The Death of Princess Diana
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 913 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2017
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Princess Diana's brother remembers the passionate speech he gave at her funeral, and one of the doctors who treated her at the scene of her fatal car crash remembers her death.
Plus, how George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, the development of a revolutionary new 3D medical scanning technique, and the birth of the online auction site eBay.
Picture: Earl Spencer and Prince William at Princess Diana's funeral. Credit: Getty/AFP
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and |
| 0:03.4 | welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson |
| 0:04.8 | the past brought to life by those who were there. |
| 0:07.8 | This week the founding fathers of the eBay revolution, |
| 0:11.0 | the invention of 3D head scanning, and Richard Blair, the son of Eric Blair, better |
| 0:15.8 | known by his nom de plume. George Orwell, well, George was the name of the King, it was a very common |
| 0:21.6 | Christian name, and Orwell was the river Orwell that ran through |
| 0:25.4 | Ipswich, which of course was a river not very far from Southworld. |
| 0:29.1 | More from Richard Blair later. |
| 0:30.8 | But for the first half of the podcast today, we're going to look at the event which dominated |
| 0:35.1 | the world news exactly 20 years ago. It was on the 31st of August 1997 that Diana Princess of Wales died in a car crash in Paris. |
| 0:45.0 | She was mother to the Royal Airs, Prince William and Harry, |
| 0:48.0 | the ex-wife of Prince Charles, |
| 0:50.0 | and almost certainly the most famous and photographed woman in the world. |
| 0:54.0 | Diana's death was one of those I remember where I was when I heard the news moments. |
| 0:58.5 | For example, I can recall being summoned into the World Service home in those days Bush House and being on air for |
| 1:03.6 | hours as the detail of what had happened emerged. We'll be hearing from Diana's brother, Earl |
| 1:08.8 | Spencer, in just a moment. But before that, Mike Lanchin has spoken to one of the doctors who treated the princess, and to one of Diana's closest friends, Rosa Monckton, who was woken in the early hours of the morning to hear news of that car crash involving Diana and |
| 1:25.2 | her companion DoDial fired. |
| 1:27.4 | It's August 31st 1997. |
| 1:30.7 | Rosa Monckton has just been woken with the first news of a terrible accident in Paris. |
| 1:36.0 | It involves her close friend and the godmother to one of her daughters, |
... |
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