Prince William (44 page)

On 1 October 2007, Help for Heroes was born, and the injured that Bryn and Emma had seen lying in their beds at Selly Oak that day are now immortalised on the home page of the website: ‘It's about the “blokes”, our men and women of the Armed Forces. It's about Derek, a rugby player who has lost both his legs; it's about Carl, whose jaw is wired up so he has been drinking through a straw. It's about Richard, who was handed a mobile phone as he lay on the stretcher so he could say goodbye to his wife. It's about Ben, it's about Steven and Andy and Mark, it's about them all. They are just blokes but they are our blokes; they are our heroes. We want to help our heroes.'

General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of General Staff (now Lord Dannatt), suggested raising money for a swimming pool at Headley Court, the military rehabilitation centre near Leatherhead in Surrey.
The charity's simple message, ‘It's not about the rights and wrongs of war, we just want to support those who serve our country and are injured in doing so', caught the public imagination. The media gave it a massive boost, particularly the
Sun
, which launched a campaign on 29 October called HELP OUR HEROES, encouraging readers to wear the distinctive tricoloured wristband.

A few days earlier, Bryn had spoken to Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton on the phone and asked whether he could send some wristbands to Clarence House for the Princes; he had a friend who had served with Jamie, which no doubt eased the way. He sent a few over, and on 30 October William was pictured wearing one. Shortly afterwards, Harry was photographed wearing one too, and the bands became a familiar sight. A multitude of celebrities were soon seen wearing them and Help for Heroes took off. Within six months the
Sun
had helped raise over £4 million.

The Princes were happy to give their tacit patronage but when Bryn wrote asking whether, as serving officers, they would become patrons, he was told they preferred not to be patron of any service charity. It was by no means the end of the road, however. After many conversations with Jamie about where Bryn wanted to go with the charity, he was invited to Clarence House to the Princes' Charities Forum, where all the service charities sat around the table. ‘We were completely new to charity when we started and I got a lot of very sensible advice from Jamie and Geoffrey Matthews, their project manager [former McKinsey consultant and one-time managing director of the National Gallery's commercial arm]. I've been able to use them as a sounding board. “This is what we're doing,” I'd say. “Oh that's interesting, have you talked to so and so?”

‘William and Harry wearing our wristband gave us fantastic credibility and their support is hugely appreciated,' says Bryn. ‘We were honoured when they chose H4H to be one of the beneficiaries of the James Bond film
Quantum of Solace
premiere.'

Both Princes were wary about their invitation from the producers of the Bond film – neither of them wanting to be seen as celebrities. They only agreed to go if they could do it their way. They
asked for the proceeds to be split between Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion, and insisted that both sides of the red carpet in Leicester Square should be lined with veterans from Headley Court. It was a cold night but they spent an hour outside chatting to the wounded and their families on their way into the film – and avoided the glitzy, star-studded champagne party after the show.

The support for their wounded comrades didn't stop there. In May 2008, they were the inspiration behind a fundraising extravaganza raising almost £1 million, which was split between the Help for Heroes rehabilitation complex project and SSAFA (the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association). With the help of the team at Clarence House, particularly Geoffrey, who harnessed some big-hitting sponsors and benefactors, they put together a magnificent military pageant called City Salute in Paternoster Square in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral. As darkness fell, the glorious Wren building was lit up by a state-of-the-art light show and provided a dramatic backdrop to an extraordinary evening. Hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, it began with the roar of three Eurofighter Typhoon jets flying overhead, followed by a display of Chinook helicopters. ‘It's a bit of a lumbering tank,' said Clarkson, unable to resist the joke. ‘Not exactly hard to miss. You can't even land one on the Isle of Wight without the newspapers finding out.'

The evening was a massive celebration of all three services, attended by celebrities, soldiers – many of them wounded – and thousands of ordinary Londoners and visitors. One of the wounded was Ben McBean, one of the two comatose soldiers who had been on Harry's flight home from Afghanistan, whom he had described as the real ‘heroes'. McBean had lost his right leg and left arm. Harry was particularly interested in his progress and visited him at Headley Court. Such was the twenty-one-year-old Marine's determination that a year later he miraculously conquered the London marathon with his prosthetic limbs, finishing in six hours and twenty minutes.

‘Clarence House were very helpful because they commissioned
an artist's impression of what the swimming pool would look like,' says Bryn. ‘At City Salute people could see what was going to happen and no one was left in any doubt of the Princes' view about the need for a swimming pool'.

And on 4 June, 2010 William was there to open it.

William wore a suit that day, aware that in uniform he would outrank most of the patients, which might be awkward for them. Colonel Jerry Tuck, Commanding Officer at Headley Court, was very impressed by William's sensitivity in talking to the men. ‘It was an action-packed programme and during it he spoke to maybe two hundred people. You get no sense from him that he's talking to people because he has to; there were times where I tried to move him along a bit and maybe bypass a couple of people, and he would not allow anyone to be bypassed. So we got further and further behind on the programme. When you're talking to him you feel you matter to him. The break in is, “How's it going?” or “What's happened since I last saw you?” [he and Harry visited in 2007 and again in 2008] and “Where are you going? What does the future hold for you?” A genuine desire to know what was going on without unnecessarily picking at the scab and making the patient contemplate the fact that in reality they are going to be leaving the service.'

As William said in his speech that day, he and his brother had not known what to expect when they first came to Headley Court. ‘We expected to find a place of suffering with, perhaps, a pervading atmosphere of desolation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here reigns courage, humour, compassion and, above all, hope for the future. “How can this be?” Well, part of it – it seems to me – is down to the extraordinary spirit and indomitable nature of the British soldier, sailor and airman. However, it is also about individual courage, the refusal to give up – even in those darkest moments that each and every one of you must have gone through. But if courage is the foundation stone of recovery, the unconditional love and support of friends and family, and the unstinting dedication and selfless care of the staff here, and at Selly Oak, are
the tools by which this stone is levered into place. And that unconditional love is exemplified by that of Help for Heroes for this place, Headley Court. This great day – the opening of this state-of-the-art complex behind me – has been brought about by this unique charity and the millions who support it.

