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Today marks 25 years since the extraordinary life of Diana, Princess of Wales was cut short in a car crash in Paris.
Here, KentOnline reporter Sam Lennon - who covered the tragedy - remembers how the county reacted to an event that shocked the world...
For an entire week the British stiff upper lip vanished.
Grown men and women openly wept in the streets when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash on Sunday, August 31, 1997. She was 36.
The outpouring of mass public grief and showing of emotion was extraordinary; the kind not seen in this country since, and rarely before.
The day the news broke
I only learned of the tragic news when I arrived for a weekend shift for PA (Press Association) in London at 9am on Sunday, August 31, 1997.
“We’re going to have a lot to do because of the death of Diana,” my news editor told me before I’d sat down.
“You’re joking,” I blurted out in shock and bewilderment, unaware of the tragedy.
Those up in the early hours would have heard the first reports - that Diana was still alive and seriously injured, but her new boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, was dead.
A few hours later it was confirmed she had not survived.
It was in the early days of the internet, so most people would have heard the news through the radio, early morning TV broadcasts or the 24-hour news text service on TV - Ceefax for the BBC and Teletext for ITV.
I had no car then so was unable to catch the radio news on my journey into work. Instead I was in the vacuum of a train travelling to the capital from my home in Dover. There were no smartphones that would have offered the news as I travelled.
I was then a freelance journalist, so I worked on the story across two different jobs - at the weekend doing casual shifts for PA Teletext in Victoria, London, and during the week with the KM Group’s Kentish Express newspaper in Ashford.
My shift on the day Diana died was spent editing news wired in from the Midlands, with many regional stories focused on local tributes and vigils.
When I clocked off I walked the short distance from Victoria to Buckingham Palace to check on the scene there.
Sure enough there were carpets of floral tributes outside the gates and hundreds of mournful people. I overheard one young man say: “It makes you realise your own mortality.”
Tony Blair, who had become Prime Minister just a few months before, grasped the public mood straight away and coined the term “people’s princess”, which was repeated by several newspapers through the week.
Samaritans overwhelmed
The front page of the Kentish Express on September 4 told of the local Samaritans branch being deluged with calls from those distraught about Diana’s death.
The charity’s spokesman, Tim Bomback, told me: “It’s gone ballistic.”
Calls to its Ashford base in Queen Street soared by 30% from that Sunday morning, with people crying down the phone. Off-duty Samaritans were brought in to help with the surge.
Flags on buildings flew at half-mast throughout across the county, prayers were said in churches and books of condolence were opened at many venues.
This included Ashford Civic Centre, where colleagues and I duly left our messages.
One woman, Nicola Hawkins, of Bromley Green Road, Ashford, wrote: “Sometimes I get this silly idea that she’s not died, she’s gone somewhere else to be happy and left alone. It doesn’t seem real.”
A child’s handwritten message simply said: “I love you for your smile.”
Our office received updates from PA through the week, including details of the funeral in London. News editor Justin Williams read one out to us: “Elton John’s going to sing Candle in the Wind.”
It was a specially rewritten version for Diana.
‘Never seen before’
Kent MP Damian Green had been elected just three months before the tragedy.
He was told of Diana’s death by his then seven-year-old daughter Felicity, who had heard news of Diana’s death first and rushed to tell her mum and dad.
It was exactly how the Ashford Conservative, as a seven-year-old in 1963, had broken the news to his parents of the assassination of President John F Kennedy.
“It’s an eerie recollection for me,” he said this week.
Mr Green recalls the outpouring of public emotion that followed Diana’s death as “something I had never seen in Britain before”.
“My most vivid Ashford memory is the memorial service at St Mary’s, where Bill Deedes [former Ashford MP and newspaper editor] gave a brilliant tribute,” the 66-year-old recalled.
“He paid the most moving testament to all the good she did. There was barely a dry eye in the church by the time he had finished.”
Kent’s streets deserted
The Lord Lieutenant of Kent, Lord Kingsdown, gave an address to almost 2,000 people at Canterbury Cathedral, and there were 1,500 mourners at a service at Rochester Cathedral.
Lone piper Alan Barber played a lament at Sheerness clock tower and then saluted a portrait of Diana attached to it.
Her funeral was on Saturday, September 6, at Westminster Abbey and that day KM photographers took pictures of deserted high streets.
Most people stayed at home to watch the funeral on TV, while several shops closed until at least after the service.
The British television audience peaked at 32.1 million, one of the UK’s highest ever. An estimated 2 to 2.5 billion people watched the event worldwide, making it one of the biggest televised events in history.
In Ashford the branches of McDonald’s, Woolworth’s, WH Smith, Tesco and Sainsbury’s remained shut until 2pm.
The few shops open that morning included florists, allowing people to keep buying their floral tributes to leave at the Civic Centre.
There was a mass migration of an estimated three million people to central London for the funeral.
Those not among the 2,000 guests inside Westminster Abbey lined the cortège route and watched the service being relayed to parks in central London.
