A critical plot point in the fourth season of The Crown centers around a deadly avalanche in Switzerland involving Prince Charles. Much of the story focuses on the suspense of whether or not the Prince of Wales survived the natural disaster, but it also reflects on the tragedy of the death of Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the Queen, and a friend of Charles and Diana.
The 25th anniversary edition of Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words, Andrew Morton's biography of the Princess of Wales, which was reportedly written with her collaboration, includes an edited transcript of the interviews Diana gave to Morton. In it, Diana describes the events of that tragic day.
She and Sarah Ferguson had not been out on the slopes when the avalanche occurred; Diana hadn't been feeling well, and Fergie, then pregnant with Princess Beatrice, had fallen earlier in the afternoon.
"She landed upside-down in a ditch and had come back shaken, pale and exhausted. I put her to bed and both of us were in the chalet and we heard this helicopter go up," Diana said. They immediately knew something was wrong, and then heard a royal aide come in. "We heard him say: 'There's been an accident.'" Once he realized Diana and Fergie were there, and had heard him, he didn't want to elaborate, but eventually Diana forced him to explain. "He said: 'There's been an accident and one of the party is dead.'"
At first, they didn't know who had died, but eventually, it was confirmed that while Prince Charles was fine, their friend Hugh Lindsay had perished in the natural disaster.
"Fergie and I were closer to Hugh than Charles ever was. Hugh just felt sorry for Charles. He was very good with all the members of my husband’s family, he was always a star trouper," Diana said in the transcript. She also detailed how she and Fergie packed Hugh's suitcase for Sarah, and how she insisted they take his body home the next day. "We're going home, to take the body home to Sarah; we owe it to Sarah to take the body home. And we're not going skiing tomorrow," she said.
Simon & Schuster Diana: Her True Story--in Her Own Words
Diana also provided a detailed account of the aftermath of the avalanche. "We arrived back at Northholt and we had Hugh’s coffin in the bottom of the aeroplane and Sarah was waiting at Norholt, six months pregnant and it was a ghastly sight, just chilling," she said in In Her Own Words.
Following her husband's death, Sarah came to stay with Diana at Highgrove for a few days.
"She cried from dawn to dusk and my sister came and every time we mentioned the name of Hugh, there were tears, tears, but I thought it was good to mention his name because she had to cleanse herself of it, and her grief went long and hard, because he was killed in a foreign country, she wasn’t out there with him, they’d only been married eight months, she was expecting a baby," Diana said.
"The whole thing was ghastly and what a nice person he was. Out of all the people who went it should never have been him."
As the digital director for Town & Country, Caroline Hallemann covers culture, entertainment, and a range of other subjects
