Society ladies were no longer presented to the Queen, but rather to a large, symbolic cake the distinction conferred by the season was being steadily eroded by Princess Margaret making salty remarks, probably when she was drunk. 1965-73: the debutanteīy the time Camilla was a 17-year-old debutante in 1965, the coming-out fandango was being wound down. The last thing you would have wanted them to emerge with was a bunch of O-levels. The girls’ estate is no different – and in the 50s and 60s it needed hostesses and broodmares. When Eton needed soldiers, it was a very harsh environment later, when it needed shysters and chancers, it adapted successfully to produce Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Public schools exist to create the material they need for the class they want to build. You can’t glean a huge amount from her academic record. She went to Queen’s Gate school in South Kensington, leaving with one O-level, and then Mon Fertile, a now defunct finishing school in Switzerland. Photograph: John Silverside/ANL/Shutterstock When popular historians write about kings and their mistresses, they always perform this elaborate bafflement when the royal in question doesn’t select for beauty, like a judge in Miss World: “Countess So-and-so was no beauty, yet Prince Whatshisface was smitten …” But when you consider the royal family, none of whom look remotely happy except in those split seconds when a horse has just won something – King Charles was “metaphorically born with a headache”, in the words of the royal biographer Hugo Vickers – it is not difficult to understand why the heir to the throne was drawn inexorably to the one woman in his circle who didn’t have an expression like a bulldog licking a nettle.Ĭamilla (left) with friends at an Eton versus Harrow cricket match in 1963. That is how school friends – indeed, all known associates – describe Camilla: optimistic, happy-go-lucky, untroubled. But all we need to know is that the Shands were wealthy, with houses in East Sussex and South Kensington raised Camilla and her younger siblings, Annabel and Mark (who died in an accident in 2014), in the regular way and were unusual for their class and era in only one respect: they were very supportive and loving.Ĭamilla has always described them warmly, while Annabel told Vanity Fair: “Unlike a lot of our generation, we had this incredibly warm, easy relationship with our parents.” Splice in some dogs and horses and this childhood, as if by magic, seems to have produced someone who is usually in a good mood. The Debrett’s world loves its fine distinctions: who came over with the Conqueror, who bought their own furniture a Pantone scale of blue blood. Camilla (centre) with her mother and siblings in 1952.
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