Because road and railways were expected to be overwhelmed, those coming were warned to travel in the night before.
I did, staying at my parents’ home in north London before the start of another weekend shift at Victoria.
Others coming in that night camped in central London, including along the planned route of the procession. Mercifully it had been a warm, dry week for them.
We at Teletext were just a few minutes’ walk from the service but we stayed in the office all day, rapidly putting up updates as the world’s cameras focused on the funeral.
When the hearse was first seen coming out onto the main road that morning there were haunting cries of anguish from the crowd.
Moments that stood out included Diana’s children, William, then 15, and a 12-year-old Harry, joining the walk behind the hearse with their father, grandfather and uncle, Prince Charles, Prince Philip and Earl Charles Spencer.
Another highlight was Spencer’s stinging attack on the behaviour of some of the press for the way they had treated Diana.
How the tragedy unfolded
On August 30, Diana and Dodi had decided to stop off in Paris for the night on their way back to London from a holiday in Sardinia.
They dined at the Hotel Ritz and were returning to Dodi’s family apartment in the city.
But they decided to make a hasty exit to avoid the paparazzi outside, leaving via the back of the hotel and using chauffeur Henri Paul to take them away in a black Mercedes-Benz.
Paul had gone off duty a few hours earlier and had since been drinking. He drove at speed to escape the photographers.
Just before 12.25am French time on August 31, the car hit a pillar head-on at the Pont de l’Alma underpass and spun into a stone wall.
Dodi and Paul were pronounced dead at the scene. Diana was taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital but was declared dead more than three hours after the crash.
William and Harry were told the news when they woke by Prince Charles at the Queen’s Balmoral estate in Scotland.
The only survivor was bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, who suffered severe head injuries.
Nobody in the car had been wearing seat belts.
Investigations later found the car was travelling at an estimated speed of 105km/h (65mph) – more than twice the tunnel’s 50km/h (31 mph) speed limit.
Paul was later found to have a blood alcohol level of 1.75 grams per litre of blood, which is about three-and-a-half times the legal limit in France.
Enquiries into the tragedy dragged on for years, but in 2008 an inquest jury in Britain concluded Diana had been unlawfully killed by the “grossly negligent driving” of members of the paparazzi and Paul.
The campaigning Princess
Diana had been the subject of public fascination and adoration since she was first revealed as the shy 19-year-old girlfriend of the heir to the throne in autumn 1980.
Her wedding to Prince Charles the following year drew a global TV audience of 750 million.
This masked her turbulent personal life in an increasingly unhappy marriage, which ended in divorce in 1996.
On paper she was the wife of the heir to the throne and the mother of the second in line.
But she turned out to be an extraordinary person in her own right, radiant and immensely compassionate, but also a rebel and groundbreaker. She pushed against the conventions of the royal family and constantly broke down barriers.
In 1987 the Princess stunned people by shaking hands with an AIDS patient when too many people then still thought that was how the disease could be transmitted.
She also hugged them, later commenting: “Heaven knows, they need it.”
Her actions helped break down the stigma surrounding this relatively new disease at the time.
She knew the indisputable fact that too few people had yet grasped - the virus can’t survive the open air.
Diana was patron of several charities and campaigned tirelessly on issues including landmines, visiting Bosnia on the subject in early August 1997.
Diana’s visits to Kent
Princess Diana visited Kent many times, mainly in connection with her charity work, and always attracted huge crowds of well-wishers.
Her links to the county went back to her school days at West Heath in Sevenoaks, but her first official visit was in May 1983, to open the Cranmer House residential home in Canterbury.
In December 1985 she visited the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, as patron of the National Rubella Council.
And in September 1989 Diane made an unscheduled visit to Canterbury when her helicopter was diverted from Dover because of fog.
It landed on Victoria Recreation Ground, next to Canterbury High School, as pupils came out to cheer her arrival. The Princess then travelled by car to Dover to visit HM Customs and Excise, and then on to Deal Centre for the Retired.
In March 1990, as president of Barnardo’s, she visited two projects in Tunbridge Wells to help families and children – the Ravensdale day care centre and the Chilston Mediation and Family Service Project.
In October 1990, the Princess dropped in to St Augustine’s Hospital at Chartham, officially opened Tenterden Leisure Centre and visited perfume manufacturer Quest International in Ashford.
On the same day in October 1992, Diana opened the Heart of Kent Hospice in Aylesford and the Paula Carr Diabetes Centre at the William Harvey Hospital.
One of her enduring connections with the county was as Colonel-in-Chief to the newly formed Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.
She visited Howe Barracks in Canterbury for the first time in June 1993, and the last time in May 1995.
On her visit in 1993, the Princess told the soldiers: “It has to be said that for a 31-year-old woman to have 2,500 men under her command is some feat.”
But the life of an extraordinary woman so loved across the country, and in Kent, was to be tragically cut short just four years later.
