Wills & Wills

The other Prince William: The uncanny parallels between Wills and the dashing but doomed cousin in whose memory he was named

 by Michael

Two men named William. Both princes, both pilots. Both polo players with a taste for danger. Both Eton-educated, handsome men of the world. One is destined to be our future king, while the other has been long-forgotten. Yet it is after Prince William of Gloucester, who died young in 1972, that the Duke of Cambridge was named. Next month, the older prince should have been celebrating his 70th birthday, but his life was cut tragically short. William of Gloucester, son of the Queen’s uncle the Duke of Gloucester, was Prince Charles’s hero — the man upon whom the future king modeled himself, and whose example, in so many things, Charles followed.

 

William was a dashing polo player, so Charles took up the sport. William chose Cambridge for his university education, so too did Charles. William had a fatal taste for married women, and — as we all know — Charles followed suit. But above all, William was cool — the one thing the young, earnest, wet-behind-the-ears Prince of Wales wanted to be but never quite achieved; though his dreams and ambitions to be that man live on in the son who was named after him.

 

William of Gloucester was just 30 when the Piper Arrow single-engine aircraft he was piloting in an air race crashed, killing him and his co-pilot outright. The shock that ran through the Royal Family was colossal, but the person most affected by the loss was his first cousin once removed, Prince Charles, who was 23 at the time.

Though the older man presented a perfectly conventional exterior to the outside world, clad in tweeds or polo blazer, he was somehow different to the other Windsors. He refused a career in the armed services — unheard-of in those days — and tried hard to turn himself into an ordinary citizen, even though at the time of his birth he was fourth in line to the Throne.

 

He was the first member of the Royal Family to gain a university place through open competition, the first to arrive without the shadow of a private detective. When he went up in 1960, college staff were instructed to address him as ‘Prince William, Sir’, though the bedmakers who tidied his rooms soon slipped into calling him ‘Mr Prince William’. He worked hard for his history degree, though he modestly told his tutor: ‘I’m afraid we are not a very bookish family — I can’t work more than five days a week.

He was right about the unbookishness. His father, the Duke of Gloucester — younger brother of King George VI and the Duke of Windsor — had a well-earned reputation as a buffoon, while his mother, Alice, a daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, was a prim and rather silent matriarch. Reading was not a priority in the family. But William was bold, stylish, different. Like his present-day namesake, he loved skiing, shooting and nightclubs — and drove a high-powered sports car. 

 

While at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he conceived an expedition across Africa in two Land-Rovers accompanied by six friends — an odyssey echoed 45 years later by the 1,000-mile road trip across the same continent by Princes William and Harry in 2008. He also threw himself into the social side of life at college. At the beginning of his third year, he masterminded a traditional mock funeral procession for two undergraduate friends who were being sent down for failing their exams. The ‘deceased’ sat bolt upright in open coffins pulled on a cart through Cambridge, and accompanied by pallbearers including the Prince, and two trumpeters. Invitation cards with heavy black edges had been sent out for the event.

 

After graduating, William looked round to find himself an ordinary job. ‘I’m blowed if I’m going to be treated as a mascot,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I may be arrogant and conceited in thinking myself capable of succeeding in some other career. But, on the other hand, I am going to have a bloody good shot at showing that, though I’m just a rather junior appendage to … the Monarchy, I can do as well as anyone else in some capacity where I have no privileges or advantages.’ To him, the Army seemed to be ‘the easy way out, and I want more of a challenge out of life’.

 

He signed up for a course at Stanford University in California, broadening his knowledge with the study of American history, German and Russian affairs, and economics. He then traveled incognito through America and Canada, earning admiring glances from the women he met, none of whom knew his privileged position back home. He took a job at Lazard’s merchant bank but hated it. Then, after three attempts at passing rigorous Foreign Office entrance exams, he won himself a job as Third Secretary at the British High Commission in Nigeria.

 

It was while here that he became aware of the first symptoms of a rare and incurable blood disease called porphyria — the self-same condition that had seized his ancestor George III, and from whom he had probably inherited it through several generations. And when Alan Bennett wrote The Madness Of King George, his Oscar-winning 1994 film, Prince Charles — having learned at first hand through conversations with his cousin William the perils of the disease — interested himself deeply in the production. As a result, all royal children are now routinely screened for this rare but pernicious condition.