‘Very occasionally – perhaps once or twice in a generation – something or someone pops up to change the entire landscape. Help for Heroes, under the magnificent and brilliantly quirky leadership of the mad cartoonist, Bryn, and his equally inspirational wife, Emma, is one such phenomenon. What it has achieved here at Headley Court is, in truth, but the tip of the iceberg. Help for Heroes has galvanised the entire British people. Always supportive of its men and women in uniform, this country has been elevated by Help for Heroes to a state of realisation and proactive support for our military that has made me personally, very, very proud to be British, and a member of our Armed Forces.'

By the time the swimming pool was up and running, the charity had built up such momentum and such staggering funds (£53 million, and that figure has been going up every day since) that Bryn and Emma realised they were in for the longer term. ‘The overwhelming support of the wounded and the desire of the public to help made it clear we had to go on,' he says. ‘The road to recovery is a very long and hard path, these are young men and women today but they will grow old. We at H4H want to ensure that when the current level of public support has passed, as it inevitably will, they are not forgotten; they deserve the best and we are doing our best to get it.'

Colonel Jerry Tuck has a good idea of how their lives will be. Showing me around the centre, he said, ‘You don't get a flavour for Headley Court until you see the prosthetics department, because it is that which delivers the feel-good headlines. It's a strength and a weakness of this place. As a strength, we can demonstrate to the nation that we are doing the best we possibly can for our patients; the weakness is that that might be interpreted by the nation as Happy Ever After, and for our complex trauma survivors, we don't
do Happy Ever After. We do maximum functional capacity that your injuries will allow you to do but if you are a triple amputee, at the end of every day before you go to bed, you take off your very expensive componentry and you see, surgically, what is left of three previously fully functional limbs. I don't believe that's happy ever after. I don't know what's going to happen in ten, twenty or twenty-five years, thirty years, forty years. What are the mental health implications down range? I'm not necessarily talking about post-traumatic stress disorder but I am talking about reactive depression. It's going to be very difficult if you are depressed because of the way your body looks, because your body's going to look like that until the day you die.'

CREATING SYNERGY

Every six months, all the charities of which William and Harry are patrons, and a few of which they are not, gather at St James's Palace for the regular meeting of the Princes' Charities Forum. It is, according to everyone I have spoken to who attends it, a brilliant concept, which today has nearly thirty disparate organisations working in harmony. ‘They have been very clever in creating this,' says Charlie Mayhew of Tusk Trust. ‘I heard the other day it's so successful that some of the other Royal Households are rather jealous of what it has achieved.'

Its genesis, however, was more through luck than judgement. The Princes had taken on their first few charities and were about to enter the Forces. Jamie came up with the idea of getting them all together around a table so they could work out who wanted which Prince and when and which charities could be accommodated. ‘It was a diary thing really,' says one of them, a means of demonstrating in a transparent way to each charity that one was not getting more of the Princes' time than another. In the early days when there were just a handful of charities, the meetings were more frequent, less formal and had no fancy name, but the magical effect of bringing these disparate charities together was apparent from the start, and nowadays, the Forum has almost taken on a life of its own.

‘It's all about seeing where we can work together,' says Charlie. ‘The first time we met, the only other charities were Centrepoint and Sentebale, and there didn't seem to be any synergy between us, but we quickly did see there were opportunities to share ideas
and thoughts and one of the results of that was some Centrepoint young people came out to work on a Tusk project.'

‘I don't think anyone envisaged at the beginning going beyond that initial remit,' says one of the Household. ‘But what happened was that these charities got into a room and found that they could help each other out with all sorts of things that had nothing to do with the Princes.'

Today the Princes have well over twenty charities between them and most of them are as different in their remits as you could hope to find, and yet the Royal Marsden Hospital, expert fundraisers, have given advice to the English Schools Swimming Association on fundraising – nothing to do with Prince William, just a friendly exchange of information. Mountain Rescue (England and Wales) took some young people from Centrepoint on a fell walk to give them a taste of adventure. They've done it twice and the first time William wasn't there – and wasn't even invited. A couple of Centrepoint young people cycled over a thousand miles through Botswana and Namibia in aid of Tusk. It was the first leg of a 5,000-mile cycling expedition, called the Cycle of Life; and as Charlie remarked at the time, charities concerned with the homeless and conservation were, ‘by normal standards, strange bedfellows'.

‘The Princes' Forum extends our reach into areas that we would never have been in otherwise,' says Julia Samuel from the Child Bereavement Charity, which is now working with the Armed Forces, WellChild and Centrepoint, providing training and resources to each. ‘The Forum means we don't compete because we all feel so pleased with ourselves to be sitting round the table. There's a real generosity of spirit; we are all very lucky and want to help each other and learn from each other.'

‘Once the Princes realised what was happening, they encouraged it,' says one of the team. ‘They realised it's a model that can work, although the other factor is it's a model that can only work up to a certain size.'

William and Harry's trip to southern Africa in June 2010, their
first official overseas tour together, was the ethos of the Princes' Charities Forum writ large. They were there for six days, visited three countries, gave a huge boost to four of their charities, which, because of the Forum, they both knew and cared about, watched England play Algeria in the FIFA World Cup in Cape Town and lent support to the 2018 bid. They began in Botswana with Tusk, which was celebrating its twentieth anniversary year – which William had launched at a reception in London – but this was the first time in the five years he had been patron that he had been to Africa for them.