Month: April 2014

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DESIGNER REBECCA TAYLOR ON DRESSING THE DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE AND HER EARLIER MEMORY OF AWAITING PRINCESS DIANA

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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, with Prince George, as they board their jet departing Wellington. She is wearing a skirt suit by New Zealand-born designer Rebecca Taylor. Picture / Mark Mitchell

In a fitting final touch, the Duchess of Cambridge farewelled New Zealand wearing a suit by one of our international fashion success stories.

The navy tweed skirt suit with frayed trims and floral embellishment at the neck is by the designer Rebecca Taylor, born in Wellington and now based in New York.

The designer, who studied fashion design at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University), described seeing the Duchess wear her designs in her hometown as overwhelming.

“I am beyond flattered and excited that the Duchess has worn my suit in my hometown,” Taylor told Viva.

“Seeing the image of her about to board the plane reminded me of the time my family and I awaited the arrival of Princess Diana at the same airport years ago. That moment is still really special to me, so now seeing Catherine wear one of my designs in Wellington brings it full circle for me and it’s quite overwhelming.”

The outfit was another example of the Duchess recycling her wardrobe on the tour, having first worn the suit publicly in 2012.

It also follows an earlier reference, of sorts, to New Zealand design, with Catherine wearing an emerald blue coat dress by New Zealand-born, London-based designer Emilia Wickstead earlier in the tour. The newly created bespoke piece was identical to the pink version she had worn in 2012; Wickstead was asked to create a new dress for the Royal Tour.

 

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KIWI WOMAN REMEMBERS PRECIOUS MOMENT MEETING DIANA

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Angelique Rewiti and her son, Isaiah, 6 months, with the photo of her, aged 8, with Diana, Princess of Wales in Auckland in 1983. Photo / Mark Mitchell
It was more than 30 years ago but Angelique Reweti still vividly remembers the moment she met a young Diana, Princess of Wales.

At the time Mrs Reweti was an 8-year-old dancer in a production of the New Zealand Ballet’s Coppelia, which Diana and her husband attended at Auckland’s St James Theatre.

Being chosen to deliver a bouquet of flowers to the Princess was the thrill of a lifetime.

“It is still really fresh in my memory,” recalled Mrs Reweti, 39.

“I remember all the TV cameras and photographers … she was a real Princess, and when you are an 8-year-old, that’s the stuff of fairytales.

“She was wearing the most beautiful lilac gown and she glided in on the red carpet. It was literally like a fairytale coming to life.”

Mrs Reweti spoke to the Herald with her six-month-old son on her knee. Now working in Maori health, she and her husband have settled in Palmerston North.

“I went up and had to do a little curtsy, and I couldn’t believe she was speaking to me. It seemed to me like she had the voice of an angel.

“She just said, ‘Are you dancing tonight?’. I said yes I was, and she said she was looking forward to seeing me dance. And I remember Prince Charles was standing by her side, but I was more enthralled with Princess Diana.”

The St James is now boarded-up in a state of disrepair. In 1983 the theatre’s management had worked furiously to attempt to rid the venue of the after-effects of vandalism the day before the royals arrival. Foul-smelling liquid had been spilled throughout the theatre.

“I remember the smell, it smelled of rotten fish,” Mrs Reweti said. “Security was really tight.”

A baby to care for means it’s unlikely Mrs Reweti will get to see the next generation of royals.

“It really was a big deal back then. I think people are interested now, but it’s not quite the same,” Mrs Reweti said. “It was huge, I remember we had time off school and all the schoolchildren were waving in the streets.”

 

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1983 ROYAL RIFT NOT REPEATED ON RECENT DOWN UNDER TOUR OF DUKE AND DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE

It was 1983 when Prince Charles and Diana set off on the grand tour, amid public aspiration and private squabbling. For William and Kate, there has never been any question that Prince George would be left behind. But 31 years ago things were different, as one veteran of the 1983 tour, who wishes not to be named, recalls: “It was a six-week stint. The inclusion of William had gone down badly among older members of the Royal family, and even more so among senior staff.
“They pointed out the many occasions the Queen had gone on tour, leaving Charles and Anne at home – ‘the right and proper place’ for them. In the teeth of heavyweight opposition, Diana won the battle but, as Charles pointed out, and correctly, it didn’t work.”
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Diana, Charles and William arriving at Alice Springs in 1983