 

Despite suffering fevers, nausea, and dizziness, William determined it should not affect his career or his leisure pursuits, and applied for a Second Secretary’s job at the British Embassy in Japan. It was in Tokyo that he fell desperately and hopelessly in love. The object of his affection was a Hungarian divorcee, seven years his senior, Zsuzui Starkloff. Having been briefly introduced to him, Zsuzui sent her chauffeur round to the embassy with a handwritten note saying: ‘Dear Prince Charming, I have a slipper missing. Would you like to come to a party?’

Later, William’s old Eton friend Giles St Aubyn recalled: ‘She was witty, intelligent, attractive. The rumors started to fly. ‘William sparkled in her company and she helped him enjoy life in Japan. [But] the relationship overshadowed everything else. ‘It resulted in a period of great anguish for him, for it involved him in disagreements with his friends and family.’ Most of all, it put the fear of God into royal courtiers back at Buckingham Palace. By this time, the succession had been assured with the births of the Queen’s four children, but the shadow of the old Duke of Windsor and his obsession with a twice-divorced woman was still fresh in people’s minds. Zsuzui Starkloff was not only twice-divorced, like Wallis Simpson, but had two children. She was also Jewish. Courtiers feared a colossal backlash if the relationship became public, but William pressed on —determined she should be accepted by one and all. Princess Margaret, passing through Tokyo, was introduced to her. This encounter emboldened him to bring Zsuzui back to Britain. He had written to his parents, enclosing photographs of Zsuzui, asking what their reaction would be if he proposed marriage to her.

‘They were against it,’ Zsuzui recalled later. ‘It came as no shock to me. I was seven years older than William for a start, divorced, and a different religion. I knew it was doomed.’ The prince did not. The couple arrived at Heathrow and drove to the Gloucesters’ country home, Barnwell Manor in Northamptonshire, where Zsuzui was introduced to the Duke and Duchess. So insistent was the Prince that he should have his way that she stayed on for six weeks in the company of his parents. He even took her to Balmoral and introduced her to the Queen.

 

That visit was sufficiently successful that later, on a flying holiday in California — he had taught Zsuzui how to pilot a plane — they discussed marriage. ‘We were very much in love,’ she later recalled. The relationship lasted nearly four years, but in the end William buckled to what he must have known was the inevitable conclusion of their relationship, and called a halt. He explained to a friend: ‘I am bound by the Royal Marriages Act [which required the Queen to give her consent to any marriage — which was unlikely in Zsuzui’s case]. There is no question of ignoring it.’ But the couple continued to write to each other, and Zsuzui lived in hope their love might be rekindled. ‘It was not all over,’ she recalled.

William resigned from the Foreign Office and took over the running of the family estate. The porphyria which had developed years before had not gone away, and he suffered increasingly uncomfortable symptoms. To ease the stress which came with those symptoms, he stepped up his flying, entering air competitions in his Piper Arrow. It was on August 28, 1972, that William took off, accompanied by an experienced co-pilot, Lt-Commander Vyrell Mitchell. They were taking part in the Goodyear International Air Trophy being held at Halfpenny Green near Wolverhampton. Soon after take-off, the plane executed a 120-degree turn towards the first leg of the course. ‘The angle of turn made by the Piper Arrow was observed to be too steep,’ according to his old Cambridge supervisor, Dr Ronald Hyam. ‘The aircraft lost height, cut through the top of a large tree, losing part of its wing, then rolled over, diving inverted into the ground, and burst into flames. Both pilots were killed instantly.’ As Dr Hyam adds: ‘It was a desperately sad and terrible end to the life of a remarkable young man of many talents, admired by all who knew him.’ The prince’s great love, Zsuzui Starkloff, paid her own tribute to him by gaining a commercial pilot’s licence and working in the aviation industry, delivering aircraft to customers. Today, she lives in Colorado and, at 77, no longer wishes to be reminded of her lost love. She never remarried.

 

Prince Charles, for a time, paid his own personal tribute to his cousin by growing the mutton-chop whiskers that were William’s trademark. He emulated his cousin on the polo field, on the ski-slopes, in the air, on the grouse moor — and in the bedroom. His relationship with the then Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles had more than an echo of William’s own passionate love for Zsuzui Starkloff. But in the naming of his first-born son after Prince William of Gloucester, Charles paid the greatest tribute possible to the man he most admired in the world.