Later this month, Princess Diana’s younger brother Charles Spencer is releasing a memoir about his childhood, A Very Private School, which has a focus on the boarding school he began attending at a young age. In preparation for the book’s release on March 12, the earl has been taking a walk down memory lane by sharing old photographs on his social media accounts. On Saturday, he shared one rarely-seen photo that shows him posing with Diana and their late mother, Frances Shand Kydd.
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In his caption, Spencer comments on the family’s joyful appearance. “My mother, Diana and I, in c. 1967. I would have been 3, and Diana 5 or 6. I love how happy each of us looks,” she said. “At this stage of my life, my mother nicknamed me ‘Buzz’—because she saw me as having the endless energy of a rather happy—and busy—bee.”
The family’s apparent happiness would prove to be short-lived. During the summer of 1967, Frances would leave Charles and Diana’s father, John Spencer, and after the divorce she lost custody of the children and later remarried Peter Shand Kydd. She wrote about the complications that the separation would provoke in diaries later republished by journalists Max Riddington and Gavan Naden in their 2003 biography, Frances: The Remarkable Story of Princess Diana’s Mother.
“Johnnie and I would agree on an arrangement for the children, our respective lawyers would advise that this should be documented and, by the time they’d used their professional languages, a friendly agreement seemed to be complicated beyond all measure,” she wrote. “And this would invariably result in an argument. Not surprisingly, it would then be the children who suffered.”
In addition to the photograph of the trio in 1967, Spencer has been sharing photos from other significant moments in his life, including one that shows his sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale at the age of 11 and another from Nelson Mandela’s 2001 visit to his Althorp estate to pay his respects at Diana’s grave. He also shared a youthful portrait of his grandmother, Cynthia Spencer, looking remarkably like Princess Diana. It was drawn by John Singer Sargent in 1919.
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