The Art of Photojournalism: Image of the Month
The Princess of Wales in Camelford, Devon, May 12, 1993, Daily Mail, by Richard Lappas
By Alan Sparrow
This week I heard of the death of a friend and former colleague Richard Lappas. So, I reached for his book, More by Luck than Judgement. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, and occasionally I lift It off the shelf, brush off the dust and enjoy his wonderful stories of the photo assignments over his career.
Crazy tales of 35-foot-tall scaffolding built in a reservoir to illustrate how much the water level had fallen due to a drought. Creative moments such as when he commandeered a fruit and vegetable shop in the high street of Camelford so that he could snatch a photograph of the Princess of Wales and the rare occasion when the late Queen visited a pub, a one-off, he claimed.
It is a wonderful story of driven ambition, a desire to achieve something, a plan for a future, that many of us can recognise but so often let go of. But not Richard. He had ambitions for a life in newspapers which began when he was an eight-year-old , excited by the pages of the Daily Express and especially the sports pages.
The buzz stayed with him and armed with a clutch of CSEs he was off to Fleet Street to look for newspaper work.
While waiting for a positive response from a newspaper he took a job at a hairdresser in Carnaby Street where he started by sweeping the floor and making coffee, later becoming an assistant to glamour star Twiggy’s hairdresser.
But he was determined to get into print and eventually got an interviewed with the boss of the Keystone Photo Agency, Bertram Garai, who gave him a break as a caption writer in the features department. It was a great opportunity for a man who boasted about his inability to spell! Lappas stayed with it for a while but wanted more, and so after a few years he took a chance and moved to Devon working for the Devon News Service in Exeter, where he stayed for ten years before opening his own agency in the south-west. Among his regular clients was the Daily Mail and its sister paper the Mail on Sunday.
One day in 1993 Lappas was asked to go to Camelford to cover a trip to the town by Diana, Princess of Wales. He was asked to support the Daily Mail photographer who was coming down from London. Lappas would be there to develop the film and wire the pictures - this was the day after the leaked MI5 tapes exposed the conflict in the marriage of Diana and the Prince of Wales, and Diana was top of the news list.
Travel delays meant that the Mail staffer would not arrive in time, so Lappas was asked to photograph the visit to the town. The visit was a Royal Rota, so passes were needed for access, and unfortunately the necessary passes were in the pocket of the Mail staffer still in transit.
Lappas banked that the princess would go walkabout, even though it was not scheduled. So in Camelford High Street he approached the owner of a fruit and vegetable store and offered her £20 to access the water, power and telephone so that he could send the pictures. The owner was going out to watch the visit of Diana and offered Lappasa key to the shop so that he could let himself in if she was delayed.
Some adaptions to the shop were needed, Lappas strung up a line across the shop to hang his film from while it was drying and some of the fruit and veg had to be moved so that he could access the BT jack and a power point. This achieved, off he went to see if he could photograph Diana.
As the princess began her unscheduled walkabout, rain started to fall and she was now carrying an umbrella. The brolly obscured her face and the chances that Richard would get a picture looked grim. As she was about to disappear into the offices of the council, a biker caught her attention and she stopped to talk to him. Now was Richard’s moment.
He tells the story in his book: “I fired off 36 exposures on each of the two cameras I was holding. The relief was incredible - the whole incident had happened so late and so quickly. I went back to the fruit and veg shop, and I was quickly into the changing bag putting the films onto reels and trying to contain my delight as I had pulled something good off in very difficult circumstances.
“I developed and rinsed the films, hung them on the line and began drying them off with a hair dryer when the door opened. I looked up to see not the returning owner but a customer.
“It brought new skills to the meaning or multi-tasking. As I dried the film and spoke to the office on the phone, I weighed the customer’s King Edward potatoes. took the her money and sorted out her change, and thanked her for her custom.
“She must have thought the world had gone mad at that point, but it hadn’t and by the time I had dried the film I had served seven or eight more customers serving everything from grapes to spuds to bananas much to the delight of the shop owner when she returned from her trip to witness the visit of the Diana the Princess of Wales, the most photographed woman in the world. To cap it all my picture was on the next morning’s page one of the Daily Mail.
RIP Richard Lappas 1951 - 2026