Prince William (42 page)

As Sir David Manning says, ‘There is emotional intelligence in both of the Princes. They react to people they're with and their ability to connect is very striking. The first time I saw this was in New Zealand when we went to open the Supreme Court. It was the first time William had represented the Queen and it was obvious he had a gift of getting on with and connecting to people. It's all about moving people because of who you are, not what you are. He has that quality.'

Those who accompany the Princes say they have the same surety of touch during the hospital visits they make, both privately and officially, and suggest it might be, in part, as a result of having lost their mother. When Harry was visiting Selly Oak, the critical military hospital in Birmingham where casualties from Afghanistan used to be sent (they now go to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the same NHS Trust), there were two soldiers who had been unconscious for five days, and their families were sitting around their beds. These boys were in a very bad way but it seemed probable that they would pull through. The staff had put diaries at the ends of their beds, in which the nurses, families and visitors were encouraged to write entries during their time in intensive care. These diaries were introduced in 2008 and have been shown to be helpful when the patient comes round. They are usually disorientated
and think they're still on the battlefield under attack. According to the critical care manager, soldiers read the diaries over and over again and it helps to put their experience into perspective. Harry wrote, ‘For God's sake, mate. Came to see you and what were you doing? You were kipping.' The families were delighted.

THE DAY JOB

When Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton began working for the two Princes, he took William up to his home in Suffolk, determined to have a serious conversation about William's role as a member of the Royal Family and his understanding of what that meant in an existential sense. William, then twenty-two and about to go to Sandhurst, listened as he always does and made intelligent comments, but Jamie quickly realised that it was the wrong time and the wrong place for this discussion. What mattered before they worried about any of that was for William and Harry to get their hearts and minds in the right place – and Jamie's job was to let that happen.

They needed to be allowed to reach their full potential during their military careers so that they would go into their thirties and take up Royal duties full time, able to look anyone and everyone in the eye. That has been a strong mantra for him and the rest of the Household over the last few years. They believe it's an important part of their job to make sure that William and Harry hit their own personal goals. From that springs self-confidence and self-belief and means that twenty years down the line, they will be able to say, ‘I've been there; I did it.' As one of them says, ‘William does it flying out to the middle of the Atlantic in a force 9, rescuing people. Harry does it on the front line in Afghanistan, and they can then look at anyone at the end of it and say, “Yes fine, I'm on these tramlines now and I know what I've got to do and it's not necessarily everything that I want to do but I know my duty. But, I knew the day when I was a brave young thing … It's incredibly important for that reason alone that they get it right
in here [he says, passionately thumping his chest].' For William, it was becoming a search and rescue pilot.

The island of Anglesey is off the north-west coast of Wales, separated from the mainland by the Menai Strait, twenty miles from the Snowdonia National Park and one of the most beautiful parts of the United Kingdom. At the end of January 2010, soon after his triumphant tour of Australia and New Zealand, William began his advanced helicopter training there, at RAF Valley. It's the busiest station in the RAF, well integrated into the local community and, according to the Station Commander, Group Captain Adrian Hill, ‘a watersports paradise' with clubs for most of William's favourite activities: water-skiing, windsurfing, surfing, sailing, canoeing, angling and sub-aqua. As well as being an operational base – home to C Flight of 22 Search and Rescue Squadron – it's also a major training centre for fast jet crew and search and rescue pilots and crew. During his year at Shawbury, he had easily qualified for this next step.

Training began on a Griffin, in which he learned ‘generalhandling flying, underslung-load carrying, night-vision goggle training, procedural instrument flying, formation flying, low-flying navigation and an introduction to tactical employment, including operations from confined areas, plus elements of mountain flying and maritime rescue winching'. With all that under his belt he moved to Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose in Cornwall, where the RAF do Sea King conversion training because the Sea kings – the distinctive big yellow helicopters – are basically Navy helicopters but the RAF use them for search and rescue.

