The recently released fourth season of “The Crown” has sparked several controversies with its content, and has reportedly disappointed many people whose lives were fictionalised in the series. Sarah Horsley, the widow of Major Hugh Lindsay, is also among those people and is “horrified” that a personal tragedy in her life is being displayed on the screen.
The ninth episode of season 4 of “The Crown,” titled “Avalanche,” depicts the March 1988 avalanche that killed Sarah Horsley‘s husband, Major Hugh Lindsay. Horsley, who was working in the Buckingham Palace press office at the time and was six months pregnant with their daughter, is “upset” with the dramatisation of the tragedy and is “dreading people seeing it.”
Major Hugh Lindsay, an equerry of the British royal family and friend to Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, had accompanied the heir apparent, Princess Diana, and others to a ski trip in Klosters, Switzerland. Major Lindsay, Prince Charles, Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, a Swiss police officer, and a guide hit the slopes when an avalanche struck them.
While Charles escaped alive, Lindsay and Palmer-Tomkinson were buried in the snow, as reported by BBC at the time. The following day, Prince Charles and Princess Diana flew back to London with Major Lindsay’s body.
Horsley, who has been shown mourning at her husband’s funeral in the hit Netflix show, recently told the Sunday Telegraph that she was “horrified” after finding out that the incident was being fictionalised.
“I was horrified when I was told (the episode) was happening and was very concerned about the impact on my daughter. I’m very upset by it, and I’m dreading people seeing it,” she said.
Horsley revealed she even wrote to the show’s producers requesting them to omit the storyline, but they denied it with a “very kind letter.”
“I wrote to them asking them not to do it, not to use the accident. I suppose members of the royal family have to grin and bear it, but for me, it’s a very private tragedy,” she said. Talking about the letter from “The Crown” producers, Horsley said that they assured her they understand her concerns, “but they hope I will feel that they deal with difficult subject matters with integrity and great sensitivity.”
The Princess of Wales, who stood behind Horsley at her husband’s funeral, had also remembered Lindsay’s death in her tapes. In Andrew Morton’s 1992 biography “Diana: Her True Story—In Her Own Words,” the late royal had said: “What a nice person he was. Out of all the people who went, it should never have been him.”
David M. Benett/Dave Benett/WireImage
