DIANA - THE PRINCESS OF WALES

1/7/1961 - 31/8/1997

They regarded her as "unbalanced","anti-establishment" and called her "a loose canon". All these indignities by a blimpish minority were swept away by the overwhelming voice of the people after her tragic death. During the week until the 6th September more than a million travelled to London to attend her funeral in an unequalled demonstration of united sadness. The unexpected applause following the forthright oration by her brother Earl Spencer spread to all sections of her classless mourning community.
Fifteen years earlier, the Diana who came to visit our Islands in 1982- not quite a year after her wedding - was a rather shy pretty young woman but friendly, humorous and approachable. She was expecting the birth of her first son William that same year. Already. then she had been the victim of often undue press importunity. It must have been a relief to come to a paparazzi - free zone, to islands so small that almost everybody knows everybody else but where privacy is respected.

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