Having mastered the basics, William then went back to Valley to train with the operational search and rescue unit, refining techniques and taking part in genuine rescues, but only as an observer. In September, after nineteen months of training, having completed seventy hours of live flying and fifty hours of training in a simulator, practising rescue missions over the Irish Sea, the Atlantic and in the mountains of Snowdonia, he graduated as a fully qualified RAF search and rescue pilot. It was a very informal ceremony; he
and his fellow trainees – four pilots and four rear crew – were handed their certificates and squadron badges. The course, he admitted, had been challenging ‘but I have enjoyed it immensely,' he said. ‘I absolutely love flying, so it will be an honour to serve operationally with the search and rescue force, helping to provide such a vital emergency service.' The RAF was keen to emphasise that he had no special treatment because of who he is. ‘There can be no place for people who are not up to scratch,' said Wing Commander Peter Lloyd. ‘You are exposed to your weaknesses and therefore have to adapt to them. The crews have to work with you as a team – there is nowhere to hide in the crew of a helicopter.'

The next week he began a three-year tour as a member of 22 Squadron based at Valley, which involves an automatic six-month attachment in the Falkland Islands. (When the attachment came up in February 2012, by an unfortunate quirk of timing, thirty years after the war, the Argentinians saw it as an act of aggression. The Foreign Office was bullish about it; William was there in a humanitarian role, in theory to rescue downed Typhoon fighter pilots, but in practice he was more likely to be rescuing sick Argentinian fishermen from trawlers than to be doing anything remotely confrontational.)

When his three years come to an end in 2013, he has indicated that, if circumstances allow, he might like to stay in search and rescue for a second tour of duty. His second choice of base had been RAF Lossiemouth in Moray in the north of Scotland, and, although nothing has been decided, there's a possibility he might move there. Beyond 2016, there will be no military search and rescue service for him to be a part of. In November 2011, just a day after William was involved in the dramatic rescue of two sailors off the coast of Wales, the Government announced that the mountains and coastlines would be patrolled by civilian contractors instead.

At Valley he works on a shift system. He is part of a team of four, doing eight twenty-four-hour watches a month, and when on duty they live on the base next to their helicopters. During
the daytime they can be in the air in fifteen minutes, at night-time it's forty-five minutes, and when the scramble bell goes they have no idea what lies ahead of them or where they are headed. It could be anywhere in the UK or beyond, it could be miles out into the Atlantic, it could be to rescue a stricken tanker or a capsized yacht, a walker who is lost or has fallen and broken a limb in the mountains, a heart-attack victim, a fire on an oil rig, or a community that has been cut off by floods and needs evacuating. As William has said, it's the ‘fourth emergency service'.

‘It doesn't sound very many shifts,' says one of the team, ‘but it's very stressful because it's foul weather and you have to work out in double quick time how you're going to get there, how you're going to make your fuel last, how long you can stay over the target area, how many people you can carry, how many you have to rescue, what you strip out, etc. They tend to group them in three watches, so three lots of three, or two of three, and that will be twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, so it lasts for a short week, then a gap for three or four days to have a rest, concentrate on your other work, do your helicopter training – training flights continue where you practise with the mountain rescue teams – and then you go back on watch for three days.'

When the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh came to visit RAF Valley in April 2011, William gave them a personal tour of a Sea King – and his grandmother nearly had her hat blown off in the 50 mph wind. The media followed and he spoke about the job: ‘It's definitely advanced flying and it's rewarding, so put the two together and it's a fantastic job. It's rewarding because every day you come into work you don't quite know what's going to happen, it's quite exciting in that sense, it's unpredictable. But at the same time it's great that you get to go out and actually save someone's life, hopefully, or at least make a difference to somebody; when you know that they are in trouble, you do everything you can to get there.' The team, he said, was a ‘big family in the sky' and he felt ‘very privileged to be flying with some of the best pilots, I think, in the world. The guys do a fantastic job and they are very
happy to do it. It's a job but it's emotional, it's physical and it's very demanding.' At times it could get ‘hairy – especially with someone like me at the controls,' he quipped. But more seriously, what was hairy, he said, was ‘flying at night in 40-knot winds over Snowdonia with the cloud at 200 feet searching for someone with a broken leg.'

