The other Prince William: The uncanny parallels between Wills and the dashing but doomed cousin in whose memory he was named | Mail Online
The other Prince William
The uncanny parallels between Wills and the dashing but doomed cousin in whose memory he was named
Excerpts
Two men named William. Both princes, both pilots. Both polo players with a taste for danger. Both Eton-educated, handsome men of the world. One is destined to be our future king, while the other has been long-forgotten.
Yet it is after Prince William of Gloucester, who died young in 1972, that the Duke of Cambridge was named. Next month, the older prince should have been celebrating his 70th birthday, but his life was cut tragically short. William of Gloucester, son of the Queen’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester, was Prince Charles’s hero — the man upon whom the future king modelled himself, and whose example, in so many things, Charles followed.
William of Gloucester was just 30 when the Piper Arrow single-engine aircraft he was piloting in an air race crashed, killing him and his co-pilot outright. The shock that ran through the Royal Family was colossal, but the person most affected by the loss was his first cousin once removed, Prince Charles, who was 23 at the time.
He was the first member of the Royal Family to gain a university place through open competition, the first to arrive without the shadow of a private detective. When he went up in 1960, college staff were instructed to address him as ‘Prince William, Sir’, though the bedmakers who tidied his rooms soon slipped into calling him ‘Mr Prince William’. William was bold, stylish, different. Like his present-day namesake, he loved skiing, shooting and nightclubs — and drove a high-powered sports car.
He signed up for a course at Stanford University in California, broadening his knowledge with the study of American history, German and Russian affairs, and economics. He then travelled incognito through America and Canada. He took a job at Lazard’s merchant bank but hated it. Then, after three attempts at passing rigorous Foreign Office entrance exams, he won himself a job as Third Secretary at the British High Commission in Nigeria.
It was while here that he became aware of the first symptoms of a rare and incurable blood disease called porphyria — the self-same condition that had seized his ancestor George III, and from whom he had probably inherited it through several generations. And when Alan Bennett wrote The Madness Of King George, his Oscar-winning 1994 film, Prince Charles — having learned at first hand through conversations with his cousin William the perils of the disease — interested himself deeply in the production.
As a result, all royal children are now routinely screened for this rare but pernicious condition.
Despite suffering fevers, nausea, and dizziness, William determined it should not affect his career or his leisure pursuits, and applied for a Second Secretary’s job at the British Embassy in Japan. William later resigned from the Foreign Office and took over the running of the family estate. The porphyria which had developed years before had not gone away, and he suffered increasingly uncomfortable symptoms. To ease the stress which came with those symptoms, he stepped up his flying, entering air competitions in his Piper Arrow.
It was on August 28, 1972, that William took off, accompanied by an experienced co-pilot, Lt-Commander Vyrell Mitchell. They were taking part in the Goodyear International Air Trophy being held at Halfpenny Green near Wolverhampton. Soon after take-off, the plane executed a 120-degree turn towards the first leg of the course. ‘The angle of turn made by the Piper Arrow was observed to be too steep,’ according to his old Cambridge supervisor, Dr Ronald Hyam. ‘The aircraft lost height, cut through the top of a large tree, losing part of its wing, then rolled over, diving inverted into the ground, and burst into flames. Both pilots were killed instantly.’ As Dr Hyam adds: ‘It was a desperately sad and terrible end to the life of a remarkable young man of many talents, admired by all who knew him.’
Prince Charles, for a time, paid his own personal tribute to his cousin by growing the mutton-chop whiskers that were William’s trademark. He emulated his cousin on the polo field, on the ski-slopes, in the air, on the grouse moor — and in the bedroom. His relationship with the then Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles had more than an echo of William’s own passionate love for Zsuzui Starkloff.
But in the naming of his first-born son after Prince William of Gloucester, Charles paid the greatest tribute possible to the man he most admired in the world.
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, but I did post about Prince William a few months back; I will try to find the post again [think it was on a York thread, oddly enough] but basically, I was describing how, when I was a young schoolgirl, Prince William really was THE handsome, man-about-town debonair, brave action-man Prince of his time. He skied very well [at at time before package market ski holidays had taken off and so the whole thing was imbued with a sort of jet-set glamour]. He could pilot a plane, he drove a fast sportscar. He dated beautiful [but highly eligible] aristocratic 'Park Lane gels' [a form of Sloane Ranger before that species was codified.] As I said when I posted previously, he was a type of 'royal James Bond'. Girls adored him. And, as I also posted at the time, it seemed so odd to be posting as I did, because here in 2011 everyone has all but forgotten all about him..........
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