Prince William (23 page)

‘At the end he said, “This has been a very long time.” I'm sure he was homesick. That's fair enough, lots of people are, and it's a long time to be living on top of other people; he didn't get any space. Okay, you can go and sit on a rock or down a track, but you don't have space and I think that for him was quite difficult. But the great thing about the whole expedition was it was probably the last time he could go for a long period away from the public eye; I wonder if he knew that then.

‘He grew a lot. He arrived quiet and shy, head down, and by the end he had made friends – people loved being around him – and he was swinging from the rafters, head high and very comfortable with everyone. I think it gave him great confidence.'

Jamie Robertson-Macleod now has a framed letter in his study from William saying how much he enjoyed the trip and thanking him for playing down the situation, which he said had been very helpful. There was just one plea. ‘Next time, dryer, warmer and 20 miles of beach in each direction and no mountains!'

THE SPORT OF KINGS

William's social life in the country largely revolved around horses and the Beaufort Polo Club. It's a small, friendly club no more than a stone's throw from Highgrove, started nineteen years ago by Simon and Claire Tomlinson. Claire is one of the best polo players in the country with a string of accolades to her name; she was the highest-rated woman player in the world, and among a host of other things, she coached the England team that she once captained. William and the Tomlinsons' youngest child Mark became very good friends when they were small and they were in and out of each other's houses, although more often at the Tomlinsons'. William always knew he was welcome there any time and if his parents were away or busy that was where he went. Mark has two elder siblings, Luke and Emma. It was a house full of dogs and wellies and not a butler in sight.

‘He was just like the other boys and enjoyed doing things,' says Claire. ‘If I was the only adult I had to kick them all into touch a bit, but I didn't treat him any differently from the others, because I thought that was the fairest thing for him.' They used to play together and ride their ponies and bicycles, and as they grew older they upgraded to horses and motorbikes and pubs and parties, and would often go off across the fields shooting rabbits. They went on summer holidays and skiing trips and Claire taught them both to play polo. She also taught Harry a little later.

‘At the back of your mind there's always anxiety for their safety but as with your own children you wouldn't want them to see it. What boy isn't devil-may-care? Any boy who's got any sporting
instinct will be like that. I don't think it's good to restrict them too much. They almost have to learn by their own mistakes. If you're always saying be careful, it's not very fair. You get on and enjoy life and he's enjoyed the things he's done and I'm sure would like to spend more time at them but can't any more. He's very competitive but if you're going to play a sport you might as well be competitive. And he's analytical about his own performance; he doesn't like playing badly.'

All the children of local horsey and hunting families are members of the pony club – it's a rite of passage for them (along with bossy pony club mothers). The five-year-olds start learning to ride and how to look after their ponies, and as they progress they learn jumping, cross-country, dressage and polo. It's good fun, hard work and makes for very capable, practical children, and for those who don't go to the local day schools, it's a great place to make friends in the area. During the school holidays there is a programme of training sessions and rallies, competitions and gymkhanas, camps of varying lengths in the summer and Christmas parties. And the most exciting days for most pony club children is when they are allowed to join the grown-ups and go foxhunting. Even though hunting with dogs was banned in 2005, the Beaufort, like most hunts, still goes out several times a week and still holds special Children's Meets.

William had already done a bit of riding when they first met but Claire took him up a level. ‘We did a lot of riding and jumping and having fun. He loved jumping. He has no fear, he'd get stuck into anything, but equally he wasn't completely crazy.' When he was a little older, she lent him horses to hunt with. ‘It's nice to have the right sort of horse to get going on. He was growing out of his pony and needed something a bit bigger.'

Prince Charles was passionate about hunting and polo and encouraged the boys from an early age in both sports, although hunting was always going to be controversial. He loved it because of the adrenalin rush and the fact that in the process of trying to stay on your horse, it's very difficult to worry about anything else.
But he also loved it because he saw it as a natural part of the management of nature, and as a great leveller. As a fellow member of the Beaufort says, ‘There's very little protocol on the hunting field, particularly when you're covered in mud and being hauled out of a ditch!' The killing of the fox is almost incidental.

