By Katie Nicholl
Harry enjoyed the company of glamorous women including waitress Christiane Mouttet
When Prince Harry passed out from Sandhurst on April 12, 2006, his girlfriend Chelsy Davy flew in from South Africa to attend the celebratory ball. Harry, then 21, had excitedly told his fellow officers all about his ‘knockout’ girlfriend and she did not disappoint, stealing the show in a stunning turquoise, bias-cut, silk dress that clung to her curves and dipped daringly at the back to reveal acres of tanned skin.
She had had several fittings at home to make sure the evening gown was perfect and had arranged her hair in a loose chignon. Harry kissed her as they danced the night away to a live jazz band.
Any worries Chelsy, then 20, may have had about her boyfriend’s night out the week before – his drunken dancing with strippers at a lap-dancing club had made the papers – were a distant memory. For now.
In the summer of 2006, Chelsy was at home working hard for her finals at the University of Cape Town – where she was studying politics, philosophy and economics.
Sadly, it was a summer of rather tacky confessions from the wayward Prince.
Harry had met Zimbabwean-born Chelsy two years earlier, and was smitten, enthralled by her tales of riding bareback and how she could strangle a snake with her bare hands. She was in her final year at Stowe School and was about to return to South Africa where her parents, Charles and Beverley, now lived.
When Harry travelled to Cape Town in April 2004, taking a break from a two-month humanitarian trip to Lesotho, he had every intention of reconnecting with her after getting her contact details from Simon Diss, the mutual friend who had introduced them.
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‘He got straight on the phone to her,’ recalls a friend. ‘Chelsy wasn’t impressed that he was a Prince, she just thought he was cute, so they met up.’
The chemistry was immediate. They went out with friends to a nightclub and by the end of the evening were locked in a passionate embrace on the dance floor.
Harry made several more trips to see Chelsy and, after returning to England, he would fly to Durban to stay at the Davys’ family home. They were wonderful visits, made all the more exciting by their secrecy. Chelsy was everything Harry wanted in a girl. He was in love. And, it seemed, the feeling was mutual. Chelsy had been waiting for someone special, and Harry was her first love.
Harry enjoyed the company of Natalie Pinkham (left), Astrid Harbord (centre) and Catherine Davies (right)
After Sandhurst, where Harry had thrived, he started an intensive 12-week training programme at the Household Cavalry’s headquarters in Dorset.
He had plenty of free time and on Fridays couldn’t wait to get home to London and hit Boujis nightclub in South Kensington. In June 2006, Harry spent the evening there with the one girl guaranteed to rile Chelsy, then at home in South Africa. TV presenter Natalie Pinkham had met the Prince in 2001 at a rugby match. They stayed in touch and Harry sent Natalie emails while she was in her student hall at Nottingham University, to the disbelief of her housemates.
There were reports that Harry had sent her a thong one Christmas and that he ‘fancied her rotten’ despite her being five years his senior.
That night at Boujis in June 2006, they were in the mood to party, and the champagne corks popped as they danced and chatted in the VIP room. At closing time, Harry suggested continuing the fun at former Royal aide Mark Dyer’s house
The Army officer turned gastro pub owner often allows his basement flat to be used as a party venue for Harry and his friends – much to the annoyance of the long-suffering protection officers, who have to wait patiently in their cars until their Royal charge is ready to call it a night. By 5am Natalie was ready for bed. As the Prince escorted her to his waiting Range Rover, Natalie, a little unsteady on her feet after eight hours of drinking, begged Harry for a kiss goodnight.
‘Not here,’ he said before whisking her back down the steps.
They emerged seconds later, blissfully unaware that their late-night encounter had been captured by a long lens. When the story hit the newspapers, there was an awkward long-distance call to Chelsy.
When Harry first met Zimbabwean-born Chelsy, he was smitten, enthralled by her tales of riding bareback and how she could strangle a snake with her bare hands
In May there had also been the rather breathless account of Catherine Davies, a 34-year-old mother of two who claimed she was chatted up by the Prince at a house party in Fulham.
‘I was absolutely speechless. I was against the wall and he literally lifted me off the floor and gave me a lovely kiss which I was stunned by,’ she told The Mail on Sunday.