Back in 1983, the tour managers decided to do the trip the other way round – Australia as the warm-up for New Zealand. It wasn’t a particularly bright idea, and the evidence suggests that not much thought had gone into that sequencing, nor the presence of Prince William – who, at nine months old, was almost exactly the same age as Prince George will be when he arrives Down Under.
From touchdown, there were difficulties. The royal parents found they had to travel much more than would otherwise have been necessary because William was based at a farm at Woomargama in New South Wales. This meant returning there every three or four days, often by air, increasing not only their mileage but the wear and tear on themselves and their staff.
“Charles enjoyed these breaks, but thought his son’s presence was distracting them from the real job, which was persuading the people of Australia that continuing to have a Royal family was a good thing,” recalls one participant in the tour.
“By the end of it, Diana, too, had doubts about having her baby there, though at that time her maternal instincts took precedence over all else. There can be no question that, the way things were organised, the boy slowed the tour down and diffused its focus.”
An additional problem was that each royal tour is built on a template of the previous one. The Australasia visit of 1983 lasted six long weeks, based upon the more leisurely days of the past, when getting to the Southern Hemisphere took longer and required days of downtime to recover. Now, with jet travel and easier access between cities, the same itinerary could have been covered in half the time. Everybody agreed they’d been away too long.
Lessons were learnt. Part of a royal private secretary’s job is to write up a report after the event, detailing the highs and lows. And though the report may gather dust for decades, it is worth its weight in gold when the time comes for a return trip.
How much Edward Adeane – then the Prince’s private secretary – confessed, as he wrote out his notes, to having driven the royal couple too hard, we shall probably never know. But one individual who accompanied the Prince and Princess on the tour recalls: “It was exceptionally gruelling and exhausted them both. The itinerary was largely drawn up by Adeane, who appeared to think his master had been slacking in his duties and had better make up for it.”
There may have been another reason for Adeane’s assiduity. While working on the preparations for the Australian leg, he was shocked to discover that the Princess could not name the capital city of the country she was about to visit.
Meanwhile, official engagements offered a dull similarity for Charles. “The protocol departments that arrange these things always pull out the same file – you might as well do everything blindfold,” the Prince wrote later to his friend, Nicholas Soames, MP. “Not only that but the actual protocol here is so stultifying and rigid. They do stupid things like putting sticky tape in a line along a carpet at a reception and making everyone stand behind the line while we walk along between rows of nervous, drinkless people. They treat the tape line as though it was a 24,000-volt cable!”
The irony was not lost on the Prince – that although the crowds outside exulted in the presence of the royal couple, indoors it was a different matter, as the great and good jockeyed for an introduction. “The trouble with this kind of formality here is that it rubs many Australians up the wrong way and makes them extra-anti and determined to mock the whole thing,” he added.
Charles wrote from bitter experience. A vocal minority had taken to deriding the tour, and the Prince himself. “The fatuous remarks and insults that are made to me; rude things shouted out, gestures made, plastic [Spitting Image-style] masks waved about, unnecessary things written in the papers about me,” he complained.
Inevitably, what separates the two high-pressure tours is not only 31 years and a vast cultural shift, but the difference in the relationship between the principal characters.While William and Kate have been soul-mates for over a decade, sharing everything as equals, by the time Charles and Diana hit Australasia they had been married for only 20 months. There was also a 13-year age gap between them.

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The Cambridges in the Far East last September

