Prince Harry Found the Public’s Reaction to Princess Diana’s Death ‘Very, Very Strange’
After Princess Diana’s death in a 1997 car crash, many grieved her publicly. A sea of flowers, handwritten notes, and mementos were left outside the Kensington Palace gates. All the while, tears streamed down many mourners’ faces. Prince Harry, not yet a teenager when Diana died, later said he found the public’s reaction, “very, very strange” as a boy.
Prince Harry was 12 when Princess Diana died
The Duke of Sussex, now 37, was just 12 years old when Diana died on Aug. 31, 1997. He and his then-15-year-old brother, Prince William, had been vacationing in Scotland at Balmoral Castle when the crash took place.
In Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Harry remembered speaking to Diana hours before her death.
“I can’t necessarily remember what I said, but all I do remember is regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was,” Harry recalled. “If I’d known that that was the last time I was going to speak to my mother, the things I would have said to her.”
“Looking back at it now, it’s incredibly hard,” he continued. “I have to deal with that for the rest of my life: not knowing that it was the last time I’d speak to my mum, how differently that conversation would have panned out if I’d had even the slightest inkling that her life was going to be taken that night.”
Diana died after a car carrying her and three others — with paparazzi in tow — crashed in the Pont de L’Alma tunnel in Paris, France. Her then-boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul, also died. The fourth passenger in the car, Diana’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived the crash.
Prince Harry called the ‘outpouring of love and emotion’ from those who hadn’t met Princess Diana ‘very, very strange’
In the same documentary, Harry looked back on the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death. Particularly, how he’d felt seeing people grieve his mother.
“It was very, very strange after her death, the sort of outpouring of love and emotion from so many people that had never even met her,” he said.
Later, in The Me You Can’t See, Harry thought back to Diana’s funeral, which took place on Sept. 6, 1997, a little more than a week before he turned 13. Harry memorably walked behind Diana’s coffin alongside his brother, grandfather Prince Philip, uncle Earl Charles Spencer, and father Prince Charles.
“It was like I was outside of my body and walking along doing what was expected of me,” he told Oprah Winfrey in the Apple TV+ docuseries. “Showing one-tenth of the emotion everyone else was showing. Like, this was my mum? You’ve never even met her.”
He went on: “I was so angry with what happened to her and the fact there was no justice. At all. Nothing came from that. The same people who chased her into that tunnel photographed her as she was dying on the back seat of that car.”
Prince Harry wants the 25-year anniversary of Princess Diana’s death to be ‘a day filled with memories’
After playing — and winning — a charity polo tournament in Aspen, Colorado, on Aug. 25, 2022, Harry shared how he plans to honor Diana on the 25-year anniversary of her death.
“Next week is the 25th anniversary of my mother’s death, and she will certainly never be forgotten. I want it to be a day filled with memories of her incredible work and love for how she did it,” he said.
“I want it to be a day to share the spirit of my mum with my family, with my children, who I wish could have met her,” he said, referring to he and Meghan Markle’s children Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, 3, and Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, 1.
“Every day, I hope to do her proud,” Harry continued.
