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Death of Princess Diana

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Princess Diana was, of course, the former wife of Prince Charles, and mother of Princes William and Harry. After the divorce, she was involved with Dodi Fayed, and on August 31 1997, while on vacation in Paris, the car they were traveling in crashed in a tunnel. Dodi Fayed and the driver, Henri Paul, died instantly. Diana died later in hospital, during surgery.

Because of the time difference between France and where I was living, it was not that late in the evening when the first newsflash came in on the radio that she had been in an accident but there weren't many details at first. The radio went back to normal programming, then less than 5 minutes before 10 pm, they broke in with another newsflash - and even before they said anything, I knew that the only reason they would break in just a couple of minutes before a scheduled news update had to be that she was dead. I immediately switched on the TV, and spent most of the night watching the coverage. I watched the same coverage over and over, because it just wouldn't sink in that it was true. A week later, I got up around 5am in order to watch the coverage of the funeral.

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Do You Remember Death of Princess Diana?

  • Anonymous user
    on
    I was on the first night of my Summer holiday with my family when it happened- we always take our Summer hols late (usually early September), and we'd only arrived at our holiday cottage in St. Davids, Pembrokeshire a few hours previously. I was up late after my parents & sister had gone to bed, drinking sherry and watching one of the Royal Institution Lectures on TV- it was the astronomer Jocelyn Bell talking about pulsars. That finished, and I changed channels to ITV to discover a newsflash- Michael Brunson was standing outside Buckingham Palace reporting on the tragedy. At the time, Diana was still just about alive, but then came the report that she'd passed over. I at first took it for a sick joke- I thought it was one of those comedy acts like Hale & Pace who used to sometimes take things too far, and was disgusted that a journalist of Brunson's calibre could go along with such a thing. But it gradually dawned that this was no joke, it was the real thing. I was up all night watching the coverage unfold, and told my mum early in the morning when she was still in bed- as I was doing so, two guys were walking past the window outside talking about it. I was shocked and saddened, as she was a good-hearted girl who did a lot of good campaigning work, but what shocked me even more was the mass public hysteria that followed. It was scarey to see so many people being taken over by such emotional madness. In Wales, the reaction was not anything like what it was over the border- despite the fact that she was Princess of Wales, she was English nobility, and nationalist sentiment was burgeoning on the run-up to the Assembly referendum a few months later. People were sorry, but they never regarded her as 'one of their own'. But even as far as England was concerned, the response was ridiculous- we just don't do that sort of thing in Britain! I know they got like it over Nasser in Egypt, over JFK in the US, and over Billy Hughes in Australia back in '52, but it's the kind of national reaction you just don't expect here. I HATED Elton John bowdlerizing his own 'Candle In The Wind' song at the funeral, that made my skin crawl- but even he joined in the appeals for calm after a while. Diana was a kind woman who did a lot of good, but at the end of the day she was a nice upper class girl from Hertfordshire, not a Goddess. I DID admire the incredible way that her sons William and Harry carried themselves at the funeral though, they were SO brave- they were just kids back then, and it didn't matter that they were Royals in the public eye, at the end of the day she was their mum, and they loved each other. However turned off I am by William's wedding to Kate Middleton, I'l always admire him for that. Conspiracy theories still abound that Prince Phillip secretly ordered MI5 to kill Diana, to stop her marrying Dodi Fayed and having his child, though I don't believe any of that crap. The wreck of the Mercedes in which they died is still in storage somewhere, at a top secret location- in decades to come it'll probably end up in a museum somewhere. The 1984 Daimler Pullman hearse that took Diana's body to her grave sold a few years ago for a vast mount of money.
  • Aura
    on
    I was living with my landlady and thought they meant the queen mother at first. I told my mum and I remember her saying 'I hope she's done some good'. Meaning when she wanted landmines to be banned.
  • professorEagleOwl
    on
    It was sad that one so young died so horribly, however, the public reaction to someone they never knew was way OTT, the media coverage was disgusting, and the hype was just ridiculous. At the end of the day, very few of us knew her, and i don't just mean met her, but truely knew her. People jumped on the bandwagon because they felt thats what they had to do. I can honestly say, her death didn't shock me, and it affected me in no way what-so-ever, and i'm sure the majority of people were they to rationalise it would agree.
  • tantopat
    on
    I had just got up ready to go to school when I heard. I always used to get up really early to watch Samurai Pizza Cats, but when I turned on the TV this time there were emergency headlines on most of the channels saying what had happened. I stared at it for about 5 minutes, then ran upstairs to tell my parents what had happened. I think everyone in my school was just as weirded out by it as I was.
  • Anonymous user
    on
    Like most people I can remember the exact place and people I was with when the news broke, Id just had a blinding night out in Banbury, we went back to my mates place to eat are greasy grub and it was on the TV....shocking then and still as shocking now.
  • Anonymous user
    on
    i was on duty at her funeral , with st johns , it was a bizarre but very sad day , millions of mourners but we only had one patient , a copper who cut his finger on HIS spike strip

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