“The relationship [at that time], though companionable, was not a meeting of equals. He did not discuss affairs of state with her and at difficult moments he would turn to others, not his wife,” wrote the veteran royal correspondent James Whitaker in his book Diana v Charles. With the stress the couple were enduring, it’s remarkable things went as well as they did. But then came the media attention.
As the Princess’s biographer, Sarah Bradford, observes: “It was the beginning of worldwide ‘Di-mania’. Instead of seven photographers being there, there were 70. Before, there’d been one from each newspaper and a couple of freelances. Now they were coming from France, Germany, America and Japan.” The crowds were turning out in their hundreds of thousands, and everyone in the royal party was having to learn on their feet.
“He couldn’t understand that people wanted to see her,” a member of royal household told Bradford. “He couldn’t understand that they wanted to see a beautiful woman, rather than a man in a suit. And that was really sad. It was so unnecessary because together they were absolute dynamite. But one was just aware of a sort of petulance in him and she, I think, found it very difficult, finding how to cope with that. And she was quite emotional at that time, there were tears, she didn’t understand and it was all very stressful.”
Bradford all but points to the tour as the break-point in the Prince and Princess’s relationship. She quotes the staff member as saying: “Things were to go from bad to worse, and Charles’s resentment at his wife’s popularity began to poison their relationship. His puzzlement at people’s reaction to her was palpable – as he once said to a friend, ‘Why do they love her so much? All she ever did was say ‘Yes’ to me…’ ”
Though, inevitably, there will be repetition in the style and shape of the 2014 tour, there the similarities will end. The team behind the Duke and Duchess, led by private secretaries Miguel Head and Rebecca Deacon, are young, media-savvy, and have already distinguished themselves by simultaneously promoting and protecting their charges.
In addition, the dusty notes from Edward Adeane’s day will have offered clues as to where the elephant-traps lie. Prince George will be travelling more to keep up with his parents, staying in three locations. There is also less likely to be a disproportion in interest between William and his bride since, long ago, they worked out a routine that successfully draws attention to both. Inevitably there will be pressures, but the couple know how to face things together. And last but by no means least, they’ll be home, no doubt victorious, in three weeks.  Excerpted Telegraph by Christopher Wilson

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THIS WOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED PRE-DIANA; ROYAL CHILDREN WERE TO BE SEEN AND NOT HEARD

By Hugo Vickers

 

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As predicted, Prince George is a “wow” in New Zealand.
Prince William issues charming information about his son, tempering his appreciation that babies are demanding of their long-suffering parents, with his obvious delight in Prince George’s every action. Thus we hear that young George is “at his most vocal” at 3am, is, apparently, preparing for his position as “a prop forward” and, said the Prince: “I swear I heard him doing the haka this morning.” To an extent unprecedented, this royal baby has been exposed to the public gaze.
He has been seen arriving in New Zealand, carried down the steps of the plane in his mother’s arms, and most unusually, was even popped into a local playgroup to mix with infant New Zealanders.
He is already spoken of as undertaking his first official royal engagement. This sort of thing never happened in previous generations.

The maxim that children should be seen, but not heard was applied in full measure to earlier royal babies.
Traditionally, the arrival of royal progeny met with political involvement from the start, with the Home Secretary required to be at the birth.
This was on account of the “bed pan” incident in the reign of James II. The king’s wife, Mary of Modina, had lost eight babies to miscarriages or infant mortality. Despite 40 courtiers being present, it was thought that a male child may have arrived in the chamber concealed in a bedpan.
In 1840, before Queen Victoria gave birth to her first child, the cabinet, archbishop of Canterbury, bishop of London and Lord Steward gathered outside the royal bedchamber. The door was open and the Lord Steward could see and hear all that went on. Moments after her birth, the infant Princess Victoria (later Empress Frederick) was carried naked into the outer room and laid on a prepared table to be inspected by the councillors.
When the Queen and Princess Margaret were born, Home Secretaries were on the premises but George VI, wisely, terminated this practice before the birth of Prince Charles. Today, royal babies are born in hospitals, so their first public showing comes a day after the birth, when they are carried out into the glare of the media, in their mother’s arms – witness Prince William in 1982, and Prince George in 2013.
The present Queen was born at her grandparents’ house in Bruton Street. She was christened at Buckingham Palace. When her parents, then the Duke and Duchess of York, left for a trip to New Zealand and Australia from January to June 1927, she was left in the care of her grandparents, George V and Queen Mary.
Known to be a stern father, feared by his own children, George V was a more relaxed grandfather. There are accounts of him on all fours, playing with the infant princess and allowing her to tug his beard. During his long illness of 1928, she was sent down to Bognor occasionally to cheer him up.
A month after Prince Charles was born in 1948, Cecil Beaton recorded the first act of his career: “He interrupted a long, contented sleep to do my bidding and open his blue eyes to stare long and wonderingly into the camera lens, the beginning of a lifetime in the glare of public duty.”
After that, Prince Charles’s public appearances were confined to the occasional photo call with his parents, and “paparazzi” style shots of him in his pram, pushed by his nanny around St James’s Park. When Princess Elizabeth joined Prince Philip in Malta, the baby was left in the care of nannies at home. And later, during her Commonwealth tour of 1953 to 1954, the royal children (admittedly a bit older by then) stayed at Buckingham Palace, joining the Queen Mother at Royal Lodge for weekends.
Things changed with the arrival of Diana, Princess of Wales. In 1983, she and Prince Charles took nine-month old Prince William on their tour of Australia and New Zealand, a visit that in many ways echoes what is happening now.
Prince Charles, Princess Diana and Prince William of Wales Visit to Australia and New Zealand 1983 (Anwar Hussein/ Getty)
Before the trip, Tim Graham took photographs of Prince William with his parents at Kensington Palace. Helpful articles advised the royal parents how to cope on a long flight: “A supply of cheap, small toys can do wonders … A biscuit or sandwich will keep your child going.” They travelled with 90 suitcases and trunks, a pram, baby bouncer, bath, pots of talc and jars of baby ointment.
Their first stop at Alice Springs required a last-minute change of hotel due to flooding. Prince William made a brief appearance in his mother’s arms at the airport, where a fly landed on his head, inspiring the media to report that Prince Charles quipped: “He’s got his first fly on him already. He’s going to be brought up the hard way.”
Prince William was then flown on to the Woomargama homestead, near Albury, the home of businessman Gordon Darling, where the family were to be based. He travelled in the care of his nanny, Barbara Barnes.

