It was October 1982, more than 40 years ago, when I was sent on one of my first royal jobs as a newly minted royal reporter for a London tabloid. Late one evening, I arrived home after a night out to find a note from my wife: ring the news desk, you’ve got to go to the Caribbean.
I was told that the then Prince Andrew, the hero prince who had just returned from the Falklands conflict, had been spotted on a plane bound for Barbados. By chance, Steve Wood, the royal photographer for the Daily Express, was on the same plane, and it was his girlfriend Katie Hobbs who eventually spotted Andrew.
He kicked himself for leaving his cameras in the hold, but had the sense, when they landed, to ring his news desk and tell them what he’d seen. He checked the flight manifest and discovered that a certain Mr and Mrs Cambridge had travelled on the plane in the seats occupied by Andrew and the unknown girlfriend.
The aliases led to feverish speculation that Andrew had secretly married and was going on his honeymoon. The merest suggestion sent the news desk into a frenzy of excitement. If the then third in line to the throne had secretly married, it would have been an extraordinary royal scoop.
So, at 6am, I was playing catch-up, boarding a plane to Miami with the award-winning cameraman Ken Lennox. Ken knew the PR at Pan Am, so we found ourselves at the front of the plane, dining on caviar followed by roast beef carved at the table. Those were the days.
From Miami we flew on to Barbados, then island-hopped to St Vincent, where we hired a plane in an attempt to reach the tiny, then little-known island of Mustique, made famous by Princess Margaret.
She had been given a ten-acre plot there by Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, as a wedding present in 1960, and on it had built Les Jolies Eaux, her celebrated holiday home, designed by Oliver Messel.
The gardens were later laid out and tended by Roddy Llewellyn, the landscape gardener who became Margaret’s much younger lover and whose relationship with the Princess had caused a tabloid sensation when photographs of them together on Mustique were published in 1976. The island’s name derives from the French word for mosquito and, as we would discover, it was a painfully apt name.
On tricky phone lines, word came back from London that Andrew and his party were indeed staying at Les Jolies Eaux.
In what started to unfold as a Boy’s Own adventure, we hired a plane from the nearby island of St Vincent to take us to Mustique, but the island’s air traffic control, essentially a bloke in a shed, told us no dice: it was a private island and no one could land. So we returned to St Vincent to find another way in.
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