Then in July he reportedly danced with a well-known Page 3 girl and a masseuse who claimed he had kissed her on the lips at Boujis.
The flurry of newspaper tales left Chelsy in tears but when she flew to London after term finished, the couple were inseparable and Harry assured her that she was the one.
He was calmer when Chelsy was around, and her positive influence had not escaped the notice of his father. For the first time Charles gave his seal of approval, allowing Harry and Chelsy to share a room at Highgrove.
When she flew home in August, Chelsy was confident they could last the distance.
They had hatched a plan for her to move to Britain, where she would enrol on a postgraduate course. When Harry finished his military training he was desperate for a posting to a war zone. There was no way he was going to, as he put it, ‘sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country’.
But plans to deploy him to Iraq or Afghanistan floundered when it was decided he represented too high-profile a target. He was devastated.
The MoD decided to send him to Canada to retrain as a battlefield air controller. It was the easiest way to get him to the frontline but it needed to be done covertly.
But within days of his arrival in May 2007, Harry was on the front page of a local newspaper, photographed in a clinch with a waitress. He had gone to a bar with two of his bodyguards and a group of Army colleagues and, the worse for wear, couldn’t resist chatting up one of the waitresses, an attractive 22-year-old called Cherie Cymbalisty.
‘He was very forward and told me I was stunning,’ she recalled. ‘He certainly didn’t mention anything about having a girlfriend. He sure didn’t act like he had one.’ Yet again, he had to face Chelsy’s questions.
Things got worse. Chelsy signed up for a postgraduate course in law at Leeds University and when she flew into Heathrow airport in September, Harry kept her waiting for close to an hour after she landed. When he eventually arrived, he looked like he had just rolled out of bed.
In October, he missed her 22nd birthday, instead flying to Paris to watch England play South Africa in the rugby World Cup.
Then he became friendly with a gorgeous Trinidad-born waitress called Christiane Mouttet. He had known her from Boujis, where she used to wait on the VIP tables, and they got along well. Having secured her phone number, he spent a fortnight texting her, and the rumour among his friends was that she had recently accompanied him home to Clarence House. News of their friendship had even reached Christiane’s home town in Trinidad where her family and friends were devouring every detail of the burgeoning romance.
‘Trinidad society is abuzz with some girl who has been seeing Prince Harry,’ I was informed.
When I spoke to Christiane about her friendship with Harry she told me: ‘We made a pact that we would never talk about what happened.’
Chelsy was furious and, in November, told Harry the relationship was over. She was not prepared to be made a fool of. Back in South Africa she had always been the prettiest girl in her glamorous and wealthy clique, never short of male attention.
Harry had worried particularly about an old friend from Zimbabwe, Bradley Kirkland.
Known to his friends as ‘Jabu’, he was close to Chelsy. They had never been romantically linked but Harry, who had heard that Jabu had once referred to him as a ‘wet fish’, felt threatened by the handsome student who hunted crocodiles as a hobby.
However, the separation was just a blip and within weeks they were back together – but their reunion was brief. In December, Harry was posted to Afghanistan, under a media blackout, where his job was to guide aircraft in combat zones.
At Forward Operating Base Dwyer, a dusty outpost in the middle of Helmand Province, Harry was in his element and quickly earned the friendship and trust of his comrades. He was also posted with the Gurkhas at FOB Delhi, close to the border with Pakistan.
'Chelsy was fed up with just being Harry's girlfriend. She felt she was making all the effort and he wasn't making enough. She also wants to be her own person, not just Prince Harry's girlfriend,' said one of her friends
Every week, like everyone else, he was allowed 30 precious minutes on a satellite phone. He used them to speak to his family and to call Chelsy. She would make him laugh with tales of disastrous dinner parties at her student digs – cooking was not her strong point. She kept the conversation upbeat, and only afterwards would she allow herself to cry. She was desperately worried for his safety.
They also managed to communicate intermittently via email , with Harry using the pseudonym ‘Spike Wells’. One time he wrote: ‘******* cold here. Like insanely cold bit weird!! Anyhoo, gotta go, lots of love to you, probably see you soon unfortunately for you, hehe! Laters ginge!’ In another he simply told the girl he calls ‘Chedda’ he was missing her. ‘I love you. I mis (sic) u gorgeous.’
