Sun Royal Photographer Arthur Edwards tells how he first got Princess Diana to pose for him — in the first of thousands of photographs over 17 years
Arthur was at Diana's side as she transformed from a shy nursery assistant into the most famous woman in the world
I LOVE this picture of Diana. Of the thousands I took of her over 17 years, it’s one of my favourites.
It was May 1982, a polo match at Windsor. She was eight months pregnant with William and absolutely radiant.
I watched Diana turn from a shy, teenage nursery school assistant into the most famous woman in the world. I can’t believe it’s 20 years since she died.
For the best part of two glittering and unforgettable decades Princess Diana held the world in her hands . . . and I was at her side.
For 17 years she and I were locked together on a crazy roller coaster ride of every emotion imaginable.
I was there to photograph her in those carefree summer days of July 1980 when her romance with Charles first blossomed.
And I was there at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris on that darkest day as she lay lifeless.
Her life had been a fairy tale that had long before turned sour.
Diana had married a man she thought would stay with her for life.
Although Prince Charles stopped loving her, the public never did.
As The Sun’s Royal Photographer my job was to catalogue her life and times.
I followed her on hundreds of Royal engagements.
For weeks at a time I would see more of Diana than my own darling wife, Ann.
The Princess and I were thrown together by circumstance — but we got on well together.
Ten years after her death William and Harry invited me to write a tribute and provide some pictures for their mother’s Wembley memorial concert.
Those first, early meetings with Diana — then a shy teenager — remain burned into my memory nearly 40 years on.
My job on The Sun had been to be the first to identify and photograph the woman who would steal Prince Charles’s heart.
I did find her and photograph her before my rivals.
But I shoved the picture in a drawer because I couldn’t believe the Prince, who was nearly 32, would be going out with a teenager.
My remarkable friendship with Diana began exactly a year to the day before her wedding to the world’s most eligible bachelor.
Tracking down Charles’s new love had become a bit of an obsession with me as I followed him everywhere.
Along the way I saw his other girlfriends, like Davina Sheffield and Sabrina Guinness, but they didn’t last long.
He had only recently broken up with Marjorie Wallace, a stunning girl with model looks who we all thought would be The One.
Then on July 29, 1980, the trail took me to a polo match at Cowdray Park at Midhurst, West Sussex.
I’d been told Charles had arrived with a girl called Lady Diana Spencer but no one seemed to know what she looked like.
Looking around I saw a pretty girl sitting among the crowds wearing a necklace with the letter D on it.
I gave it a go and politely asked: “Excuse me, are you Lady Diana Spencer?”
When she said yes I asked to take a photograph. So she posed for me, her hand delicately framing her face.
It was the first of hundreds of thousands of pictures I would take over the coming years.
But I filed this one in a drawer after discovering that Earl Spencer’s youngest daughter, who worked as a nursery teacher, had only just celebrated her 19th birthday.
I had the scoop of the year but I sent the roll of film back to the office by messenger with a note, “File this, because I’m not sure”.
A month after I’d first photographed her I was driving along the banks of the River Dee near Balmoral, certain she was The One.
Then I saw Prince Charles fishing with an unusual-looking ghillie.
It was Diana dressed as a man. I stopped the car and tore across the field, while Diana ran away, hid behind a tree and used a mirror to look over her shoulder to see where I was.
She suddenly made a dash for it through the trees and I got all these pictures.
Charles stomped out of the river fuming because his fishing had been interrupted.
We then ran my photo of Diana from the polo on Page 1 with a headline: Lady Diana Spencer — All the Qualities to be Queen.
The next day, I trawled around dozens of nurseries in West London looking for her.
Finally I knocked on the door of the Young England kindergarten in Pimlico and asked: “Does Lady Diana Spencer work here?”
She did. I was delighted when she agreed to pose but she insisted on being photographed with two of the children in her arms.
I took her into the park with the children. Halfway through the shoot the sun came out and we saw those beautiful legs.
Later, when the pictures were processed, I went back and told Diana about her see-through skirt.
Blushing, she said: “I’d hate to be known as the girl who didn’t wear a petticoat.”
I never deliberately set out to create a photo like that but when I saw it I was delighted.
Recently Natasha Kaplinsky on BBC Radio 5 Live took me to task over it.
She asked: “Why did you take it?”
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I did it because it was a great picture. It became one of the most famous images of Diana, remembered by everybody.
Every day the Press would go to the lovely flat Earl Spencer had bought Diana and take pictures of her leaving for work and coming home.
Looking back, she coped with it all very well.
One day, she stopped me and asked: “Why are you so interested in me?”
I said: “You know why, you seem the perfect girl with no past.”
She just smiled and laughed and the reporter with me said: “If you get the big job you’ve got to give me and Arthur knighthoods.”
It was a bit of fun.
My last picture of her
THIS picture of Diana on a trip to Bosnia in July 1997 is the last I took of her.
It was also the first portrait I’d taken with a digital camera. I remember I had to send it through four times to get the colours right.
Later, I watched as she was driven past my Sarajevo hotel to the airport to fly home.
I looked at Diana in the car — a woman who used the privilege of being the Princess of Wales for the betterment of others, never herself — not knowing it would be the last time I ever saw her.
I can’t believe she’s been gone for 20 years. She helped many things change for the better.
Buckingham Palace is now proactive, positive and helpful. So different from the past — and it is all down to Diana.
Her great legacy is William and Harry.
When I see them interacting with kids, I always think of their mother.
Only noise was horses' hooves... and sobbing
OUTSIDE the Paris hospital where I took this picture of Diana’s coffin my tears started to flow.
I was overcome by grief. I suddenly realised it was the end. It was all over.
It seemed everybody was affected by it. My wife and I took lilies and placed them on the great swathe of blooms outside Kensington Palace.
We watched Diana’s pilot standing in the two-hour queue waiting to sign the Book of Condolence.
I remember going to a press briefing about her funeral and being told the boys will not be walking behind the coffin.
As long as I live, I will never forget the eerie atmosphere outside Westminster Abbey as the funeral cortege approached.
All you could hear was the horses’ hooves on the cobblestones and people sobbing. Not crying, sobbing. Men, women and children all sobbing their hearts out.
As her boys walked slowly behind the gun carriage carrying Diana’s coffin — despite the briefing — one woman cried out and spoke for us all, “God bless you Harry, God bless.”
Many famous and not-so-famous people were at the funeral.
I remember seeing Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise alongside David and Elizabeth Emmanuel who had made that beautiful wedding gown that took my breath away.
People were hanging off lamp posts to get a good view.
I remember her brother, Earl Spencer’s speech that was broadcast to the crowds and everybody cheering his sentiments.
They even extended the route as so many people wanted to say farewell as she travelled to her final resting place at the Spencer’s ancestral home, Althorp.
Wherever I went afterwards, everyone I spoke to told me they watched Diana’s funeral.
It seems the whole world had stopped to watch the televised farewell to this remarkable woman who died too young.
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