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princessanneftw · 4 years

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Princess Anne’s organisations ➔ Save the Children Fund

Princess Anne began her work with the Save the Children Fund on 15 August 1970 - her 20th birthday - when she accepted their offer to become their new President. She immediately wanted to see the kind of work the Fund were doing on the ground, and so embarked on her first overseas trip with the Fund to their Centre in Nairobi, which was filmed by the BBC’s Blue Peter team. This was the first in a long line of trips which would see her travel to some of the most remote, poverty-stricken, and dangerous places around the world, and which saw a colossal growth for the charity.

While the majority of her engagements for the Fund are in the UK, it is on foreign tours that she gets involved with the Fund’s most important work and witnesses at first hand how the money she helps raise is used. These extensive tours for which she became famous for, beginning in the 1980s, were when people really began to sit up and take notice.

Visiting Nepal in 1981, the Princess spent ten days visiting the SCF’s four projects in the foothills and valleys of the Himalayas, which provide basic health care for mothers and children and are run by the locals, having been educated in modern health practices by the Fund workers. Around 300 children attended the clinics daily, trekking long distances to do so. To visit one clinic, Anne had a strenuous four-hour walk through the mountains, proving her stamina.

In 1982, Anne undertook her most extensive tour with the Fund yet, which was to be a major turning point for the Fund. It took her to Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, North Yemen and Beirut. Covering 14,000 miles in three weeks by air, road and boat, she was met with poverty, starvation and disease. She visited immunization centres in places where typhoid and polio were rife, camps with tens of thousands of starving refugees, and children who were on the brink of death.

She was advised to abandon the tour halfway through when continuing hostilities between Ethiopia and Somalia had begun to reach breaking point, and the Foreign Office deemed it too dangerous. “Damn them, I’m going on” was her response. If that wasn’t enough, she rejected further warnings that she should cancel her visit to Beirut when, the day before her arrival, 62 people had been killed by a bomb close to the point where she would be travelling. It only gave her further determination. The duration of her visit to the capital, where civil war had killed hundreds, was extended by several hours which she spent touring refugee camps, medical centres and some of the worst hit areas.

Throughout the tour, the press - who had only tagged along to try and get a scoop because Mark Phillips hadn’t gone with her - were admittedly shocked and impressed by where she went, what she saw and what she did. It was a first for a member of the Royal family. Startling, shocking pictures of human suffering, highlighted by her visit, were sent around the world, alerting a previously unaware public to the plight of the impoverished, disease-ridden conditions under which vast numbers of Africans were living - and dying, thus pointing the way to a massive relief effort. The Fund organisers were delighted with the impact of the tour, and it also gave great hope to those working for the children on the ground.

In 1984, she embarked on a ten-day tour of Morocco, Gambia and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), which she described herself as the most harrowing trip she’s ever made. When asked if she would ever consider a full-time career with the Fund, she said: “I have actually thought about it, but I think really I would only last about a year. What I saw, for instance, in Upper Volta made me realise I would not have the stamina to do it for much longer than that.”

What she saw was thousands of children who faced death within weeks. Life was in the hands of the weather: if the rains don’t come, the people starve. At the hospital in Gorom Gorom, she saw children with spindly legs and pot bellies through lack of food. Those too weak to move lay on rush mats, covered with flies. She brushed the swarming insects from one child’s face, but it was a futile task. “You have to stay remote,” she said, “or you’d just crack.”

There were no frills attached to these tours. Anne stayed in the refugee camps with the Fund workers. When asked about things like washing, her lady-in-waiting, the Hon. Shân Legge-Bourke, who often accompanied her, said: “We just stand under the shower with our clothes on - if there is a shower. But a bucket will do.” Anne neither expected nor received any special treatment for her Royal status. She slept in the same huts, was bitten by the same bed bugs - “little ‘friends’ who shared my sleeping bag” as she called them - and ate the same food.

Mark Bowden, who coordinated the African campaign, said: “There is a communal kitchen where the local staff prepare food that is either tinned, dried or heavily dominated by the only meat available - goat. There is goat stew, goat spaghetti bolonaise, goat everything you can think of... [Anne] is the most marvellous person who makes the most difficult conditions fun. Her presence gives everyone an enormous boost.”

Her position gave her immediate access to presidents and other government heads who might never have been persuaded to discuss their country’s problems. Here, she demonstrated a knowledge acquired from her experience: the need for village food banks, water schemes, locally trained health workers.

On a trip to India, Fund workers had been trying to negotiate the building of a new nutritional centre for which they were being asked to pay £200,000 for. The day after Anne arrived, it was reduced to £40,000. A donation of £750,000 from the Townswomen’s Guild, of which she is patron, was used to build other health centres. She managed to secure a further £70,000 which was used to finance long-term relief projects in Bangladesh.

In Uganda, the Fund had been trying without success for months to obtain permission to go to a certain area. When Anne visited the country, she spoke to the President personally and within days, permission was given. “That is the sort of help she can give to us which no one else can do,” said Nicholas Hinton, the Director General of the Fund at the time.

When she wasn’t on a tour, she utilized her engagements in Britain to further the cause wherever she could. When she addressed a conference of freight hauliers in Brighton, she obtained donations of services from a worldwide courier company who promised to deliver medicines to any SCF project anywhere in the world free of charge. She extracted a sizeable donation from the delegates she addressed at a meeting of the Inland Revenue Staff Federstion. When Michael Parkinson invited her on to his chat show in Australia, she only agreed after a donation of £6000 was sent to the Fund.

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She has since made further visits to Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Sudan, Uganda and Somalia. Her extensive work with the Fund has been recognised worldwide, so much so that in 1990, she was nominated by President Kaunda of Zambia for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Most recently, Anne has travelled to Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition to her trips overseas, she regularly meets fundraisers and volunteers, and visits SCF shops around the UK. She also attends and speaks at many of their special events every year.

In 2016, after serving as their president for 46 years, Anne became Patron of Save the Children, taking on the role from the Queen. Accepting her new role, she said:

"I am proud of my long association with Save the Children, and I am honoured to succeed Her Majesty as its Patron. It is an organisation that embodies a spirit of compassion, openness and excellence. Its values are an inspiration; its achievements, a source of hope for millions of children. From significantly reducing malnutrition in some of the poorest parts of Bangladesh to sheltering, feeding and vaccinating the young people affected by the devastating winds and rain of typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and ensuring children in the UK leave primary school reading competently and able to fulfil their potential, their efforts to ensure that every child survives to live a happy, healthy life are outstanding.”

#this has been sitting in my drafts for months #finally finished it #this is only a glimpse into the work shes done with them over nearly 50 years #princess anne #princess royal #save the children #scf #british royal family #brf #organisations #charity #patronage

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