Today is the 68th birthday of Princess Anne, the Princess Royal. I thought it might be an apt time to look back on one of the most harrowing (but often forgotten) chapters in the history of the current royal family.
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Long before Diana, Kate and Meghan,
Princess Anne was considered the star of the British royal family. In March of 1974, the Queen's twenty-three-year-old only daughter was a newlywed, having married handsome army captain Mark Phillips just four months earlier, and her popularity was at an all-time high. She had even appeared on the cover of British
Vogue three times.
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So when
petty burglar Ian Ball decided that he wanted to kidnap a public figure to hold for ransom, Anne was his first choice. Under an assumed name, he rented a secluded house in the countryside and a car. He equipped himself with handguns, tranquilizers, handcuffs, and a ransom note addressed to the Queen demanding two million pounds "or Anne will be shot dead".
On the first night of spring, he set out to make his plan a reality.
He was ready for the men who would try to stop him: by the time the night was over, four of them would be lying in their own blood.
But there were two things he didn’t count on: a guy called 'The Geezer', and the princess’s own formidable personality.Knowing the princess and her husband would be returning home from a publicized appearance, Ian Ball waited along the Mall that leads to Buckingham Palace until the Rolls Royce with the royal insignia approached, then overtook it and blocked it with his own car.
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The crime scene, with Ball's white car blocking Princess Anne's Rolls RoycePrincess Anne was accompanied by her husband, her lady-in-waiting and her bodyguard, Scotland Yard
Inspector James Beaton. Beaton, assuming the man was a disgruntled driver, got out to speak to him. Ball, with a gun in each hand, shot him in the shoulder.
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Inspector Beaton holding the car door for Anne earlier in the eveningBeaton tried to return fire, but he'd been hit in his firing arm and his aim was off. After one shot, his gun jammed. When Anne's lady-in-waiting crawled out of the passenger-side door and fled in a panic,
Beaton jumped back in the car and put himself between Ball and the royal couple (he would later say the princess remained "cool, calm and collected"), but Ball fired through the car window, shattering it and hitting Beaton twice more. Ball then got the door open again, and Beaton fell out of the car and onto the ground.
The
chauffeur, Alexander Callender, started to step out of the car to confront the gunman, and
Ball shot him in the chest. He slumped, bleeding, back into the car.
Ball reached into the car,
grabbed Princess Anne by the arm and began pulling her out of the vehicle. Her husband, Captain Phillips, held her around the waist and a furious tug-of-war began, splitting open the back of Anne's evening gown"from top to bottom".
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PRINCESS ANNE and CAPT. MARK PHILLIPSAnne would later recall a male passerby who walked over to see what the fuss was about, peered placidly into the car as they struggled, and then calmly strolled off again down the Mall.
Anne remembers that she then had a "very tedious conversation" with her assailant: "I was scrupulously polite. I thought it was silly to be too rude at that stage...It was all so infuriating. I kept saying
I didn’t want to get out of the car, and I was not going to get out of the car. I nearly lost my temper with him, but I knew that if I did, I should hit him and he would shoot me".
"Please come out, you've got to come", an increasingly frustrated Ball told her as he tried to drag her from her husband's grasp. "I want you to come with me for a day or two, because I want two million pounds. Will you get out of the car?""BLOODY LIKELY!", retorted the princess. "And I haven't got two million pounds!”A
tabloid reporter, Brian McConnell, arrived on the scene. He recognized the insignia on the car and knew a member of the royal family was under attack. "Don't be silly, old boy", he said, ever-so-Britishly. "Put the gun down."
Ball shot him.
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BRIAN MCCONNELL (left) and CONSTABLE HILLS
A young policeman,
Constable Michael Hills, on patrol nearby heard the commotion and approached. Ball shot him in the stomach. But before passing out, Hills managed to radio his station for help.A second chauffeur named Glanmore Martin at this point maneuvered his own car to pin in Ball’s, in order to prevent Ball from driving off with the princess.
And this is where The Geezer enters the story:
6'4" former boxer Ronald Russell (who had been known as ‘The Geezer’ during his fighting days) happened to be driving by:“I pulled over and heard a lot of banging and smashing which I thought was the general rumpus. But then
Ball shot a policeman, and I thought ‘That’s a liberty, he needs sorting’.”
He punched Ball in the back of the head, but the gunman didn't go down.
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RONALD ‘The Geezer’ RUSSELLStill, the punch made Ball let go of the princess for a moment and provided enough of a distraction for her to finally make her move.
As Ball turned to fire his gun at Russell (he missed by millimeters), Anne reached for the door handle behind her head and opened it, then flung her feet over her head and did a "backward somersault" out of the car. She waited for Ball to start running around the car to reach her again, and when he did, she sprang back into the car and slammed the door shut again.
Ball pointed his guns at the princess's head. At that, The Geezer punched him again, this time in the face. He went down this time, but got back up. Police were beginning to arrive in response to the radio call, although they were afraid to get too close to a man with two guns now trained on a member of the royal family.
Anne could see that Ball was becoming nervous. She began talking to him again, telling him that more police would be coming and he was losing his opportunity to get away. "Go on!" she told him. "Now's your chance!" He ran.Remarkably,
all four of the men shot by Ball recovered; the princess visited them all in the hospital.
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Anne visiting Inspector Beaton (left) and Constable Hills in the hospitalBall himself was captured only minutes after he ran from the princess's car, by Detective Constable Peter Edmonds, who chased him down in St. James Park and threw a coat over his head before tackling him.
He pleaded guilty to kidnapping and attempted murder and was sentenced to life in a mental health facility, due to his history of mental illness.
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IAN BALLNearly 45 years later, he remains there (although he has petitioned Parliament to free him as a "political prisoner"; he
claims he was only trying to bring awareness to the lack of funding for mental health care in Britain and that he would have donated the entire ransom to the National Health Service for the benefit of the mentally ill).
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CONSTABLE HILLS, DET. CONSTABLE EDMONDS, and INSPECTOR BEATON
The Queen awarded the George Cross for courage to Inspector Beaton and the George Medal to Ronald Russell and Constable Hills. Queen's Gallantry Medals went to Alexander Callendar, Brian McConnell and Peter Edmonds, and a commendation for brave conduct to Glanmore Martin.
As the Queen presented The Geezer with his Medal, she thanked him and said “The medal is from the Queen of England. The thank you is from Anne’s mother.”![]()
The medal ceremony at Buckingham Palace. Left to right behind the Queen and Princess Anne are Anne’s chauffeur Alexander Callender, her bodyguard Inspector Beaton, Glanmore Martin (2nd chauffeur), Constable James Hills, Detective Constable Peter Edmonds, reporter Brian McConnell and ‘Ronald ‘The Geezer’ Russell As for Princess Anne, she went back to riding her horses and performing public engagements. She excels at both: she competed as a member of Britain's equestrian team at the Olympics two years after the kidnapping attempt and is today at age 68 admired as the hardest-working royal, by a long shot: she routinely does more than twice as many official engagements every year as royals half her age do (last year, Anne completed 540 official engagements, compared to 209 for Prince Harry and just 171 for Prince William).
She and Captain Phillips went on to have two children, but after finding out that he had fathered another daughter as the result of a one-night stand with a schoolteacher in 1985, she began her own affair with her mother’s equerry, Timothy Laurence. Anne and Phillips divorced in 1992 and Anne promptly remarried to Laurence. They celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in 2017.
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ANNE & HER HUSBAND, TIMOTHY LAURENCEsourcesourcesource![]()
