Skip to main content

Diana and her stepmother!

 

Diana and her Stepmother

Countess Raine Spencer was standing in her grand English manor when the most famous woman in the world lunged forward and shoved her down the stairs.

Life had been one steep climb for Raine — until she met Princess Diana, who was determined to keep her down, both physically and metaphorically.

The daughter of a romance novelist, Raine used her beauty and her wits to rise through the social ranks until she was a noblewoman with a luxurious home, an extensive staff and a wardrobe of taffeta gowns that made her look like a delicate little cream puff.

But as she tumbled down the steps, Raine might have wondered if it was all worth it.

A fortuitous marriage brought Raine into Diana's ancestral home.

In a scandal that rocked London high society, she had left her husband, Lord Dartmouth, for an even higher born aristocrat, Earl Spencer, in 1976.

Her new husband came with many treasures, including Althorp, a sprawling, 5,300 hectare estate that had been in his family since the 16th century.

But he also had four children from a previous marriage, two of whom still lived at home: his son and heir Charles, the Viscount Althorp, and his youngest daughter, little Lady Diana Spencer.

Traumatised by their parents' acrimonious divorce, the children despised their new stepmother — so much so, they sang "Raine, Raine, go away" to her every chance they got.

Even after Diana grew up, married the heir to the British throne and became the Princess of Wales, she maintained her rage against Raine.

And in 1989, the tension between them exploded.

The Spencers had gathered at Althorp for the wedding of Diana's little brother when an argument broke out.

"It happened on the top of the saloon stairs," Raine's personal assistant, Sue Howe, recounted in the documentary, Princess Diana's Wicked Stepmother.

A man and a woman pose together at the bottom of a grand staircase
Witnesses say Princess Diana pushed Raine Spencer down the steps in the saloon of Althorp. ()

"She had a furious row with Raine because Diana was so upset that her own mother had been ignored in the ancestral home, and she pushed her, and Raine fell down the stairs.

"She was badly bruised and was dreadfully upset."

Ms Howe believed that the then 28-year-old princess, whose marriage to Prince Charles was beginning to spin out of control, was "very stressed" at the time.

"It was not justified at all. It was a cruel, heartless thing to do," she said.

But three years after she sent her stepmother tumbling down the steps, Diana was still unrepentant.

"I pushed her down the stairs, which gave me enormous satisfaction," Diana told her vocal coach in a recorded conversation in 1992.

"I wanted to throttle that stepmother of mine. She brought me such grief."

The war between Diana and Raine put two very different women at odds.

Diana was a blue-blooded aristocrat, born into one of the most important and powerful families in British history, whose destiny was to sit upon a throne.

Raine, meanwhile, made her own luck.

She parlayed her beauty, her charm, and her carefully concealed intelligence into three favourable marriages to men with titles, as well as a short-lived career in politics.

But fate held many surprises for both Raine and Diana.

In the final year of Diana's short life, when she was cast out by the royal family, the princess made a startling discovery.

Her "wicked" stepmother wasn't wicked at all, but the maternal figure she had always desperately needed. (Courtesy ABC Australia)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MORE photos of cricketers in Kenya added

More cricket photos added! Asians v Europeans, v Tanganyika, v Uganda, v East Africa, Rhodesia, etc some names missing! Photo Gallery of Kenya Cricket 23 photos: CM Gracias, Blaise d'Cunha Johnny Lobo! Ramanbhai Patel, Mehboob Ali, Basharat Hassan and hundreds others.  

Pinto: Blood on Western and Kenyan hands

  BOOK REVIEW   Pinto: Blood on Western and Kenyan hands   Review by Cyprian Fernandes     Pio Gama Pinto, Kenya’s Unsung Martyr 1927-1965 Edited by Shiraz Durrani [Vita Books, Kenya, 2018, 392 pp.   Pbk, £30, ISBN 978-9966-1890-0-4; distributed worldwide by African Books Collective, www.africanbookscollective.com ]   Less than two years after independence from the British, on 24 February 1965, the Kenyan nationalist Pio Gama Pinto was gunned down in the driveway of his Nairobi home.   His young daughter watched helplessly in the back seat of the family car.   Pinto, a Member of Parliament at the time, was Kenya’s first political martyr.   One man was wrongly accused of his death, served several years in prison and was later released and compensated.   Since then no one has been charged with the murder.   Now the long-awaited book on Pio Gama Pinto is finally here, launched in Nairobi on 16 October 2018....

The sanctuaries trying to save birds of prey from extinction in Kenya

  The sanctuaries trying to save birds of prey from extinction in Kenya (Courtesy of Al Jazeera) Poison, deforestation and power lines have pushed the African raptor population to a 90 per cent decline in the last 40 years. Raptor technician John Kyalo Mwanzia rehabilitates a juvenile fish eagle to flight after it was treated for grounding injuries sustained in a territorial fight at the Lake Naivasha habitat, at Soysambu Raptor Centre. [Tony Karumba/AFP] Simon Thomsett tentatively removes a pink bandage from the wing of an injured bateleur, a short-tailed eagle from the African savannah, where birds of prey are increasingly at risk of extinction. “There is still a long way to go before healing,” Thomsett explains as he lifts up the bird’s dark feathers and examines the injury. “It was injured in the Maasai Mara national park, but we don’t know how,” says the 62-year-old vet who runs the Soysambu Raptor Centre in central Kenya. The 18-month-old eagle, with a dist...