Did people really love Princess Diana that much?

[canjest]

I just wondered as I knew she was well liked but videos like this show brown men crying!

www.instagram.com/reel/CnOCMtSKK_b/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

True ! Also the how she would have looked at 50 , what sort of grandmother would she have made? etc . So boring

No, she wasn't. People went completely mad, it was bizarre to watch. She was always in the papers but usually negative stories after the divorce, and people thought she was irritating with all the doe eyes and soft voice.

The media reaction was just to sell papers. There was no social media, TV news and newspapers were all there was.

Obviously the timing and manner of her death were very sad, but the mass hysteria was something else, and highly embarrassing to look back on.

I think there was a bit of guilt mixed in with the hysteria tbh for the part people played in her demise through the constant consumption of newspaper articles and photos. And people of my generation (born at roughly the same time) had literally followed her life, from the time she became engaged to it's very end, so there was an expectation I suppose that she would live the usual three score years and ten and complete shock when she died so suddenly.

She was tall and naturally photogenic and the British tabloids and foreign media made huge amounts of money from her image. The press built her up in order to knock her down in more or less continuous cycle. I once saw a documentary clip of paparazzi swearing at her, spitting and calling her a whore, in order to get her to react so they would get a nice cash payout for an action photo! Truly vile!

Also it's hard to describe with so many high profile celebrities being so accessible nowadays through sm, but at that time she was one of the most famous women in the world who had a huge following among diverse sections of society; among gay men for one (because of her work with the Terrence Higgins Trust) and among many ethnic minorities groups and the homeless; and other groups with whom the royals were not traditionally that popular.

The palace machine in typically misogynistic style has done it's best to cast her as an unstable airhead for the past couple of decades, but her press secretary who worked with her for eight years said she was extremely disciplined, energetic and professional when it came to her charity work. She definitely had a natural warmth and an intuitive knack of interacting well with people; as anyone who has done any hospital visiting will tell you, it's not always an easy job. I don't think anyone regarded her as a saint, but in a way people responded to her flaws, and she was liked for her warmth and humour, and many felt genuine sadness when she died.

The coverage was more engulfing than the Queen because there was no media escape- radio/tv/magazine/newspaper. We were on a long drive on the day so up motorways. Listening to the radio and people phoning in to say it was bad taste that service stations didn’t have flags at half mast. Ridiculous mostly fixed flags that never moved, but as we drove up the country companies had taken them down.

There was no blueprint for the media of what would happen in event of her death like with the Queen or if Prince Charles had died.
I found it sad but didn’t grieve that way. The people ready to be interviewed were part of the mass grief or hysteria and im sure anyone on a phone in would have been shouted down for saying it was too far, but it was there.

if you google there are some interesting articles about mass observation at the time with plenty saying she was fine but it went too far.

As for the mass mourning and wailing at the funeral etc; I think the media were partly to blame for building up the hysteria. But at the same time, people wouldn't go to the trouble of travelling and buying and laying flowers, and sleeping all nights on pavements for someone they hated. I guess there's always the element of wanting to be there at a memorable moment in history too, as we saw with the passing of the late Queen.

Also, because we don't really know what the royals are really like (even though some may think they do!) part of their role is to be some sort of symbolic totem on which the public hang all of their unprocessed grief on these occasions. Ritual is very important to humans I think, but we need an anthropologist or theologian on here to explain mass grief better than I can!

It was my son's third birthday party on the day of the funeral. The party went on as normal. We had the coverage on TV with the sound down because it was quite fun to watch al the pomp, but no one was very much bothered.

Honestly, it is only now that I am older that I really understand how easy it is for people to imisunderstand the past. In my arrogant youth I used to have the lofty view that people of a later generation could achieve greater insight and accuracy about the past than was possible at the time.
I feel like revisiting my entire understanding of the twentieth century now that I realise this is not the case.

I don't know anyone who did cry.

No one in my family. No one in my now ex's family. None of my friends.

We hardly gave a thought other than it's sad that young boys have lost their mum. Like plenty of other kids in the world.

The mass hysteria was crazy. It left us very bemused.

That drives me nuts. Kate giving a nod/tribute to Diana because she's wearing a dress a similar colour to one Diana wore. I think its safe to say that never once when choosing an outfit has Kate (or anyone else) worn something as a tribute to a long dead MIL who she never met

Lots of people did love her.
It was seen as superior by some people to sneer at her though and sneer at those who loved her.

