Princess Diana's charity works

Throughout her life Diana was something of a rebel. Her work with victims of AIDS could in some ways be seen in this regard. She was one of the first very high profile people to be pictured touching those afflicted with AIDS this had a significant impact in changing people’s opinions and attitudes to the disease it was certainly a charity not following the protocol and tradition of the Royal family. AS Princess Diana said:

“HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them hug heaven knows they need it"

Diana had a very personable touch. She was very at ease in meeting people from any background and even if they were  ill or in hospices. The patients would react very favourably to her meetings, they warmed to her life energy and heartfelt sympathy. Part of her appeal was her sympathy and natural compassion. She could empathise with people’s suffering, having suffered much herself.

To the media Diana often portrayed a very stoic and positive energy, but an aid suggested that at the same time these engagements often drained Diana emotionally at the end of some engagements she felt depleted.

As well as working on charities such as AIDS she lent her name to the campaign to bad landmines. Her personal support is said to have been a significant factor in encouraging Britain and then other countries to support the Ottawa Treaty which sought to introduce a ban on the use of anti – personnel landmines. When Robin Cook brought the second reading of the landmines bill to the house in 1998 he made a point of paying tribute to the contribution of Princess Diana.

Landmines & Explosive Remnants of War

Continuing the commitment of Diana, Princess of Wales we champion the issue of landmines, supporting the campaign for a worldwide ban and speaking up for those whose everyday lives are blighted by landmines.

Prisoners' Families

The Fund supports young people in prisoners’ families – an invisible group stigmatised by society and judged guilty for a crime they did not themselves commit.

Palliative Care

Enabling people to die with dignity and with the least possible amount of pain. For this reason it has launched a £5 million initiative on Palliative Care.

Princess Diana's death

On 31 August 1997, Diana was fatally injured in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, which also caused the death of her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed and their driver, Henri Paul, acting security manager of the Hôtel Ritz Paris. Millions of people watched the princess' funeral.

Conspiracy theories and inquest

The initial French judicial investigation concluded that the accident was caused by Henri Paul's drunken loss of control.From February 1999, Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (the owner of the Paris Ritz, for which Paul had worked) maintained that the crash had been planned, accusing MI6 as well as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Inquests in London during 2004 and 2007 finally attributed the accident to grossly negligent driving by Henri Paul and to the pursuing paparazzi. The following day Al-Fayed announced he would end his 10-year campaign for the sake of the late Princess of Wales's children.

Tribute, funeral, and burial

The sudden and unexpected death of a very popular royal figure Diana, a British princess brought statements from senior figures worldwide and many tributes by members of the public. People left public offerings of flowers, candles, cards and personal messages outside Kensington Palace for many months.

Diana's funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997. The previous day Queen Elizabeth II had paid tribute to her in a live television broadcast. Her sons, the Princes William and Harry, walked in the funeral procession behind her coffin, along with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, and with Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer. Lord Spencer said of his sister: "She proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.".

Memorials

The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Gardens in Regent Centre Gardens Kirkintilloch.Immediately after her death, many sites around the world became briefly ad hoc memorials to Diana, where the public left flowers and other tributes. The largest was outside the gates of Kensington Palace. Permanent memorials include:

• The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park, London, opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
• The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens, London.
• The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Walk, a circular path between Kensington Gardens, Green Park, Hyde Park and St. James's Park, London

In addition, there are two memorials inside Harrods department store, at the time owned by Dodi Al-Fayed's father Mohamed Al-Fayed, in London. The first memorial consists of photos of the two behind a pyramid-shaped display that holds a wine glass still smudged with lipstick from Diana's last dinner as well as an 'engagement' ring Dodi purchased the day before they died.The second, unveiled in 2005 and titled "Innocent Victims", is a bronze statue of the two dancing on a beach beneath the wings of an albatross.The Flame of Liberty, erected in 1989 on the Place de l'Alma in Paris, above the entrance to the tunnel in which the fatal crash later occurred, has become an unofficial memorial to Diana.

The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park, London, opened by Queen Elizabeth II.

THE DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES MEMORIAL WALK is a 7-mile long circular walking trail in London dedicated to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales.  It goes between Kensington Gardens, Green Park, Hyde Park, and St. James’s Park in a figure-8 pattern, passing sites that are associated with her life:  Kensington Palace, Spencer House, Buckingham Palace, and Clarence House, etc..  It is marked with eighty-nine individual plaques and has been described as one of the most magnificent urban parkland walks in the world.

