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14 February: The long story In February 1999 I was surfing the net at home in London, investigating whether I could send my monthly Amnesty International appeal letters by e-mail. I found the excellent Head of State E-Mail Page (now sadly discontinued), but I also found another site that allowed you to leave messages for celebrities. The messages were, they say, forwarded by post to the celeb in question. I was particularly struck by the enormous e-mail postbag for Prince William. I sent the URL to a friend, telling her to look at the site too. As a prank, I sent that message from a free e-mail account that I opened with england.com as "HRH Prince William". The address was hrhw@england.com. A few days later, I went back to delete the account, and to my astonishment found that there were messages in the in-box from people I didn't know. I had not realised that england.com automatically list accounts in the WhoWhere e-mail directory. Obviously, these people had looked up HRH Prince William, found "his" e-mail address, and sent "him" an e-mail! As a child, I wrote many fan letters myself, and after my initial surprise, I did feel an obligation to the senders of these e-mails. I did not have the heart to tell them they had made such a foolish mistake. So I did not shut down the account after all. I set up a bland automatic reply, referring people to the official British Monarchy website, and I checked the mail from time to time. Now and again, I could not resist sending a short, rather formal, but personal reply.
At this time, April 1999, I was learning HTML for a work project. Encouraged by my trainer to practice HMTL skills, I uploaded all the e-mails to make a simple one-page website called The Prince William E-Mails, using free webspace from the lovely people at Tripod Lycos. The page included all the e-mails I had received, and which you can now read in William's in-box. You will see that some were friendly and charming, others were very emotional, and some people turned the tables by pretending to be friends of Prince William. At least I assume they are pretending... I wanted to respect peoples' privacy, and did not want to make fun of individuals, so I removed all their names and e-mail addresses. Reactions
Weirdly, though perhaps predictably, some people used the site's feedback address, or the guestbook, to try to contact Prince William himself. Later still, I launched a bulletin board and you will see that it continues to attract messages for William himself, as well as for me. This has always seemed very strange to me, but it means the site continues to grow without me doing very much, and there is always something new and strange to read! Experimenting with a live chat programme that I was using for a work project, I opened a live chat page for a while, hoping to talk with visitors like you. I did have some interesting chats, but tragically some people really thought that Prince William might only be a mouse-click away, and I had some very odd chats and offline messages meant for him. You can still read the best of these messages and chats -- and my sarcastic replies that usually fell on deaf and clueless ears. Mistaken identity That's a very good question. I think the site is fairly blatantly satirical. Those who sent the original messages, who looked him up in WhoWhere, are only guilty of being naive and hopeful. But what about the others who visit this site and then decide to leave Prince William a message in my guestbook or on my bulletin board? Or the lost souls who tried to chat with "him" live? Perhaps they just ignore the evidence of their own eyes and common sense? Perhaps some who are not native speakers of English are misled? All I know is that even now, three-and-a-half years years after it all started, there is barely a week goes by I don't get a message for Prince William in my guestbook. I think it is bizarre and funny that they do so, so I do not delete this messages. Weirder still, I have had lots of messages from people who understand the site, who "get it", who say the site is funny, interesting, etc., but then say something that shows they don't get it at all. The two most common messages have always been variations on
Of course Prince William does use email, and this has itself become the subject of speculation and fantasy. There were many stories about his email correspondence with Britney Spears, he spoke in an interview about emailing family and friends, and at least one fan fiction site uses the ideas as the basis of a fantasy called The Day He IM'd Me.
Most people do get the point of this site, thank goodness, and it has been mentioned in the media quite often -- see the fame area for details. I have also had complimentary words from cultural critics I admire:
I also now have the main status symbols of real celebrity: a professional lookalike, a fan site, a conspiracy theorist and and, in the shape of "Danielle", a stalker. I do love hearing from visitors, so please do sign the guest book before you go, or use the bulletin board. I don't know if Prince William or his family has visited the site. I assume he has, and I hope he appreciates the spirit in which it has been created. Weird people do leave me messages saying I am insulting him, but I don't see how. In a way this site could be about how fans relate to any celebrity, but the fact that it is the heir to the British throne makes it far more interesting. Andrew
 go to William's in-box |
If you
are in a hurry, here's the story in a nutshell. Scroll down a bit for the
full sorry tale..
After about six
weeks, messages were arriving every day. I could not bear it any longer,
and I closed down the e-mail account. But before I did, I saved all the
e-mails. I let a few friends read them, and everyone was struck by the
strange collision of modern celebrity, royalty, friendliness, formality,
ancient protocol and e-mail culture.
Almost
everyone who read the emails was astonished, a little embarrassed, and
entertained. Not long after I set up The Prince William Emails, I applied
to join a webring of sites devoted to Prince William. It seemed like a
good idea, but the owner of the ring turned out to be someone who had sent
one of the e-mails. She was a little upset to say the least. You can read
my correspondence with her, and many other people who came to visit the
original site, in 
It was very
interesting to me that the original e-mails all came from outside the UK.
Most were from the US, and some from Australia and France. I am no
historian, but surely the constitutions of these countries were drawn up
partly as a protest against the idea of privilege through birth? People
have send me some interesting ideas about this in the guest book and the
discussion area.