William's particular enthusiasm regarding hunting was the hounds. Ian Farquhar, Master of the Beaufort, has pedigree records in bound volumes for the Beaufort hounds going back fifty-four generations or more. He is fascinating and passionate on the subject of breeding and bloodlines, knows the name and quirks of every dog in the pack and loves them like children. He once said, ‘Hunting people support their hounds as others may support their football teams.' Having known William for most of his life, it would be surprising if some of it hadn't rubbed off. The best part of hunting for William was riding at the front of the field, alongside Ian, and watching the hounds work. Like his father, he was sad to have to stop. For although their friends might have carried on while the ban remains in place, they know they can't.

But he still has polo, the oldest ball game in the world, said to have first been played in 600 BC. The Royal Family's passion for it doesn't go back quite so far, but it is certainly in the blood. William doesn't get enough practice these days to play as well as he might, but he loves it, and he and Harry use it, as their father did for so many years, as a means of raising serious sums of money for charity. To be a decent polo player you must be an excellent horseman, have good hand–eye co-ordination and be a team player. According to Claire, ‘He's not an advanced standard of horseman today [he is a one handicap; his friend Mark, now a professional, is a seven] because he hasn't done it enough, but he's a very sympathetic horseman. So many people who ride treat their horses like machines, but he has never done that – he treats a horse like a living being which has limits, and he will get the best out of it. He has great empathy with his horses.'

As a teenager, the polo club was the place where William and his friends hung out after matches and games. They would go into
the bar where at weekends a rock band called Nobodys Business often used to play. It was made up of two locals, Steve Hoare and Frank McQueen. They were loud and gutsy and rapidly became everyone's favourites. They also played at two of the pubs polo club people drank in – the Rattlebone Inn, in the neighbouring village of Sherston, and the Vine Tree at Norton. Steve remembers the excitement the first time the heir to the throne stood six feet away from him, dancing to his music – and watching his friends form a protective barrier on the dance floor as some young girls attempted to move in on him. At the end of the evening, he and Frank were introduced to William and a group of them sat around on hay bales chatting.

William started wearing the band's black T-shirt. Once, he told Steve, he'd been wearing it over the weekend and ‘Granny had asked what the logo was.' Their music always raised the roof and they regularly ended the gig with the Status Quo number ‘Rockin' All Over the World'. William and a couple of his mates started rocking alongside them one night, belting out the words without a care in the world, and thereafter it became his cue to sing. Afterwards, the landlord of the Rattlebone, Dave Baker, often had an after-hours lock-in, with only friends and regulars. They would all sit around drinking and chatting until the small hours. Increasingly, Harry joined the party, and sometimes their cousins, Peter and Zara Phillips, who lived not many miles away at Gatcombe Park.

Steve and Frank were soon playing at all the local eighteenth and twenty-first birthday parties, and became chummy with the whole crowd. Sometimes William and Harry would act as their roadies, helping them carry their equipment and guitars from the back of the car to set up. Harry used to impersonate their strong Wiltshire accents – at a smart dinner, he once mischievously flung a bread roll at Frank, getting it back double-quick. As Steve said, ‘It's not every day you get a bread roll hurled in your direction by a member of the Royal Family followed by a handshake and a hug.'

For a bit of a laugh, they all put together a Nobodys Business
polo team with William, Mark Tomlinson, Christian Blake-Dyke and Bruce Urquhart, and they successfully played their way through to the final of the Henderson Rosebowl in the summer of 2001. That same year the band played at the Beaufort Hunt Ball, a very grand event. They were not the main attraction – that was a twelve-piece band brought in from London, while Nobodys Business was put into a small side marquee. The minute they started playing, their faithful polo club fans were in there, and very soon the tent was bursting at the seams, as William and Harry, and Mark and Luke Tomlinson sang along at the tops of their voices to all the songs, leaving the smart London band playing to themselves and a small handful of ball goers.