Harry was reunited with Chelsy sooner than he had expected, after an American website chose to ignore the embargo on Harry’s deployment. It was too risky to keep him in Taliban heartland. He was brought home on March 1, 2008.
After his return, his various commitments (a trip to Lesotho, more training in Canada, a motorcycle rally for charity with his brother) meant that he and Chelsy saw little of each other and when they were together, they argued.
Harry embarked on the next stage of his Army career, training as a helicopter attack pilot with the Army Air Corps, enrolling at its headquarters at Middle Wallop in Hampshire on January 19, 2009.
He had 18 months of training ahead of him and, like William, Harry discovered becoming a pilot meant a lot of hard work, no drinking and little time for girlfriends.
While Kate Middleton had been prepared to wait for William as he embarked on his flying career, Chelsy was not. She told Harry she felt they had run their course and stopped wearing the blue topaz ring he had given her as a birthday present. Then she infuriated him by changing the status on her Facebook page to ‘Relationship: Not in one.’ Their romance was over in the click of a button.
Harry could not believe that Chelsy had done it so publicly, and he was angry and upset when The Mail on Sunday broke the story.
‘Chelsy was fed up with just being Harry’s girlfriend,’ said one of her friends. ‘She felt she was making all the effort and he wasn’t making enough. She also wants to be her own person, not just Prince Harry’s girlfriend. She fully respects his career, but they just don’t get enough time together and she’s a bit fed up with always coming second.’
Harry was not short of female admirers however. Just weeks later he was photographed with Natalie Pinkham in a nightclub. Paris Hilton had reportedly asked him out on a date. He exchanged telephone numbers with Natalie Imbruglia after meeting the singer at her 34th birthday party and pursued her with late-night texts and phone calls. In March he was linked with another glamorous young woman, Astrid Harbord, a 27-year-old Bristol University graduate and friend of Chelsy.
When they were photographed together on the back seat of Harry’s chauffeur-driven car entering the rear gates of Clarence House at 3am, this appeared to confirm that Harry and Astrid were a couple. In reality the friendship has only ever been platonic and they slept in separate rooms that night.
Astrid – along with her sister Davina dubbed the Hardcore Sisters by Tatler magazine – was the worse for wear and had passed out on Harry’s bed while he stayed in the spare room. ‘Astrid was mortified,’ says a friend. ‘The next morning she woke up to find William and Kate standing in the doorway offering her a cup of tea. Kate was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, William was laughing, and Astrid just wanted the ground to swallow her up.’
But Harry did take a shine to a young TV presenter called Caroline Flack. The pair were introduced through Natalie Pinkham at a poker tournament in April. Just weeks later they were pictured leaving Mark Dyer’s West London flat, and by June Harry had brought the Sky Sports presenter back to Clarence House. Yet, in fact, Harry was still in love with Chelsy.
Back in February, on Valentine’s Day, Chelsy had received a number of cards and bizarrely a copy of the movie Crocodile Dundee, sent anonymously. She suspected Harry. He had always been jealous of ‘Jabu’, to whom this seemed to be a reference – there were pictures of Jabu on Facebook stripped to the waist with a dead crocodile slung across his shoulders.
‘Chelsy laughed out loud when she got the present in the post,’ recalls a friend.
‘The card that came with it was anonymous but Chelsy had a feeling it was Harry and she called him up. Harry said he had nothing to do with the present but Chelsy just said, “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” That was when they started talking again.’
They were in constant touch from then on but there was no talk of getting back together until early August, when a clandestine meeting at Clarence House was arranged. As the Range Rover with tinted windows sped through the gates of Clarence House, Chelsy hid beneath a blanket on the back seat. Inside Harry was waiting for her with dinner and a bottle of wine.
Chelsy was still tanned from a recent holiday to Portugal. From her Facebook pictures, it had clearly been a great two weeks. One particular snap – a candid shot of Chelsy in a swimming pool, sitting in a giant inflatable ring with a nightclub promoter called Dominic Rose – had stuck in Harry’s mind.
Now, after a summer of meaningless flings, they realised they had missed each other, and, over drinks, decided to give their relationship another chance. Chelsy stayed the night for the first time in months.
