Writing in her biography of the duch*ess of Cornwall, The duch*ess: Camilla Parker Bowles and the Love Affair that Rocked the Crown, Penny Junor recounts that Diana often visited Camilla and Andrew’s country home, Bolehyde Manor in Wiltshire, when she first started dating Charles in 1980. It’s said that the two women got on well, with former nanny Diana even helping Camilla with her children, Tom and Laura.
Camilla was some 14 years older than Diana, so it’s unsurprising that the 19 year old looked to her for advice. In fact Camilla was a closer contemporary of Diana’s older sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who Charles also briefly dated. Taking on something of an older sisterly role herself, Junor states that Camilla was a support to Diana when both women watched Prince Charles compete at the Ludlow Races that year – a day that marked Charles and Diana’s public debut as a couple. Unused to the cameras, Camilla was no doubt a reassuring presence, with two women photographed chatting amicably as she stayed by Diana’s side.
Camilla maintained the friendship as Charles and Diana’s relationship became more serious. In Andrew Morton’s 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, Morton relates that soon after the couple announced their engagement in February 1981 and Diana moved into Clarence House, she found a note from Camilla on her bed inviting her to lunch. The women are said to have enjoyed a lively meeting, spent gossiping together and catching up. When Diana looked back on it retrospectively, however, she told Morton she later suspected Camilla was trying to find out when she might be able to see Charles alone.
It was around this time that the friendship between the two women began to sour. Morton recounts that Diana began to harbour suspicions about Charles and Camilla as early as during her engagement. The bride-to-be was upset when she found out that Charles had gifted Camilla a bracelet, shortly before the Royal Wedding was due to take place in July. It was engraved with the initials G and F, which Diana was sure was a reference to the pet names Charles and Camilla are said to have given each other, ‘Gladys and Fred’, after two characters from The Goon Show. Others speculated that it stood for ‘Girl Friday’ – no less a troubling allusion, considering that the 1940 film His Girl Friday is about a man trying to lure his newly-engaged ex-wife away from her new lover. Junor also writes of Diana’s concerns, alleging that the just-married Princess was upset when she found a photo of Camilla in Charles’s diary while the couple were honeymooning on the Royal Yacht Britannia.