OUT OF AFRICA

About half a mile from the Beaufort Polo Club, the Tomlinsons had a further nine hundred acres at a farm called Hill Court, on the outskirts of Shipton Moyne (home to the Cat and Custard Pot, another favourite watering hole). It was organically farmed and supported two large dairy herds, beef cattle, cereals and nearly two hundred polo ponies. This was where William worked as a farm-hand for four exhausting weeks at the beginning of 2001. On the grounds that he will one day inherit the Duchy of Cornwall with all its tenant farms, his father (who, like his father before him, has long been a champion of the countryside) wanted him to get an understanding of the rural economy and how those hands-on farmers live. It was something he was keen to do. He always loved spending time at the Home Farm, and David Wilson remembers him as a small child sitting for hours with the animals. But rather than go to a Duchy farm, where he'd be the boss's son, he chose instead to work for his friend's parents.

It was hard work, getting up at 4 a.m. each day to bring the cows in from the fields and do the milking and the washing down of the milking sheds afterwards and all the other mucky, backbreaking chores that fall to the latest recruit. The only consolation was that he was paid, unlike for everything else he did in his gap year; he got the princely sum of £3.20 an hour. He loved it, particularly the feeling that he was ‘just another guy on the farm'.

Next came Africa, the final and in many ways best part of the gap year. Africa has a way of getting into people's blood and it had already started to seep into his. He had been there once before
and was smitten, as so many people are. It's the sheer size of the continent, the miles of nothingness, the friendly, laughing people, the adventure and the incomparable thrill of seeing wildlife in its natural untouched habitat.

He and Harry were taken to Kenya by old family friends, the van Cutsems, shortly after their mother's death. Hugh van Cutsem had been at Cambridge with Prince Charles and he and his wife, Emilie, had been close friends of his ever since. Their four sons, Edward, Hugh, Nicholas and William, were almost like brothers to William and Harry – all but William, older than them – and although there was a brief rift in the relationship between Charles and Hugh and Emilie because of Camilla, the children remained firm friends. Emilie had been particularly good at scooping up the boys after Diana died and they had spent many happy days at their beautiful home in Norfolk. When William went to university, he gave them his black Labrador, Widgeon, to look after.

Their guide in Kenya was Geoffrey Kent, founder of the luxury travel company Abercrombie and Kent, a polo player, adventurer and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He had grown up on a farm in the Aberdare Highlands of Kenya and been educated in Nairobi. He knew the country like the back of his hand and his company specialised in up-market safaris to the most breathtaking parts of the continent.

He took them to Lewa, a game reserve on the northern foothills of Mount Kenya, which is as breathtaking as anywhere in Africa. The skies are big, the earth is red and scorched, the smells and the sounds are like nowhere else in the world and at night the stars are so bright and so close you feel you could reach up and stir them with your hand. And the place is bristling with wildlife.

Lewa was owned by the Craig family, whom Geoffrey knew well; he introduced them to his royal party. Ian Craig, like Geoffrey, was second generation; his father had gone out to Kenya from England in the early 1920s to farm cattle and owned about 35,000 acres of land, where game roamed freely. Poaching had always been a problem in Africa; elephants were killed for their tusks and rhinos for their
horns, but in the late 1980s it became an epidemic. In ten years the estimated number of black rhino had dropped from 20,000 to fewer than 300. But they had a champion in a remarkable conservationist and philanthropist called Anna Merz. She persuaded Ian's father to give over part of his ranch to a rhino sanctuary.

Together they worked to track and capture every remaining wild rhino in northern Kenya and relocate them to the sanctuary for breeding and safekeeping. Over the next ten years it grew until the Craigs decided to give over the whole property to the rhinos and enclosed it with high, electrified fencing. Since then, the government and neighbouring landowners have added to it, bringing the total acreage to 61,000. It was renamed the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy and has become a flagship not only for Kenya but for the whole of Africa, and a catalyst for conservation. A number of endangered species have sanctuary there, including the Grevy's zebra, sitatunga and oryx antelope.