And there were enormous queues at Town and City Halls to sign books of condolence.
Millions watched her funeral.
Most people know where they were when they heard she had died.

I'm 56 so remember clearly when she died. It was a kind of mass hysteria. I didn't have any particular views about her either way so it was all quite bizarre and strange to observe. All a bit mad really!

Damn right it’s ‘superior’ to not allow yourself to go hysterical with self-indulgent faux-grief over the death of a celebrity known primarily for a disastrous marriage, and who was until pretty much the moment of her death the focus of increasingly disapproving media stories.

The sneering was about people liking her or caring about her as well as grieving over her death.

The British television audience was 32.10 million on average for her funeral, one of the United Kingdom's highest viewing figures ever.[5] An estimated 2 to 2.5 billion people watched the event worldwide, making it one of the biggest televised events in history.

@ Just for loafs (🙈)

It is you who is revisionist, I think.

People were very upset by her death, because it was felt that she had had a rough deal, marrying a self centred adulterer who never pretended to love her. The British do tend to sympathise with the underdog.

She did very good work for charity; she was the first ‘celebrity’ or royal to dare to shake the hand of an aids victim, which was a bit of a turning point in peoples attitudes to a disease that had been heavily stigmatised. She campaigned against land mines when the establishment was only interested in profiting from the sale she more or less single handed shamed the UN into action.

People also thought Diana had tried to bring up her sons to have a better grasp of non royal life than her husband. Perhaps if she had lived we wouldn’t see the appalling spectacle of ‘Spare’.

in my village, the fête which was being held that day was spontaneously cancelled by 10 am. We had meeting with our builder that morning , he came in very sombrely and his first words were ‘ this is a very sad day’

I’m sorry that you feel so bitter towards someone you never knew, who touched many lives for the better.

The same holds. That ‘liking’ and ‘caring’ contributed largely to her death, after all. No paparazzi would have been hounding her if there hadn’t been such a huge public appetite for photos and stories, which is what ‘liking’ actually means in that context. It means ‘I will read the newspapers and magazines that feature her’. I can’t imagine there were many Diana lovers who on principle wouldn’t click a Daily Mail link to a story about her.

It was very shocking at the time. People were certainly upset. I remember people crying on the tube.

My mum (born 1918) adored her. She hated the fact that she’d been sacrificed to a loveless marriage. She definitely had charisma.

We didn't like or care for her honestly.
We did watch the funeral because it was a huge societal event ( and they had closed the shopping center where boyfriend worked along with everything else)

I don't think mass hysteria was the term, but there was national mourning/outpouring of grief. I remember TV and radio shows being cancelled, and sad music being played instead. It was the talk in schools and workplaces for weeks.

She was still pretty idolised. You have to remember although there had been good and bad stories in the media, it wasn't 24/7 like it is today, you saw/read a story and then forgot about it, the Internet was only in it's youth back then.

It is only now, in latter years I've read historical things about Diana that many wouldn't have seen or known about back then. So I think most people had a favourable opinion of her. Many still do of course. I still think she's seen in a favourable light but at a hit of a button you can now read a plethora of stories and opinions about anyone famous over the years.

Probably mostly it was because it was a shock tragic accident, someone so young, a loving mother, who had seemed to have quite an unhappy life and possibly now finding her feet and had tried to do some good charity work. Just a sad story really

When she died I was late teens, living in a very average backwater working class town in the Midlands, and nobody was especially bothered about the Royals apart from maybe a few people, but certainly nobody I knew or mixed with. When she died we all thought it was sad, especially for the kids, but all the OTT crying and conspicuous grieving was on the telly, most people were rolling their eyes at the sheer hysteria of it all.

Opinion polls at the time.

"The parallel U.S. and U.K. Gallup surveys suggest that the loss of Diana is a personal one for much of the public. Fully half of British adults say they feel as upset about her death as they would if someone they knew had died; 27% of Americans feel this strongly. Most of the rest say they are sad about her death, but not in the way they would be if they knew the person."

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4345/gallup-polls-britain-us-record-public-reaction-dianas-death.aspx

The idea it was only a few crazies who cared is a rewriting of history.

That doesn’t tell you how people felt before she died. There was a massive shift, probably in part due to the guilt of people who’d enjoyed being unkind about her.

Totally agree