‘I felt the whole country was in labour with me,’ Diana said.
‘The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience,’ Charles wrote a few days later to his godmother, Patricia Brabourne, ‘and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined … I am so thankful I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time, because by the end of the day I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the process of birth, and as a result was rewarded by seeing a small creature which belonged to us, even though he seemed to belong to everyone else as well!’
Charles was the first royal male known to be present at a birth – and it was the first time that an heir to the throne had been delivered in a hospital rather than in a royal home or palace. Tens of thousands of people had been milling outside St Mary’s all day chanting ‘We want Charlie!’ and when the prince finally emerged sometime after 10 p.m., having smartened up and straightened his regimental striped tie, the cheers were deafening. One well-wisher planted a kiss on his cheek, leaving a smudge of lipstick.
‘You’re very kind,’ the prince responded with a smile – and broke more fresh ground by lingering with the crowd informally for a chat. Asked if the baby looked like him, he replied, ‘No, he’s lucky enough not to.’ And that was the line that the Queen followed when she came to visit her grandson the next day – ‘Thank goodness he hasn’t got ears like his father.’
William was ten months old when his parents embarked on their first major foreign tour together, to Australia and New Zealand in March 1983, taking their baby son with them, to be based with his nanny at the Woomargama sheep station in New South Wales. It made for an unusual tour structure, and Buckingham Palace did not greatly approve of the couple’s breaking off from their timetable at regular intervals to fly back to Woomargama. But it brought the young family together as never before.
‘I still can’t get over our luck in finding such an ideal place,’ Charles wrote home to friends. ‘We were extremely happy there whenever we were allowed to escape. The great joy was that we were totally alone together.’
This was the moment, on the other side of the world, when William chose to start moving.
‘I must tell you that your godson couldn’t be in better form,’ wrote Charles to Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen’s great friend and lady-in-waiting. ‘Today he actually crawled for the first time. We laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure and now we can’t stop him crawling about everywhere. They pick up the idea very quickly don’t they, when they’ve managed the first move?’
Within a week or so William was moving at ‘high speed’, reported his proud father, ‘knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction. He will be walking before long and is the greatest possible fun. You may have seen some photographs of him recently when he performed like a true professional in front of the cameras and did everything that could be expected of him. It is really encouraging to be able to provide people with some nice jolly news for a change!’
As the future King William V performed in public for the first time, Diana made her own debut on the international scene – and it could not have come at a better moment. The royal couple had brought William along at the suggestion of Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal prime minister of Australia who had proposed the tour. But in the meantime Fraser had lost an election by a landslide to the anti-royal Labour leader Robert ‘Bob’ Hawke, who made no secret of his republican feelings – he wanted to see Australia jettison the entire outdated monarchical nonsense.
‘I don’t regard welcoming them as the most important thing I’m going to have to do in my first nine months in office,’ said the new prime minister bluntly. ‘I don’t think we will be talking about kings of Australia forever more.’
Diana soon had Hawke hauling down his flag.
‘I’d seen the crowds in Wales,’ said the photographer Jayne Fincher, recalling the enthusiasm that had greeted Diana in the principality the previous year, ‘but the crowds in Australia were incredible. We went to Sydney and wanted to photograph her with the Opera House, but just when we got there it was like the whole of Sydney had come out. It was just a sea of people … and all you could see was the top of this little pink hat bobbing along.’
In their forty flights shuttling between Australia’s six states and two territories, Charles and Diana transformed the anti-crown dynamic that had greeted their arrival. By the end of the tour an opinion poll revealed that Australian monarchists had come to outnumber republicans two to one, and even Bob Hawke had fallen under Diana’s spell. His wife, Hazel, actually found herself curtsying to the princess.
The success brought a certain uplift to the Waleses’ previously depressed marriage. As they drove together through the vast crowds in their open car, Diana regularly reached for her husband’s hand and squeezed it hard for comfort.
‘Ron, isn’t she absolutely beautiful?’ asked Charles of the AP photographer Ron Bell, as the royal couple stepped out of the lift during a reception in Melbourne. ‘I’m so proud of her.’
Crowds cheered when Diana got out of the car on their side of the street for any of the massively attended joint walkabouts – while those on the other side would groan in open disappointment at the prospect of having to put up with the prince.
‘It’s not fair, is it?’ he would grin in a sporting attempt to shrug his shoulders. ‘You’d better ask for your money back.’
It was not long, however,