 

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The Prince and Princess of Wales with Prince William at Kensington Palace (Tim Graham)
As today with Prince George, the media remained hungry for stories about the infant prince. The Princess of Wales told some children that he liked plastic whales that spat balls out of the top, a favourite toy in his bath. During his Woomargama stay he was reported to have taken his first steps, kept his mother up at night with his teething, taken a dip in the Darlings’ swimming pool – “the Prince of Waves” said the Australian media – and upset a table in a quest for biscuits.
From Melbourne, the royal party flew to New Zealand, where Prince William made a celebrated appearance in front of 60 reporters and photographers, playing with a wooden insect on the lawn.
Though the media has become more cynical and less respectful, they are enjoying Prince George’s tour with just as much zest as they did Prince William’s, 31 years ago.

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DIANA’S LAST LETTER SELLS FOR £2400

Princess Diana’s last letter sells for £2,400 at Birmingham auction
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Letter was written to landmine campaigner Dilys Cheetham in August 1997
The letter written in August 1997 was the last official letter to be written by Diana before her death

Princess Diana’s last official letter has sold for £2,400 at an auction in Birmingham.

The note, to a humanitarian campaigner, was bought by a private buyer at Fellows Auctioneers on Monday.

Mark Huddleston, of Fellows, said: “We’re generally pleased with the final hammer price for this lot.

“It went for well within the expected estimate and received a lot of attention in doing so.

“The letter’s new owner will no doubt appreciate the importance of this historical document.

“Who knows, in the future it may well be under the hammer again.”

The letter was written on Kensington Palace-headed notepaper to landmine campaigner Dilys Cheetham to thank her for her work in Bosnia.

The document was dated just three weeks before the princess died in a Paris car crash in August 1997 and signed “with love from Diana”.

Ms Cheetham, from Richmond, North Yorkshire, died in 2006, having sold the letter to celebrity photographer Jason Fraser in a 1999 charity auction to raise money for landmine victims.

He then sold the letter to a private collector in 2007 – the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death.

In the letter to Ms Cheetham, Diana revealed her own trip to Bosnia earlier in the month of her death had “strengthened her resolve” to spread the message about landmine victims.

The Royal wrote: “There was not enough time for me to visit the Mostar area while I was in Bosnia but I was able to visit a number of anti-personnel landmine victims and their families.

“I could not help but be deeply moved by the experience which hardened my resolve to ensure the world does not forget that those who have been so needlessly maimed by these terrible weapons will need care and support for many years to come.”