to a fault.” He seemed perfectly positioned to ease the prince’s 19-year-old fiancée into her royal duties.
“I was only supposed to work until shortly before the wedding [on July 29th],” Everett told me, “But Diana asked if I could stay on, so I left the Foreign Service and joined the Royal Household full time as her first private secretary.” It turned out that the beguiling young princess offered Everett a poisoned chalice. She later complained that she had been left to her own devices in those months before the wedding: “I was just pushed into the fire.” In fact, it was Diana who pushed Everett out the metaphorical window only two years later, a casualty of her mercurial displeasure that led to dismissals of some 40 other members of the Royal Household in the 1980s— “an astounding number,” noted People magazine in July 1985.
Dinners in the “Pent-Attic”’
I came to know Everett and his partner, Diana Jervis-Reed, fifteen years ago when I was working on my biography of Queen Elizabeth II. He was unfailingly generous in sharing his knowledge and insights into the royal family in public and private. He and Jervis-Reed also invited me to dinners in what they called their “pent-attic”—a charming flat atop many flights of stairs in London’s South Kensington neighborhood. There they gathered an eclectic group of guests from the worlds of art, diplomacy, literature, theater, and film to dine and converse—always with champagne, their favorite “bubbly.”
Before I describe Everett’s reminiscences about working for the Prince and Princess of Wales as well as his subsequent experiences during his eighteen years as the highly respected Royal Librarian at Windsor Castle, I want to share something noteworthy that I came upon in a scrapbook Everett and Jervis-Reed showed me after dinner at their flat in July 2013: a photograph Jervis-Reed had described to me five years earlier.
It was taken in October 1991 when the Prince and Princess of Wales were on a tour of Canada with their sons, Princes William and Harry, aboard the royal yacht Britannia. Jervis-Reed was then working for the Canadian government to assist with protocol. She was with the royal party when they returned one evening to the yacht from their official engagements in Toronto, and she watched a now-famous drama unfold.
Racing toward her boys and radiating love
As I recounted the scene in my biography, Prince Charles:
“The boys were waiting with their nanny on the deck…The limousine had scarcely come to a stop when Diana popped out, caught sight of the boys, and strode with determination up the gangplank, leaving Charles far behind…. She broke into a run, beamed an incandescent smile, and outstretched her arms. She scooped up William, then Harry, in un-royal bear hugs amid blinding camera flashes. Charles arrived seconds later and leaned down to give his sons hugs and kisses, partly obscured from the cameras by Diana’s back. His gestures were restrained, but no less loving than his wife’s…. The report on Britain’s ten o’clock news noted Charles’s ‘measured tread’ compared to the vision of Diana ‘almost dancing down the side of the deck.’…The images picked up by newspapers and magazines around the world were of Diana racing toward her boys and radiating love.”
A photo of Charles hugging William only appeared in a few places in Canada and Latin America. Jervis-Reed, who witnessed the prince embrace both of his sons, was touched by his affection. “But that was not the story the press wanted to tell,” she recalled.
Indeed, as I would later learn, neither the photographer, Jayne Fincher, nor Hulton Archive/Getty, which holds Fincher’s images, could find that particular picture. “The only images are of Diana and the boys, nothing of Charles,” a Getty archivist told my photo researcher. “I don’t know what to suggest as there is nowhere else to look.”
Charles forgot protocol for tenderness
While the original image of Charles and William has disappeared, one French- Canadian newspaper featured it, along with a headline that countered the prevailing mythology of Diana the good mother and Charles the bad father: “ON BOARD THE ‘BRITANNIA,’ CHARLES FORGOT PROTOCOL FOR TENDERNESS.” Years later in his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry reinforced the accepted narrative about the princess, writing that in his father’s family there were “no hugs, no kisses, no pats. Now and then, maybe a light touching of cheeks…on special occasions.” Harry and Meghan also included footage of Diana’s enveloping embrace on Britannia in their Netflix “reality” series. “I’ve always been a hugger,” Meghan said. “I didn’t realize that was jarring for a lot of Brits.” Thanks to Everett and Jervis-Reed’s scrapbook, the clipping showing Charles’s hug is below.
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