The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground in Kensingston Gardens,London

Memorabilia

Following Diana's death, the Diana Memorial Fund was granted intellectual property rights over her image. In 1998, after refusing the Franklin Mint an official license to produce Diana merchandise, the fund sued the company, accusing it of illegally selling Diana dolls, plates and jewellery.In California, where the initial case was tried, a suit to preserve the right of publicity may be filed on behalf of a dead person, but only if that person is a Californian. The Memorial Fund therefore filed the lawsuit on behalf of the estate and, upon losing the case, were required to pay the Franklin Mint's legal costs of £3 million which, combined with other fees, caused the Memorial Fund to freeze their grants to charities.

In 1998, Azermarka issued postage stamps with both Azeri and English captions, commemorating Diana. The English text reads "Diana, Princess of Wales. The Princess that captured people's hearts".

In 2003, the Franklin Mint counter-sued; the case was eventually settled in 2004, with the fund agreeing to an out-of-court settlement, which was donated to mutually agreed charitable causes.

Today, pursuant to this lawsuit, two California companies continue to sell Diana memorabilia without the need for any permission from Diana's estate: the Franklin Mint and Princess Ring LLC.

Diana in contemporary art

In 2005 Martin Sastre premiered during the Venice Biennial the film Diana: The Rose Conspiracy. This fictional work starts with the world discovering Diana alive and enjoying a happy undercover new life in a dangerous favela on the outskirts of Montevideo. Shot on a genuine Uruguayan slum and using a Diana impersonator from São Paulo, the film was selected among the Venice Biennial's best works by the Italian Art Critics Association. In July 1999, Tracey Emin created a number of monoprint drawings featuring textual references about Diana's public and private life, for Temple of Diana, a themed exhibition at The Blue Gallery, London. Works such as They Wanted You To Be Destroyed (1999) related to Diana's bulimia, while others included affectionate texts such as Love Was On Your Side and Diana's Dress with puffy sleeves. Another text praised her selflessness - The things you did to help other people, showing Diana in protective clothing walking through a minefield in Angola - while another referenced the conspiracy theories. Of her drawings, Emin maintained "They're quite sentimental . . . and there's nothing cynical about it whatsoever."

In 2007, following an earlier series referencing the conspiracy theories, Stella Vine created a series of Diana paintings for her first major solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford gallery.Vine intended to portray Diana's combined strength and vulnerability as well as her closeness to her two sons.The works, all completed in 2007, included Diana branches, Diana family picnic, Diana veil and Diana pram, which incorporated the quotation "I vow to thee my country".Immodesty Blaize said she had been entranced by Diana crash, finding it "by turns horrifying, bemusing and funny".Vine asserted her own abiding attraction to "the beauty and the tragedy of Diana's life".

Later events

1 July 2007 marked a concert at Wembley Stadium. The event, organised by the Princes William and Harry, celebrated the 46th anniversary of their mother's birth and occurred a few weeks before the 10th anniversary of her death on 31 August.On 13 July 2006 Italian magazine Chi published photographs showing the princess amid the wreckage of the car crash, despite an unofficial blackout on such photographs being published.The editor of Chi defended his decision by saying that he published the photographs simply because they had not been previously seen, and that he felt the images are not disrespectful to the memory of the Princess.Fresh controversy arose over the issue of these photographs when Britain's Channel 4 broadcast them during a documentary in June 2007.

The 2007 docudrama Diana: Last Days of a Princess details the final two months of her life.

On an October 2007 episode of The Chaser's War on Everything, Andrew Hansen mocked Diana in his "Eulogy Song", which immediately created considerable controversy in the Australian media.

Princess Diana's personal life after divorce

After the divorce, Diana retained her double apartment on the north side of Kensington Palace, which she had shared with Prince Charles since the first year of their marriage, and it remained her home until her death.

Diana dated the respected heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, from Jhelum, Pakistan, who was called "the love of her life" after her death by many of her closest friends,for almost two years, before Khan ended the relationship.Khan was intensely private and the relationship was conducted in secrecy, with Diana lying to members of the press who questioned her about it. Khan was from a traditional Pakistani family who expected him to marry from a related Muslim clan, and their differences, which were not just religious, became too much for Khan. According to Khan's testimonial at the inquest for her death, it was Diana herself, not Khan, who ended their relationship in a late-night meeting in Hyde Park, which adjoins the grounds of Kensington Palace, in June 1997.

