William and Harry: Behind the Palace Walls by Katie Nicholl

Author:Katie Nicholl
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 1602861404
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Published: 2010-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Stepping in line at Sandhurst

Nobody’s really supposed to love it, it’s Sandhurst … you get treated like a piece of dirt to be honest.

Prince Harry

Harry had dreamed of joining the army since he was a little boy dressing up in military fatigues and playing toy soldiers. When he was accepted as an officer cadet at Sandhurst his dream came true. Harry would become the first senior royal to join the British army since 1960, when Prince Michael of Kent, the Queen’s cousin and grandson of King George V, enrolled at the Royal Military Academy. Traditionally the Windsors have served in the Royal Navy. The Duke of Edinburgh joined in 1939 and commanded the frigate HMS Magpie, while Prince Andrew, Duke of York reached the rank of honorary captain in the Royal Navy. Charles also served in the Royal Navy after training as an RAF pilot. Harry had heard all about Sandhurst from Mark Dyer. The college was formed in 1947 by the amalgamation of two previous army training colleges and under its motto ‘Serve to Lead’ has trained officers from all over the world. At the end of their training Sir Winston Churchill and King Hussein of Jordan both passed out on the famous quadrangle in front of Old College, and now it was Harry’s chance to undertake the punishing forty-eight-week training course.

Following his somewhat controversial and unplanned double gap year, the prince was finally ready for some serious work. He had been warned that the first five weeks at the military academy would be the hardest of his life and that 15 per cent of all cadets drop out during this period, but he had already had a taste of what was to come during a four-day assessment in Westbury, Wiltshire. It had been tough, but he had passed the notoriously hard Regular Commissions Board entrance exams with flying colours. Due to enroll in January 2005, he sustained an injury to his left knee while coaching rugby to children in October 2004, and had to delay his entry by four months, but on the morning of 8 May 2005 Harry promised himself he would not fail. As he pulled up at Old College, the grand cream-fronted nineteenth-century building that looks on to the academy’s quadrangle, acres of greenery and a man-made lake, Harry took in his new surroundings. His father had driven him to Camberley and now looked proudly on as Harry, still tanned from a two-week safari in Botswana with Chelsy, enrolled as Cadet Wales.

For the first five weeks Harry was allowed to venture no further than the academy’s main buildings – Old College and New College – and the exercise fields. While Camberley town has little to offer in terms of nightlife and eating out, it is just thirty-four miles south of London, and the fact that Harry could not leave was a daunting prospect for the young prince. The idea is that by keeping the cadets within the academy, everyone is treated and assessed uniformly and has the chance to bond with their platoon.

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