Lady Eliza Spencer has recalled her heartbreaking reaction to her aunt Princess Diana’s death in 1997.
Eliza, 32, who models for high-end fashion brands alongside her identical twin sister, Lady Amelia, is one of Diana’s younger brother’s seven children.
The blonde beauty’s father, Earl Charles Spencer, 61, shared a very close childhood bond with the late princess and has described his sister’s death as ‘an amputation’.
Eliza, who was raised in Cape Town, South Africa, with her twin, her older sister Lady Kitty, 34, and her younger brother Louis, Viscount Althorp, 31, and her half brother Samuel Aitken, 22, told The Standard that Diana came to stay with the family ‘just a few months before she passed away’.
Recalling the visit, she said: ‘We were five, but we remember going to the beach with her, and her being a very gentle and kind and sweet figure in our lives.’
When Charles told the twins that Diana, who was only 36, had died, Eliza responded with the question: ‘But not in real life, Daddy?’
‘We thought it couldn’t be real,’ Eliza reflected.
In the same interview, the twin sisters spoke about their recent, seventies-inspired fashion campaign with quintessentially British brand Aspinal of London.
They also revealed that their mother, former model Victoria Lockwood, 60, has been their ‘biggest fashion role model’ and ‘biggest cheerleader’ professionally.
Referring to their mother, Amelia added: ‘She’s so naturally chic, she never tries too hard – it’s less is more.’
Their father Charles has spoken openly about his grief for Diana and last month described losing her as ‘such an amputation’.
Reflecting on his ‘sibling grief’, he also revealed that he always felt an intense need to protect Diana – and even intervened when a journalist wrote a ‘horrendous article’ about her.
Charles appeared on ITV’s Loose Men – a variant of the channel’s daily show Loose Women – which is back on screens to mark Mental Health Awareness week.
Reflecting on losing the sister he shared his childhood with, Charles said: ‘It’s such an amputation.
‘You grow up with these people, they are your flesh and blood, they’re with you forever – and then they’re gone.’
Describing losing a sibling as ‘a really extraordinary thing’, Charles recalled how, even years after his sister’s untimely death at the age of 36, he would still think to pick up the phone and call her.
He said: ‘For years after Diana died, I would think, “I must ring her and tell her something,” because we shared the same sense of humour.’
‘You just realise, of course, that’s not going to happen,’ he added.
While Charles also grew up with two other sisters – Lady Sarah McCorquodale, 70, and Lady Jane Fellowes, 68 – he was much closer in age with Diana, who would have been 63 today, and said they grew up together.
He said: ‘I don’t share my childhood with anyone anymore. That’s a great loss that you can never really put right.’
Charles, who last year published a harrowing account of the abuse he was subjected to at Maidwell Hall prep school, also told fellow panelist Craig Doyle about the responsibility he felt to protect Diana.
Despite being only 16 when Diana burst into ‘the public light in 1981’, Charles was eager to ‘get stuck in’ and ‘deal with the photographers who were plaguing her.’
On another occasion, he really did get involved, contacting a journalist who had written ‘a really horrendous article’ about her himself.
He explained: ‘I remember just before she died, a female journalist wrote a really horrendous article – because by that stage I don’t think that journalist was thinking of Diana as a person.’
Charles regretted that Diana had become ‘something to make money out of’ and wrote an ‘outraged letter’ to the journalist, which developed into ‘a bit of a to and fro’.
He concluded: ‘I think, particularly as a brother of a sister, you always feel like you want to get stuck in really.’
Earl Spencer’s parents had five children between 1955 and 1964. Lady Sarah McCorquodale was born in 1955 and Lady Jane Fellowes followed two years later.
The couple’s third child, John Spencer, died hours after being born in January, 1960.
The late Princess Diana was born in 1961 and the youngest, Earl Charles Spencer, was born in 1964.
The siblings’ father John worked as a royal equerry for both King George VI and the young Queen Elizabeth II, and the family initially rented a home at the royal estate in Sandringham.
When Frances and John divorced, the two youngest Spencer siblings lived with their father, who Charles described as ‘quiet and a constant source of love’ in a 2020 interview with The Sunday Times.
