Diana remembered — check out our gallery of the People’s Princess.
Where were you when the People’s Princess passed away? Share your memories with us below.
Deborah Thomas
Like the assassination of US President John F Kennedy, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was so sudden and shocking that most people remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news on August 31, 1997. I was in bed watching the Sunday Program when they stopped, mid-report, to announce that she’d been in an accident. Initial reports received by The Weekly indicated that the princess had been involved in a minor traffic accident and that she had a broken leg but was expected to be alright. This rapidly changed to become a catastrophic event: the death of Diana along with her boyfriend, Dodi Al Fayad, in Paris’s Pont D’Alma tunnel.
Reactions of readers ranged from disbelief and dismay to an outpouring of grief. Within a day, some were seeking revenge on the media, which was cast as the villain of the piece — particularly, since it was widely perceived that the paparazzi and tabloid newspapers’ pursuit of Diana had in some way caused her death. At the time her car crashed into a pillar in the tunnel, Diana was being pursued by paparazzi riding motorcycles. It was later found that her driver, Henri Paul of the Paris Ritz Hotel, had a criminal level of alcohol in his system at the time of the crash. He was also killed. Only Diana’s bodyguard — the only one in the car wearing a seatbelt — survived.
“It was a Sunday and I was a fortnight away from giving birth to my little girl. The whole family had gone for a late-morning walk down at the beach and when we got back in the car, it was just in time to catch some breaking news on the radio that Princess Diana had been in a car accident in Paris with her new boyfriend. There was no indication that it was serious and so when we got back home I decided to have a sleep. But just after 3pm, my husband Pete woke me up and I can still hear him saying the words: “Diana has died.” I thought I must be dreaming. It couldn’t have been real — not Diana. She was such a presence in our lives on a daily basis. It was almost impossible to imagine a world without her. But when we switched on the TV and saw that mangled Mercedes in that Paris tunnel, I remember thinking that we had come to the end of an era. I was glued to the TV for the next six days, watching that growing field of flowers mount outside Kensington Palace, hearing Londoners pour out their sadness, that breathtaking eulogy delivered by her brother Charles and then that most heartbreaking of all sights, Wills and Harry walking behind the gun carriage bearing their mother’s body, atop it the envelope saying “Mummy” tucked into that small bouquet of white roses. It was two weeks in September and a moment in history I’ll never forget.”
“I was in Sydney and I remember I was driving when I heard the news. I think I was quite stunned because the last news I’d heard had suggested she was seriously injured but okay. And I do remember thinking, how the hell do you run a big black Mercedes into a pole in a tunnel like that? Well, if you’re a drunk driver and speeding, it’s rather easy it seems.”
“I was in Melbourne that day and Eddie McGuire and I were hosting the opening of Planet Hollywood at Crown Casino. It was a very bizarre experience, because here we were putting on a show for the paparazzi and at that time it seemed that they had had a hand in her death. We ended up holding a much scaled-down version of what we had originally planned. I remember every time I heard a news commentator say that she had died, it was like a kick in the guts.”
“I was in New Zealand in a hotel room preparing to fly back home with CNN when it was broadcast that Diana had been in an accident. I immediately ran to hear more and every few minutes the news kept getting a little more clear as to how serious the accident was. Flight attendants were talking about it in the air and when I arrived in Sydney and at the duty-free counter, the cashier was in tears as she told me Diana was dead. A moment of impact and vivid memory. I thought what a terrible loss when a single person who had such international power to help so many causes and people with her very presence or a speech or endorsement is gone.”
“I was in New Zealand and I was watching the story unfold on CNN. I was gutted when the tagline on the story went from Diana injured to Diana dead.”
“I was watching TV and heard the news about the crash and was glued to the couch all morning. When it became clear that Diana had died, it was just shock. It somehow felt strange that life went on when something so monumental had happened. Watching the funeral was worse. My best friend came over and we watched it together and I remember trying not to cry too hard because I was pregnant and I worried it would disturb the baby … I recall the men all sort of cleared off somewhere and left the women to watch and cry.”
Maggie Tabberer
“I remember waking up in my hotel room in Vienna, flipping on the morning news, as you do, and hearing that Princess Diana had been in a car accident and may have broken her arm. Compelled, I watched the reports unfold, surely nothing could harm our Princess. Over the next hour I was dumbstruck, like the rest of the of the world, over how the story ended. Through streaming tears the anchor, almost in disbelief at her own words, reported that indeed the Princess had passed away on the operating table. Shock, pain, utter sadness, concern for her boys and a strange yearning that this was all untrue, I think we all felt those emotions, didn’t we, the world over. I admired her then, I miss her very much now.”
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