Sarah, Duchess of York on cancer and her royal rehabilitation
Divorce, debt, tabloid stings and a cancer diagnosis – Sarah Ferguson’s royal ride has been anything but smooth. But she opens up to Guy Walters about happiness, helping people and the things that have helped her through the toughest of times
As ever, it takes a child to ask the most pertinent question, the one that really cuts to the chase. In December 2023, it came from a young boy called Toby at the Holy Trinity Primary School in Burnley.
“How did you feel when you married into the royal family?”
It’s not a question many of us get the chance to ask, but it is perhaps one that Toby’s respondent has answered before.
“Terrified,” she says. “It was very frightening. You need to be really brave. You had to wear what I call your big girl pants.”
The children burst into cackles, because let’s face it, if you need to make a bunch of primary school children laugh, then using the word “pants” is always going to be a winner. Another pertinent question comes from, of all people, the local bishop.
“Why are you in Burnley?”
This time, her answer is less direct.
“My name is Sarah and I fly aeroplanes and helicopters and I married the Queen’s son, and I have five Norfolk terriers and two corgis.”
Even the least ardent royal watcher will realise that the person in the hotspot in the school assembly hall is none other than Sarah, Duchess of York, aka Fergie, the one who was married to Prince Andrew yet is somehow still sort of with him, the one who writes all those children’s books and historical romances, the one who was cruelly called the Duchess of Pork by the tabloids because she wasn’t a slim lass, the one who once had her toes sucked by some bald bloke on a sun lounger, the one who keeps having financial problems, the one who seems to be currently flirting with being a daytime television presenter, the one who everyone thinks is basically a good egg with a great head of red hair but can’t quite work out what she really does these days.
And yet here she is in Burnley, of all places, on a Wednesday morning in mid-December and she still hasn’t answered the immediate question as to why on earth she is here. So the bishop, a tenacious sort of cleric it seems, repeats the question. This time, he gets an answer of sorts, because as the duchess says to the bishop: “I have decided that Burnley is the cool place to be.”
To be fair to Fergie, had the audience been several years older she may have given a more revealing answer, which would have involved the fact that she was so moved by a BBC report about the plight of Burnley’s citizens in December 2020 that she felt she had to do something. She contacted Father Alex Frost of St Matthew’s Church, asked what her charity, Sarah’s Trust, could do to help, and as a result, donated 400 sacks of Christmas presents for young children. Since then, the mascara eyes of the duchess have not strayed far from this Lancashire town of some 80,000, a place that is the 11th most deprived lower-tier authority in England.
Burnley is not only poor, but it is also porky, and dangerously so. It is the 10th fattest place in Britain, with nearly 75 per cent of adults classed as overweight or obese. In short, the town has a weight problem, big time, and that is something that Fergie, a former spokesperson for Weight Watchers no less, will admit to suffering from herself.
Over dinner the night before her tour of Burnley, I was sitting opposite Fergie, squeezed in amongst her jolly entourage of – I must confess, I lost count – some eight or 10 stylists, assistants, photographers, drivers, and PRs when she said something I didn’t understand: “Food saved me.”
The mood of the evening didn’t suit elucidation, but I asked her to explain the next day.
“I was a compulsive eater from the age of 11,” she admitted to me during a quiet moment. “A child yesterday said to me I lost my father at the age of 11, and I have empathy towards that because I lost my mother aged 11. She didn’t die in a car crash until later, but she left to live in Argentina. She chose a man over her daughter.
“I didn’t want to tell mum I was unhappy because I thought it would hurt her. I obviously ate my feelings and that’s when I became a compulsive eater and food was my best friend. I was never bulimic, but I just put on weight. I had an eating disorder from the age of 12 until I joined Weight Watchers at the age of 35.”
So as well as poverty, it is nutrition that brings Fergie to Burnley, because she knows what it means to eat more than your body needs, to have a relationship with food that is more addictive than wholesome. The man on the ground advising her is Dr James Fleming, a local GP who founded a project called Green Dreams that tackles social problems and features something called the “Fresh Food Initiative” that essentially steers people away from simply existing on junk food.
As Fergie tours Burnley, Fleming is at her side all the time. I ask him – albeit not in so few, harsh words – what this 64-year-old divorced grandmother from down south can really do to alleviate the hugely complex social and health problems of this northern town.
“To be honest, I don’t know whether she has a royal title or not,” he tells me somewhere in the bland corridors of Burnley Football Club. “But it really doesn’t matter, because she’s got this enormous convening power. There’s no doubt that this visit has made people get together who never would have done so normally. And when they get together, they realise they can start to solve problems.”
It’s easy – way too easy – to dismiss what Fergie is doing in Burnley as some sort of weird royal cosplay or acting out a role from her glory days when she really was an HRH and a princess to boot. You can laugh as much as you like at her flashy suede boots with golden bauble heels, the stilted conversations with shy medical students, the bewildered looks of people at food banks, or the excited expectancy of those in the long line waiting to receive her in the town’s biggest mosque, but the inescapable fact is that Burnley invited her here.
Whether you’re a royalist or not, she is a welcome visitor, and she is forging links. At every place we visit, be it a school, a place of worship, a community food centre, I hear her often utter phrases such as “Well, that is something I can help you with” or “Well, in that case, you should talk to so-and-so”, whereupon her assistant will make a note.
To be honest, I was surprised that she was still behaving like a traditional royal, and I told her as much in the hotel she was staying in – the most unregal Holiday Inn Express slap bang next to the M65, a place where you might expect Alan Partridge to hum his way past carrying an oversize plate for the buffet.
“I do this work a lot, but nobody really knows,” she says. “It’s been below the parapet, but people haven’t been watching. But this visit in Burnley has been a big one, but I now feel supported more.”
Such talk almost smacks of rehabilitation within the royal household. And while there’s no doubt that Fergie has no formal role to play within The Firm, there are signs – very telling signs – that the relationship between the Yorks and the King and Queen may not be quite as frosty as many suppose. The most significant is that she was invited to Sandringham for Christmas. A gesture from the King and Queen that she describes as ‘seriously kind’.
But, for the time being, Fergie has more important matters on her mind.
Back in June, she had a single breast mastectomy, and the day after her tour of Burnley, she was due to have a whole battery of tests to see if the cancer had spread. A month later and it is revealed that she has malignant meanoma - just months after being treated for breast cancer - a topic she is extremely open about, not least with the students of the University of Central Lancashire Medical School in Burnley.
“I remember when the doctors told me that I had cancer,” she confides in them, “And they said, ‘She’s fretting!’ And I said, ‘Of course, I’m fretting as you’ve just told me I have breast cancer!’”
Ironically, that first breast cancer diagnosis was instrumental in helping Fergie adjust her relationship to the demon of food. “Because I’m much happier in myself after breast cancer – believe it or not – I don’t choose food as my friend any more. Food was my life after mum left, but I’ve now turned it around and shifted it and now life and food is in the right place.”
Of all the places we visit, it is perhaps in the schools where she seems most obviously at ease (indeed, she often declares throughout the day that she doesn’t like adults all that much). At one point, she is on a stage, posing for photographs surrounded by delighted primary school children, and gets them all to smile.
“Everybody say, ‘Sausage rolls’!” she exhorts.
The children do so.
“Everybody say, ‘Candy cakes’!”
And then comes another. I wonder what food she will choose now, but the children and I are wrongfooted.
“Everybody say, ‘We are very happy’!”
And as the cameras flash and she smiles, I begin to wonder whether Sarah, Duchess of York may finally be just that.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments