Devastating loss for William and Harry as childhood bodyguard 'Crackers' dies

Graham Craker was a former bodyguard to Prince Harry and Prince William and was with them when they learned of their mother’s passing. Graham passed away aged 77, who as young boys, the Princes nicknamed Crackers. He had walked alongside the boys behind Princess Diana’s hearse as it travelled to Westminster Abbey.

Graham then sat in the front of the hearse carrying the Princess to her final resting place at Althorp House. In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry wrote: “The driver had to keep pulling over so the bodyguard could get out and clear the flowers off the windscreen.

“The bodyguard was Graham. Willy and I liked him a lot. We always called him Crackers. We thought that was hysterical.”

Graham had spent 35 years in the Met Police, with 15 serving as a royal bodyguard, before he retired in 2001.

During an interview after his retirement, he described being at Balmoral with the Royal Family when news broke that Diana had been killed in a 1997 car crash in Paris.

Graham said: “I crept down the stairs to the house phone and dialled the duty office at Buckingham Palace.

“They said there were reports there’d been an accident and Dodi Fayed had been killed and the Princess had a broken arm.”

On discovering Diana had also been killed, Graham added: “It was disbelief, really, and obviously a great deal of sorrow.

“You try and deal with it as best you can but you do get quite emotional about it.”

Graham went on: “Perhaps the most emotional was seeing William the morning after.

“I saw William walking his dog outside, and I walked up to him and said, ‘I’m very, very sorry to hear your bad news’. William very sadly said, ‘Thank you’.”

Of the funeral, he said: “I was standing at the rear of the hearse and William looked up and acknowledged me. I looked toward him and nodded.

“William was comforted I was with his mum on her final journey.”

A spokesman for the Prince of Wales did not want to comment.