On the night of Harry’s 25th birthday, in September 2009, they were together again – at a Chelsea nightclub. They had spent the night drinking vodka Red Bulls and at one point hit the dance floor together before leaving separately at the end of the night. The ruse fooled no one, and by October their secret was out.
Harry had inherited £6.5million of his late mother’s fortune when he turned 25, and when he treated a group of friends including Natalie Pinkham to a water safari in Botswana in October, Chelsy didn’t object.
She was once again wearing the topaz ring Harry had given her, safe in the knowledge that this time they were both committed to making things work.
Harry’s first love? Emma of the pashmina brigade
Glamour: Emma Lippiatt, Harry's off-and-on girlfriend for four years
She is the stunning blonde who captured and broke Prince Harry’s heart. Emma Lippiatt dated the Prince on and off for four years, and was the girl Prince Harry still refers to as his first love.
Although the relationship was often turbulent, Harry still speaks fondly of their romance, which started when he was in the sixth-form and ended only when the Prince was introduced to another glamorous blonde – Chelsy Davy.
Until now, Emma has only ever been referred to as one of the Prince’s friends, but now it has emerged she was in fact Harry’s first love and that the pair enjoyed a serious, albeit on-and-off, four-year relationship.
Emma, who is two years older than Harry, was a member of the ‘Glosse Posse’, William and Harry’s clique in Gloucestershire, and a close friend of Harry’s polo-playing chum Mark Tomlinson. While they had known each other for years, they only started dating in 2001 while Harry was at Eton and Emma was studying at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, close to Highgrove.
‘Emma was older than Harry, and absolutely gorgeous. They had known each other for years from when Emma was still at school in Bath, but in the summer of 2001 they became an item,’ recalls one of their friends. ‘Emma was one of the pashmina brigade and a girl not to be trifled with, you wouldn’t mess around with her. She’s a real country girl and an amazing horsewoman.
‘Harry and her would ride together and play polo and he was always blown away by how well she could ride. She was exactly his type, very sporty, blonde and gorgeous.’
Those who know the pair describe the relationship as ‘serious and often turbulent’.
‘Emma came into Harry’s life at a time when he really needed her. It was summer 2001 and Harry, or Barry as we nicknamed him as a joke, was pretty out of control. He had started drinking at the Rattlebone Inn, but we were all doing the same thing, basically drinking and having fun. They were wonderful times and Harry was furious when the story came out. He said, “Well, someone’s made a lot of money out of me.”
‘Emma was very protective of him and would keep an eye on him. Harry needed protecting, mostly from himself, and Emma did just that. One of our favourite games was the vodka water, one we would play at each other’s houses or at Club H. You’d fill one shot glass with vodka and the rest with water. The one who got the vodka would sit out the next round. Harry always filled all of the glasses with vodka and Emma would tell him off.
‘He also liked playing practical jokes and would go to Mothercare in Bath and buy a load of nappies knowing it would cause a sensation if he was photographed. Emma would tell him he was being silly.
‘They would argue and have really bad screaming matches, but they would always make up.’
Emma, in mauve scarf, watching rugby with Harry at Twickenham in 2002
During one of their ‘breaks’ Emma started dating another student, Tom Worbouys.
‘Harry was really hurt, he was very cut up. They broke each other’s hearts many times and Harry had flings as well. In 2003 he had quite a serious relationship with a local girl called Laura Gerard-Liegh but his real first love was Emma.
In the end Emma went back to him. She was very pretty, very smart and very sassy and Harry adored her.
‘At weekends she would drive to see him at Eton, often with Jamie Murray Wells, and Harry would come to Gloucestershire to see her.
‘Emma’s family live in a 16th Century farmhouse, but she was living in a student house with three friends in a cul-de-sac in Cirencester. The road would always be blocked with police cars whenever Harry arrived.’
The relationship withstood numerous break-ups over the four years they were together and only really came to an end in 2004 when Harry met Chelsy.
He was introduced to the Zimbabwean-born Stowe student by his best friend Simon Diss at a polo match in Cirencester and he fell for her immediately.
‘It’s funny, Chelsy and Emma are actually very alike,’ recalls a friend of the Prince. ‘They both like a drink and a smoke, they are brainy, blonde and beautiful and they could both wrap Harry around their finger.’
source: dailymail