Within a month Diana had begun dating Dodi Al-Fayed, son of her host that summer, Mohamed Al-Fayed. Diana had considered taking her sons that summer on a holiday to the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, but security officials had prevented it. After deciding against a trip to Thailand, she accepted Fayed's invitation to join his family in the south of France, where his compound and large security detail would not cause concern to the Royal Protection squad. Mohamed Al-Fayed bought a multi-million pound yacht on which to entertain the princess and her sons.

Landmines

In January 1997, pictures of the Princess touring an Angolan minefield in a ballistic helmet and flak jacket were seen worldwide. It was during this campaign that some accused the Princess of meddling in politics and declared her a 'loose cannon. In August 1997, just days before her death, she visited Bosnia with Jerry White and Ken Rutherford of the Landmine Survivors Network.Her interest in landmines was focused on the injuries they create, often to children, long after a conflict is over.

She is believed to have influenced the signing, though only after her death, of the Ottawa Treaty, which created an international ban on the use of anti-personnel landmines.Introducing the Second Reading of the Landmines Bill 1998 to the British House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, paid tribute to Diana's work on landmines: All Honourable Members will be aware from their postbags of the immense contribution made by Diana, Princess of Wales to bringing home to many of our constituents the human costs of landmines. The best way in which to record our appreciation of her work, and the work of NGOs that have campaigned against landmines, is to pass the Bill, and to pave the way towards a global ban on landmines.

The United Nations appealed to the nations which produced and stockpiled the largest numbers of landmines (United States, China, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia) to sign the Ottawa Treaty forbidding their production and use, for which Diana had campaigned. Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said that landmines remained "a deadly attraction for children, whose innate curiosity and need for play often lure them directly into harm's way".

Princess Diana's divorce

Diana was interviewed for the BBC current affairs show Panorama by journalist Martin Bashir; the interview was broadcast on 20 November 1995. In it, Diana asserted of Hewitt, "Yes, I loved him. Yes, I adored him." Of Camilla, she claimed "There were three of us in this marriage." For herself, she said "I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts." On Charles's suitability for kingship, she said: "Because I know the character I would think that the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don't know whether he could adapt to that."

In December 1995, the Queen asked Charles and Diana for "an early divorce", as a direct result of Diana's Panorama interview. This followed shortly after Diana's accusation that Tiggy Legge-Bourke had aborted Charles's child, after which Legge-Bourke instructed Peter Carter-Ruck to demand an apology.Two days before this story broke, Diana's secretary Patrick Jephson resigned, later writing Diana had "exulted in accusing Legge-Bourke of having had an abortion".

On 20 December 1995, Buckingham Palace publicly announced the Queen had sent letters to Charles and Diana advising them to divorce. The Queen's move was backed by the Prime Minister and by senior Privy Counsellors, and, according to the BBC, was decided after two weeks of talks.Prince Charles immediately agreed with the suggestion. In February Diana announced her agreement after negotiations with Prince Charles and representatives of the Queen, irritating Buckingham Palace by issuing her own announcement of a divorce agreement and its terms.

The divorce was finalised on 28 August 1996.

Diana received a lump sum settlement of around £17 million along with a clause standard in royal divorces preventing her from discussing the details.

Days before the decree absolute of divorce, Letters Patent were issued with general rules to regulate royal titles after divorce. In accordance, as she was no longer married to the Prince of Wales, Diana lost the style Her Royal Highness and instead was styled Diana, Princess of Wales.Buckingham Palace issued a press release on the day of the decree absolute of divorce was issued, announcing Diana's change of title, but made it clear that Diana continued to be a British princess

Almost a year before, according to Tina Brown, Prince Philip had warned Diana: "If you don't behave, my girl, we'll take your title away." Diana is alleged to have replied: "My title is a lot older than yours, Philip", implying that her own family, the Spencer family, was older and more aristocratic than the House of Windsor.

