Prince Charles Really Did Lose a Friend in a Tragic Avalanche in 1988
After three seasons of relatively slow-paced royal drama, The Crown really kicks into high gear in Season 4. Alongside the rollercoaster that is Charles and Diana, the new season involves a palace intruder in Queen Elizabeth's bedroom, an IRA bombing that kills Lord Mountbatten and, in its penultimate episode, an avalanche that came close to killing Charles, and did kill one of his close friends, Major Hugh Lindsay. Below, the true story of that devastating 1988 incident.
Where did the accident happen?
In March of 1988, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were on one of their regular skiing holidays with friends at Klosters, a notoriously exclusive resort in the Swiss Alps. On March 10, Charles was skiing on a famously difficult slope on Gotschnagrat Mountain. Per The Guardian's reporting at the time, the mountain's slopes are "amongst the steepest in Switzerland and are rarely open to the general public ... they are regarded as suitable only for experienced skiers like Prince Charles."
Charles was accompanied on the slopes that day by a mountain guide, Bruno Sprecher, and by a group of friends that included Major Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the queen, Charles, and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, and a Swiss police officer. While the group was "in a stationary position off-piste—meaning they were away from the prepared ski runs—an avalanche happened.
How did Hugh Lindsay die?
According to Buckingham Palace's account at the time, the avalanche began above the group, who were able to take cover. But Hugh Lindsay and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson were caught in a sudden snow slide, which had built up afresh during heavy snowfall the day before. Palmer-Tomkinson suffered severe leg injuries, while Lindsay was thrown 400 meters down the mountainside and buried by snow.
Princes Charles and the other members of the group weren't injured, and they tried frantically to dig their injured friends out. Per the BBC, "As soon as the danger had passed, Prince Charles, the guide and a Swiss police officer, who was skiing with the party, raced back to help the victims, digging with their bare hands in the snow to reach them."
Sprecher administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Palmer-Tomkinson while they waited for help to arrive, and Charles would later credit him with saving her life. Lindsay and Palmer-Tomkinson were helicoptered to a hospital in the nearby town of Davos, but Lindsay was pronounced dead on arrival.
Lindsay was just 34 years old, and was expecting a baby at the time with his wife, Sarah, who worked in the Buckingham Palace press office. After serving as the queen's equerry for a few years in the 1980s, he returned to full-time army duties in 1986.
How did Prince Charles react?
Charles was, understandably, devastated by the death of his friend. An eyewitness told the BBC: "He looked very distressed, somebody said he was crying, but he did walk to the helicopter so he looked uninjured."
Charles did eventually return to Klosters, visiting with his sons William and Harry several times during the 1990s. Diana, though, never went back to the resort after the tragedy, per The Telegraph.
Andrew Morton described Diana's response to the tragedy in his 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words. Diana and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, had stayed behind at the chalet on March 10, and were informed by a courtier that there had been an accident on the slopes. Morton wrote:
For what seemed like an eternity, the Princess and her sister-in-law sat at the top of the stairs, hardly daring to breathe let alone move, as they waited anxiously for more news. Shortly afterwards Prince Charles, sounding shocked and distressed, rang and told Philip Mackie that he was all right, but Major Hugh Lindsay... had been killed. Everyone started shaking in the first paroxysms of grief.
Morton also describes how Diana managed Charles in the days following the shock, and most notably how she talked him out of returning to the slopes:
The prince was not immediately convinced that they should abandon their holiday but Diana prevailed. She appreciated that he was suffering from shock and could not at that awful time comprehend the enormity of the tragedy. For once Diana felt absolutely in command of a very trying situation. In fact she was quite bossy, telling the Prince that it was their responsibility to return to Britain with Hugh's body.
The group did indeed cut their holiday short, and returned to the U.K. with the body on March 12. "The whole thing was ghastly," Diana recalled in her interview with Morton, "and what a nice person he was. Out of all the people who went it should never have been him."
You Might Also Like