William has been involved in dozens of rescue missions during his time at Valley – search and rescue teams are called out five to six times a day. But perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous was in November 2011 when the
Swanland
, a cargo ship with a Russian crew of eight, started to break up and sink in the Irish Sea. It was about twenty miles off the coast, carrying 3,000 tons of limestone, when it was hit by a massive wave in a force 8 storm. The ship's back was broken by the wave and it was taking on water when the captain put out a Mayday call at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The crew scrambled from base shortly afterwards, as did crews from elsewhere, including the Irish Republic and several lifeboats and an Irish naval vessel. Two other cargo ships also went to the rescue. The Valley team was the first to reach the scene, by which time all that was left of the ship was a scattering of debris and an inflatable life raft with two sailors clinging to it. Sadly six men lost their lives that night, but William played a vital role in saving the lives of two of the crew members. While their Sea King struggled in the strong winds to hover overhead, with 40-foot waves beneath them, William and his team plucked the two men from the icy water, winched them to safety and took them back to Valley.

It's not hard to see why William has been so happy living on Anglesey. ‘He's loving it, wallowing in it,' says one of the Household. The job gives him immense satisfaction. And it is another small and protective community that allows him to live a normal life, as St Andrews did. He and Kate can go for long walks across the fields – and now they have a little black cocker spaniel to take with them (the offspring of the Middletons' dog). They can do all the normal things the rest of us take for granted. They can wander into shops, browse in galleries, drink in pubs, eat in restaurants,
pick up groceries in the supermarket, go to see a film and, for the most part, no one turns a hair. It is six to seven hours from London and outstandingly beautiful. He has been renting a very modest cottage off the base, hidden away in the countryside, which is completely private. He lived there on his own initially, doing all his own shopping and cooking and, apart from a cleaner coming in to tidy up, was looking after himself. Friends came to stay and Kate was a frequent visitor and, since their marriage, it has been their principal home.

KEEPING THE MEMORY ALIVE

It must have been about five years ago. William and his old friend Thomas van Straubenzee were chatting. His parents, Alex and Claire, were thinking about setting up a charity in the name of their late son Henry. William immediately asked whether he could be its patron. Harry, who happened to be within earshot, asked if he could be patron too since Henry was his friend. So it was that in January 2009, the Henry van Straubenzee Memorial Fund was launched with William and Henry as joint patrons – possibly the only charity that has ever had two Royal patrons.

Since Henry's death, his family had been wanting to find some way of ensuring that their much-loved middle son was not forgotten. The collection at the thanksgiving service at Harrow had raised an astonishing £6,000, which they decided should go to the school in Uganda, Bupadhengo Primary, where Henry was due to have worked with Asia Africa Venture (AV). Through AV, whose motto is ‘Transforming Lives through Education', they got in touch with the boy who had taken Henry's place that year, Peter Gate, and he made sure that every penny of the money went directly to the headmaster to be spent on the school. It was enough to build a classroom block for sixty children. But that was not an end to it. Money kept arriving. Friends kept ringing and saying to Henry's mother, ‘Mrs Van, what are we raising money for?' The young wanted to do something in his memory – the first thing was a canoe race from Devizes to London, then there were polo matches, university balls and marathons, 600-mile bike rides and concerts. More and more money arrived for Henry.

At first Alex and Claire thought of putting it into a scholarship in Henry's name at Harrow, but felt that wasn't quite personal enough. They went out to Uganda, where a little money, in western terms, goes a very long way. Peter Gate, inspired by his gap-year experience, had set up the Ugandan Rural Schools Initiative, under the umbrella of AV, and in the end they decided to join forces. The Henry van Straubenzee Fund raises money for projects and schools identified by Peter's Initiative which goes directly to the schools. They are currently helping over 18,000 children in twenty-five schools in Uganda, and the difference they are making is abundantly clear.