Buckingham Palace stated that Diana was still a member of the Royal Family, as she was the mother of the second- and third-in-line to the throne. This was confirmed by the Deputy Coroner of the Queen's Household, Baroness Butler-Sloss, after a pre-hearing on 8 January 2007: "I am satisfied that at her death, Diana, Princess of Wales continued to be considered as a member of the Royal Household."This appears to have been confirmed in the High Court judicial review matter of Al Fayed & Ors v Butler-Sloss.In that case, three High Court judges accepted submissions that the "very name ‘Coroner to the Queen's Household’ gave the appearance of partiality in the context of inquests into the deaths of two people, one of whom was a member of the Family and the other was not."

Problems and separation

During the early 1990s, the marriage of Diana and Charles fell apart, an event at first suppressed, then sensationalised, by the world media. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales allegedly spoke to the press through friends, each blaming the other for the marriage's demise.

The chronology of the break-up identifies reported difficulties between Charles and Diana as early as 1985. During 1986 Diana began an affair with Major James Hewitt, while Prince Charles turned to his former girlfriend, Camilla Shand, who had become Camilla Parker-Bowles, wife of Andrew Parker-Bowles. These affairs were exposed in May 1992 with the publication of Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton. The book, which also laid bare Diana's allegedly suicidal unhappiness, caused a media storm. This publication was followed during 1992 and 1993 by leaked tapes of telephone conversations which negatively reflected on both the royal antagonists. Transcripts of taped intimate conversations between Diana and James Gilbey were published by the Sunnewspaper in Britain in August 1992. The article's title, "Squidgygate", referenced Gilbey's affectionate nickname for Diana. The next to surface, in November 1992, were the leaked "Camillagate" tapes, intimate exchanges between Charles and Camilla, published in Today and the Mirror newspapers.

In the meantime, rumours had begun to surface about Diana's relationship with James Hewitt, her former riding instructor. These would be brought into the open by the publication in 1994 of Princess in Love.

In December 1992, Prime Minister John Major announced the Wales's "amicable separation" to the House of Commons, and the full Camillagate transcript was published a month later in the newspapers, in January 1993. On 3 December 1993, Diana announced her withdrawal from public life. Charles sought public understanding via a televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby on 29 June 1994. In this he confirmed his own extramarital affair with Camilla, saying that he had only rekindled their association in 1986, after his marriage to the Princess of Wales had "irretrievably broken down."

While she blamed Camilla Parker-Bowles for her marital troubles due to her previous relationship with Charles, Diana at some point began to believe Charles had other affairs. In October 1993 Diana wrote to a friend that she believed her husband was now in love with Tiggy Legge-Bourke and wanted to marry her.Legge-Bourke had been hired by Prince Charles as a young companion for his sons while they were in his care, and Diana was extremely resentful of Legge-Bourke and her relationship with the young princes.

Princess Diana's charity work

Though in 1983 she confided in the then-Premier of Newfoundland, Brian Peckford: "I am finding it very difficult to cope with the pressures of being Princess of Wales, but I am learning to cope," from the mid-1980s, the Princess of Wales became increasingly associated with numerous charities. As Princess of Wales she was expected to visit hospitals, schools, etc., in the 20th-century model of royal patronage. Diana developed an intense interest in serious illnesses and health-related matters outside the purview of traditional royal involvement, including AIDS and leprosy. In addition, the Princess was the patroness of charities and organisations working with the homeless, youth, drug addicts and the elderly. From 1989, she was President of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

During her final year, Diana lent highly visible support to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a campaign that went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 after her death.

Princess Diana's pregnancy

On 5 November 1981, Diana's first pregnancy was officially announced, and she frankly discussed her pregnancy with members of the press corps.In the private Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington,on 21 June 1982, Diana gave birth to her and Prince Charles's first son and heir, William Arthur Philip Louis.Amidst some media criticism, she decided to take William, still a baby, on her first major tours of Australia and New Zealand, but the decision was popularly applauded. By her own admission, Diana had not initially intended to take William until it was suggested by Malcolm Fraser, the Australian prime minister.

A second son, Henry Charles Albert David, was born about two years after William, on 15 September 1984.Diana asserted that she and Prince Charles were closest during her pregnancy with "Harry", as the younger prince was known. She was aware their second child was a boy, but did not share the knowledge with anyone else, including Prince Charles.

She was regarded by a biographer as a devoted and demonstrative mother.She rarely deferred to Prince Charles or to the Royal Family, and was often intransigent when it came to the children. She chose their first given names,dismissed a royal family nanny and engaged one of her own choosing, selected their schools and clothing, planned their outings and took them to school herself as often as her schedule permitted