This was partly Diana’s fault. Harry would have been welcomed by all manner of British public schools, but his mother had been set on her younger son joining William and the elite at Eton College.
‘If he doesn’t go there,’ she told the author Ingrid Seward, ‘everyone will think he’s stupid.’
That, sadly, was exactly what most people did think about dear Prince Harry. Nobody ever imagined that he was a Brain of Britain. The young man had so many other good qualities – his vigour, his warmth, his horsemanship. ‘He’s very artistic and sporty and doesn’t mind anything,’ Diana told Seward protectively.
On car journeys Prince Charles would try to sharpen the geographical knowledge of his younger son by testing him on the world’s capital cities, along with his maths – which had always been a challenge for Charles himself. Charles had failed his maths O-level at his first attempt.
The Prince of Wales came to feel that Eton was simply beyond the intellectual reach of Harry and for a time Diana had agreed, prompting the two parents to research a series of alternatives – posh schools for thickos. But William protested. He insisted that his brother would be happiest joining him at Eton – that’s what Harry had told him he really wanted to do, and that’s what William wanted too. Even before Diana’s death, the brothers were quite sure that they wanted to spend their school days in each other’s company if they possibly could.
So that had left Harry with the challenge of Eton’s relatively stiff entrance requirements which, unlike Oxford or Cambridge, the school was not prepared to relax, even to recruit another Windsor. Hence the extra year at Ludgrove, additional tutoring, less partying and more swotting.
But Prince Charles did have a reward in mind for all this extra effort – an encounter with the Spice Girls, then Harry’s favourite group, as well as a meeting with Nelson Mandela. The young prince had been scheduled to spend the October half-term of 1997 with his mother, since Charles was booked for the official five-day tour of South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho that involved these Spice Girls/Mandela encounters. Now Charles suggested that his son should join him on the tour with a school friend, under the supervision of Tiggy and a friend of hers, Mark ‘Marko’ Dyer.
A burly, red-headed former Welsh Guards officer, Dyer had been an equerry to Charles for a spell, so he knew the royal ropes. He also had a zest for hard living – and quite hard drinking. Dyer’s later career would embrace the creation of two of south-west London’s more successful gastropubs, the Sands End and the Brown Cow, which became popular venues for the ‘Glossy Posse’ smart set with whom Wills and Harry ran. The Sands End would also become one of Harry’s secret rendezvous during his courtship with Meghan.
All this fun and friendship derived from the October 1997 safari to Botswana that Mark Dyer helped to organise for Tiggy, Harry and his school friend, while Prince Charles was carrying out his formal duties on the tour. It was Harry’s first taste of Africa, its people and its wildlife, and it proved the beginning of a love affair. Inspired by his days and nights camping under the stars in Botswana, he would come to make animal conservation one of the burning causes in his adult life – and when, in July 2016, the prince was introduced on a blind date to the US actress Meghan Markle, he would invite her to fly off with him on an instant trip to Botswana.
Prince Charles had envisaged Mark Dyer becoming an elder brother-style mentor to the still-fragile Harry, and with the Botswana safari thrown in, he got that and more. On his return to Ludgrove, the thirteen-year-old was spotted actually visiting the school library! Harry knuckled down to his studies as never before and at the year’s end he succeeded at Common Entrance with the 65 per cent grade that he needed to gain entry to Eton – including passes in both geography and maths.
Prince Charles’s hope that his second child might replicate the special sibling partnership that he had enjoyed with Princess Anne had not, of course, worked out exactly – William and Harry were no brother and sister act. But by their teens, life and death had forged them into a pair of mutually supportive companions – and this partnership took clear shape when Harry joined William at Eton in the autumn of 1998. Harry had gone the extra mile to reach the level of his high-achieving brother and they now enjoyed two of the most closely interlinked years of their lives.
For security reasons, the princes were placed in the same house – Manor House – in the care of the fatherly Andrew Gailey, and William took pleasure in showing his brother around the house breakfast room, where boys could make coffee and toast for themselves in the mornings. Dr Gailey had installed a pool table and was relaxed about the boys hanging posters of their favourite models and movie stars above the scruffy oversized sofas around the common room walls.
They were allowed pin-ups in their rooms too. William had opted for Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer, whom he had actually met as acquaintances of his mother. Harry opted for the African-American actress Halle Berry – a Meghan Markle lookalike, some would later maintain with hindsight – in the middle of a spectacular red and orange psychedelic wall-hanging. Both boys had framed photos of their parents beside their beds.
William had established a close and trusted circle of friends at Eton and Harry was invited to join them. His year’s delay at Ludgrove had somewhat severed the prince from his contemporaries, so quite a few of his expanding social circle were a full two years older than him – making it likely that the fourteen-year-old would be introduced to temptations that were ahead of
