At the time, it was a regular holiday for Princess Diana, Prince William, and Prince Harry. No one knew everything was going to change in the upcoming months.
The last episode of series five of The Crown teased the trip, showing Diana packing for a holiday as Queen Elizabeth is asked if she thinks Harry and William should join their mother.
The then 15-year-old William and 12-year-old Harry ended up joining their mother on the idyllic yacht trip around the south of France in July 1997.
Prince Harry wrote about the trip in his memoir Spare which was released last year. “Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven,” he said.
“There was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday,”
he remembered fondly. “The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling.”
The yacht, named the Jonikal at the time, was owned by Mohamed Al Fayed and his wife, Heini Wathen-Fayed. The couple were also on board and so was Mohamed’s son, Dodi.
Diana had already known Dodi, but the two got close on this trip. “We’d been with Mummy weeks earlier when she first met him [Dodi], in St. Tropez,” Harry wrote in Spare, “We were having a grand time, just the three of us, staying at some old gent’s villa.”
Friends of the 36-year-old princess reportedly believed that she dated Dodi to make her ex, British-Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, jealous. Hasnat allegedly couldn’t handle the media scrutiny surrounding the relationship.
About being on the boat, Harry wrote: “Best of all, there were jet skis. Whose were they? Don’t know. But I vividly remember Willy and me riding them out to the deepest part of the channel, circling while waiting for the big ferries to come. We used their massive wakes as ramps to get airborne. I’m not sure how we weren’t killed.”
A few weeks later, Dodi and Diana were caught kissing on the same yacht on a holiday without the children. It was front-page news around the world. About a month after the trip, on August 31, 1997, Diana and Dodi were killed in a car crash in Paris, France.
The first part of season six of The Crown seems to delve deep into Diana’s death and the royal family’s scrutinized reaction to the tragic passing. The trailer for the first part of the season centered around Diana and the media’s obsession with her, as well as touching on how her death impacted not just the world but the royals.
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Source: The Washington Post
