Princess Diana Gave Sons Prince William and Prince Harry the Most Surprising Nicknames as Young Boys

The royal family tends to love giving one another nicknames—but Princess Diana’s nickname for a young Prince William requires a little bit further explanation.

When the current Prince of Wales was just a boy, his childhood nickname—given to him by his mother—was Wombat. Back when Matt Lauer was still hosting The Today Show in 2007—which also marked the 10-year anniversary of Diana’s death in a Paris car accident on August 31, 1997—Lauer told William, “She used to call you Wombat, which is cute—when you’re 7.” To this, William begrudgingly replied, “Yeah.”

In 2007, William was 25 years old and was speaking with Lauer ahead of the Concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium on July 1 of that year—what would have been Diana’s 46th birthday.

“I guess you don’t want your mates in the pub going, ‘Hey Wombat, how are you?’” Lauer joked. “It kind of stuck with me,” William said. “I can’t get rid of it now.”

Per The Daily Mail, the nickname’s origins went back to William’s six-week tour of Australia and New Zealand with his parents Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1983—groundbreaking at the time as, in the past, royal parents would have left William, then just 9 months old, at home. The Australia and New Zealand visit was William’s first major overseas visit, and Diana later told her biographer Andrew Morton, “The first foreign trip we took William to was Australia and New Zealand. That was for six weeks. That was great—we were a family unit and everything was fine.”

“It was very tricky, mentally, for me because the crowds were just something to be believed,” the Princess of Wales continued. “My husband had never seen crowds like it, and I sure as hell hadn’t, and everyone kept saying ‘It will all quiet down when you’ve had your first baby,’ and it never quieted down—never.”

Anwar Hussein/Getty Images Princess Diana while visiting Australia and New Zealand in 1983

Charles and Diana kept a busy tour schedule during the visit, so William was watched over by nanny Barbara Barnes. “The wombat, you know, that’s the local animal,” William told Lauer. “So I just basically got called that.”

“Not because I look like a wombat,” William cheekily added. “Or maybe I do.”

Jumping into the conversation, Prince Harry jokingly said, “You know what it was? He was still crawling at 6.”

“He still couldn’t walk,” Harry chided in good nature. “He was still lazy.” Digging into the brotherly banter—a joking sign of what was to become deeply serious a little over a decade later—Lauer asked William about Harry, “Alright, get him back. What’s his nickname?” Without missing a beat, William responded, “Oh, Ginger. Whatever. You can call him whatever you want. Most of them I can’t call in front of here. You know, a bit rude. He’s got plenty.”

When Lauer turned to Harry and asked, “Ginger?” a very redheaded Harry replied, “I know, exactly. You’re as surprised as I am. I don’t think I’m ginger.”

“Apart from the fact that you are,” William said, before Harry added—in an attempt to move on—“Shall we not? Let’s not.”

William was apparently right in saying that Harry had plenty of nicknames—as The Daily Mail pointed out, Harry itself is a nickname, as his birth name is Henry. As Harry wrote about in his 2023 memoir Spare, Charles and William call Harry “Harold,” and Harry’s wife Meghan Markle calls him “H” or “Haz.” Harry’s friends call him “Spike,” and Diana’s nickname for her youngest son was “GKH,” which stood for “Good King Harry.”

According to the documentary William & Harry: Princes at War? royal biographer Robert Jobson said that Diana called Harry such “because she thought he’d probably be better equipped for the role in the future than William.” The moniker apparently came about after a young William confided in Diana that he “didn’t want to be King”—and Harry “happily offered to take on the role and its responsibilities instead,” according to The Daily Mail.

Speaking to a 14-year-old boy in August 2016 who had also lost his mother (for context, Diana died when William was 15 years old), the former Duke of Cambridge said, “Time makes it easier. I know how you feel. I still miss my mother every day, and it’s 20 years after she died.”

Seven years earlier, in 2009, William said in support of the Child Bereavement Charity’s Mother’s Day campaign, “Never being able to say the word ‘Mummy’ again in your life sounds like a small thing. However, for many, including me, it’s now really just a word—hollow and evoking only memories.”

Harry has said of his mother, “She was our guardian, friend, and protector. She never once allowed her unfaltering love for us to go unspoken or undemonstrated. Behind the media glare, to us, two children, she was quite simply the best mother in the world.”

Read the original article on InStyle