By NOEL MURPHY
BRITAIN’S Lady Diana enjoyed a vexed relationship with the media but former paparazzi king and Geelong mayor Darryn Lyons remembers a woman who was massively influential with an extraordinary sense of community service.
As part of London’s media throng, Lyons was a regular at Kensington Palace or the gym Diana frequented. He waited outside hospital as she gave birth to her children and likewise at schools as she picked up the boys.
“I got a world exclusive when I sat at the back door at Wetherby School while 150 others were at the front, on Prince William’s first day at school as he was coming out the back,” he told the Independent.
“I got the spanking pictures on the sports day when Williams had a fight with one of his little colleagues, when he was getting bullied. Diana spanked his bottom, he was in tears. There was a famous sequence of five frames, the last shots on a 36 roll.
“I always left five frames because you never knew what could happen next. This was one of the biggest pictures in the world.”
Cr Lyons says he was a familiar face to Lady Di, so much so she once intimated to him – though not in so many words – he should investigate her husband Prince Charles’ extra-marital activities.
“Through sources she’d tip me off, and one day she … tried to tell me, in a riddle, of the affair between Camilla Parker-Bowles and Charles. She said ‘You should be keeping an eye on my husband’.
“I said, ‘M’am, I don’t think he sells very well. She said ‘I assure you, you’re looking in wrong place’. Twelve months later, the Camillagate story came out.”
When Lady Di died in a Paris tunnel car crash in 1997, Cr Lyons collected negatives from paparazzi who captured her last moments alive. He still has them and says he will never release them to the public.
“I’ve always said they’re not for public consumption and after I pass this world they will be left to my family in whatever shape or form,” he said. “It’s a great campaign to wear your seatbelt otherwise she’d be alive today.
“I’ve been offered multi-millions around world but I’ve always said no, even though you could do with the money, but with some things in life there’s a consciousness. I made a decision and I’ve stuck to it ever since.”
Cr Lyons’ London office was raided and he was cross-examined by the inquest into her death.An exhibition of some 70-plus photographs held by Cr Lyons is presently being staged at the Elephant and Castle hotel in East Geelong with proceeds going to beyond blue.
