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natural manner without being aggressive. If there was any failing at all it was possibly
her impatience. She was extremely quick to grasp things herself and couldn’t understand
anyone else not being able to do so.’ Like her father, Anne was not academically
minded; she worked just hard enough at her lessons to get by and concentrated on sport
and, above all, riding. She left school with two low-grade A-level passes in History and
Geography and no ambitions whatsoever to go to university, which she pronounced ‘a
highly overrated pastime’. At school she had succeeded in crossing the invisible royal
barrier between herself and her contemporaries far better than Charles had, but she was
none the less deluding herself when she claimed (as did the girls and teachers who were
at school with her) that she was treated just like any other girl. ‘Fortunately children
aren’t so stupid,’ Anne said of her first days at Benenden. ‘They accept people for what
they are rather quicker than adults do. They have no preconceived ideas, because how
could they have? They accepted people for what they were and they had other things to
do, so they weren’t bothered.’ 7 While the girls might have come to accept Anne, the idea
that at the age of twelve her fellow pupils had no idea that she was the daughter of a
woman called the Queen, whose pictures appeared constantly on television, in the
newspapers, on stamps, coins and banknotes, is simply disingenuous. An ordinary girl
does not attend boarding-school accompanied by her own detective nor is she addressed
as ‘Princess’ by teachers.
Anne would have made a success of anything she took on even if she had not been a
royal and she has, first as a top rider of Olympic standards, then as President of the
Save the Children Fund. She owed her introduction to the world of the horse to her
parents and specifically to her mother’s Crown Equerry, Colonel Sir John Miller, who
had his own gelding, Purple Star, sent to the top-class eventer and trainer, Alison
Oliver, to be trained for her to ride. Sir John, who rode for England in the 1952
Olympics, as Crown Equerry was officially in charge of the Royal Mews, which meant
all the Queen’s horses and carriages and all her motor transport as well as the royal stud
at Hampton Court and Prince Philip’s polo ponies. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he
was the owner of a large house and estate near Oxford, and had commanded the 1st
Battalion of the Welsh Guards until appointed the Queen’s Crown Equerry in 1961, a
post which he held until 1987. A man of few but pithy words, he masterminded the royal
horses (but not the racehorses), both for the family’s sporting activities and for official
occasions, with military precision and the perfectionism and attention to detail which is
a feature of royal service. Sir John was a law unto himself; if he thought something
needed doing, he would telephone the Queen directly and he was in the habit of
dropping in on her to discuss things without warning. In the case of Anne, it was he as
much as anybody who set her course for three-day eventing. After leaving Benenden
Anne began training at Alison Oliver’s stables at Brookfield Farm, Warfield, with the
fierce dedication and self-discipline which she showed in anything she wanted to do. She
made her eventing debut with Purple Star in 1968, coming a creditable fifth at the
Eridge Horse Trials, and from then on she was launched on the eventing circuit,
travelling the country with Alison Oliver, staying in the large country houses in whose