EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Queen Camilla mourns Harry Fane after he dies at the age of 70… Friend, adventurer and jewellery dealer

A damper has been put on Buckingham Palace’s Christmas festivities as the Queen is mourning one of her closest friends, Harry Fane, who has died aged 70.

Fane had been a long-time fellow adventurer and business partner of her late brother Mark Shand, before going on to become one of London’s top vintage jewellery dealers.

‘He was one of Mark’s very best friends,’ the Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, tells me.

‘One of those rare people who one was always delighted to see.’

Renowned as the man who knew more about Cartier than Cartier, Fane was born the younger son of the 15th Earl of Westmorland — who was Master of the Horse and a Lord in Waiting to Her Late Majesty the Queen — and Jane Barbara Findlay of the Findlay baronets.

A damper has been put on Buckingham Palace’s Christmas festivities as the Queen is mourning one of her closest friends, Harry Fane, who has died aged 70

Fane had been a long-time fellow adventurer and business partner of her late brother Mark Shand, before going on to become one of London’s top vintage jewellery dealers

Fane trained at Sotheby’s before he and Shand decided to go into business selling objets d’art, launching their company, Obsidian, in 1978. 

The pair spent the proceeding years, according to Shand, ‘like posh swagmen in linen suits ‘. 

‘With sacks of beautiful booty over our shoulders, we hit the rich and famous, the old and new wealth in the money-drenched capitals of the Americas: Caracas, New York, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, and Miami,’ he explained. 

And while life was certainly picaresque, the pair couldn’t avoid the odd dramatic scrape. When chased by Indonesian paramilitaries wielding M16s in 1985 for buying human skulls and keeping them in biscuit tins, Fane and Shand only escaped due to the quick thinking of the translator they had picked up in the Jakarta bus station.

The ingenious interpreter pointed to Fane and said: ‘This man friend of the Queen.’

He then turned to Shand and said: ‘This man friend of prime minister of England’ — Mark’s uncle was in fact then-foreign secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe. All three men were promptly released.

Fane leaves behind his wife, Teresa Forsyth-Forrest, 68, and children Sam, 34, and Sophie Jane, 36.

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