Who is India Hicks? As she celebrates her 56th birthday, we meet the bridesmaid to Charles and Diana who survived to be with us today because she liked to watch Laurel and Hardy
She might not have received an invitation to her Godfather's coronation, but there are few figures more closely associated with the Royal Family than India Hicks.
India, who turns 56 today, is the granddaughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle to and adviser to Prince Philip, and was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Charles and Diana Spencer.
She has made her name as a model, interior designer and business woman, and lives in the Bahamas with her long-time partner-turned husband David Flint Wood.
India Hicks pictured at home in the Bahamas
India was a bridesmaid at the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. She is second left. Also pictured are Sarah-Jane Gaslee, the bride, Clementine Hambro and Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth
India was one of the five bridesmaids at the 1981 wedding of Diana and Charles, who is her godfather and second cousin.
She is the daughter of interior decorator David Hicks and Lady Pamela Hicks, one of the late Queen’s former ladies-in-waiting and the daughter of the last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten.
She is still with us today thanks only to a stroke of luck. She had decided to stay at home and watch a Laurel and Hardy film rather than join Mountbatten and others for a Carlingford Lough fishing trip on August 27, 1979.
An IRA bomb blew the boat to pieces killing Mountbatten, the boy who would have been her uncle Nicholas Knatchbull, and others aboard the boat.
India was aged 13, when Charles phoned her personally and asked if she would be a bridesmaid at his 1979 wedding to Diana.
‘I had to practise,’ she later recalled.
‘It was during these rehearsals I got to know Diana, whom I first met at a dress fitting. She always seemed more like a head girl than a princess-in-waiting, with never a shy moment in private.’
India has kept her bridesmaid’s wreath from the ceremony at St Paul’s in its original box.
In November she posted a photograph of her dress – still in perfect condition – on social media.
It was pictured alongside another royal bridesmaid dress – one worn by her mother who, as Lady Pamela Mountbatten, had been a bridesmaid to the late Queen Elizabeth.
India was educated at £40,000-a-year Gordonstoun, near Elgin, Scotland, until she was expelled for inviting boys to her room.
In the 1990s, India modelled for brands including Ralph Lauren, Tod’s, J.Crew, and many others
