Princess’ Death Shocks, Saddens British Citizens Living in County

The fatal car crash may have been thousands of miles away, but the news of Princess Diana’s death in Paris over the weekend hit hard among Ventura County’s British community and others who kept close watch on the royals.

“We just thought she’d live forever. We’d thought she’d be our queen,” said 41-year-old Bertrand Webber, a British citizen who has lived in Thousand Oaks for the past 14 years.

“I never met her, but like a lot of people I felt that in a way I knew her,” Webber said. “It’s horrible.”

The princess died after she and her companion, Dodi Fayed, a 41-year-old movie producer and heir to the Harrod’s department store fortune, were involved in a high-speed car crash early Sunday in a tunnel that skirts the River Seine. The driver of the car was also killed and a bodyguard remains in serious condition at a Paris hospital.

Since her divorce from Prince Charles in 1996, Diana has championed humanitarian efforts to stem the spread of AIDS and to focus international attention on children’s health issues.

“She was such a beautiful woman who did so much for the people of the world,” said Tricia McCarthy, a native of Scotland and owner of the Hare and the Hounds import store in Thousand Oaks. “It’s just devastating.”

Mark Savin, a 38-year-old Camarillo resident who immigrated to the United States from Britain 12 years ago, was hunched over the bar at the Victoria Pub in Ventura late Saturday when the news broke that the princess had died.

“It’s kind of surreal. . . . It’ll probably sink in in a couple of days,” he said. “That poor woman’s life went from a fairy tale to a complete nightmare.”

In Ojai, Carol Reid, owner of Mendips Teahouse, which is frequented by British customers, decided to close her business Sunday but kept the doors open for anyone who wanted to come in and talk about the news.

“It’s very hard to talk about it,” said Reid, 42, as her voice began to falter. “We had a British family in here yesterday who were on vacation and we talked about her. I can only imagine what they must be feeling today.”

While county residents learned that Diana, 36, had been involved in a fatal accident late Saturday night, residents of Britain awoke Sunday morning to clanging church bells, somber newscasts and the Union Jack flying at half-staff.

Glenda Lee-Barnard, 49, a former Thousand Oaks resident who moved to the small London suburb of Berkhamsted last month, described the mood in that country as one of panic and sadness.

She was awakened shortly after 4:30 a.m. by friends in the U.S. who told her the news that Diana, a woman whom Barnard herself had met when the two were schoolteachers in Chelsea, had been killed.

“The milkman cried when he gave me my milk this morning, and then when the postman arrived I saw he was crying too,” Lee-Barnard said in a telephone interview. “This is just a horrible tragedy for these people who loved Diana because she was one of their own.”

For Barnard, the news was especially difficult to come to grips with, not only because she admired Diana for surviving the harsh media spotlight and painful travails of the royal family, but also because her death fell near the anniversary of the shooting of Barnard’s son, David, and his subsequent paralysis in 1990.

“I started shaking the same way I did when I heard my son was shot,” said Barnard, who has become an anti-gun activist. “I just kept thinking of that young girl I met standing on a corner in a skirt and umbrella and how charming she was.”

Barnard considers Diana’s death an act of brutal and senseless violence perpetrated by cold cadres of greedy photographers. She hopes that the four men being detained by French investigators will be held accountable for the three deaths.

“What they did makes no sense,” Barnard said. “The paparazzi acted like mercenaries.”

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