Diana's Secret Charity Work -- Letters, Phone Calls And Private Visits To The Homeless, The Addicted, The Sick

LONDON - On a raw winter night in 1994, Princess Diana dropped by a shelter called Off the Streets to comfort 40 prostitutes, drug addicts and other homeless Londoners.

As they waited, a swaggering 23-year-old told Paul George, the social worker in charge: "I don't know about these royals. I think the IRA should shoot them all. She comes in here, we can give her a good one."

"Then Diana walks in, and he's the first person she sees in this big warehouse," George remembers. "She walks over to him, and I'm thinking, `Oh my God, this is going to be trouble!'

"But then Diana says: `It's Ricky, isn't it? Didn't I meet you when you were sleeping down in the Strand?' And he just melts. `That's right,' he says, `I'm getting myself together. now. . . .' "

That story is one of many surfacing this week that suggest Diana touched the sick and the down-and-out far more often and perhaps more deeply than was publicized during her lifetime.

The death of Diana has set off a flood of new offers to her favorite charities. Britons involved in these causes said Diana's true legacy won't be the millions she raised with celebrity lunches and auctions of her fashionable clothes but an irreplaceable compassion she brought directly to people she was helping.

Incognito visits to vagrants

The British-based Leprosy Mission and the National Aids Trust credit Diana with easing the stigma of those diseases by embracing sufferers on camera, dispelling the myths that either can be spread by human contact.

She also held publicized benefits for the Centrepoint organization for the homeless, the English National Ballet, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for children and the Royal Mardsen NHS Trust cancer treatment center - the few charities she focused on after resigning from 100 others in July 1996, just before her divorce from Prince Charles.

But Diana kept most of her work from public view so as not to spoil its intimate nature.

"There was no financial benefit when she made a private visit," said George, whose shelter is one of 14 run by Centrepoint. "Money is not what it was about. She wanted to know what life was like for people less fortunate than herself. And she wanted to make a difference by showing that she cared."

Diana went incognito to visit vagrants sleeping on the pavement, George said, and a few months ago she brought her two sons to help prepare a meal and meet people staying at his shelter. He said these visits often involved elaborate security procedures, such as changing cars, to throw photographers off her trail.

While it was never a secret the princess conducted missions of comfort out of the limelight, the extent of them is just starting to become known. A wide range of ordinary Britons whose burdens she shared now feel free to speak about friendships that, until her death, had to be confidential.

Secret letters, phone calls

London's Evening Standard solicited letters this week from such people.

Dean Woodward, 30, wrote about his relationship with the princess, which developed while he was in a coma from head injuries suffered in an auto accident. Woodward was unaware of Diana's first visit, but she visited him at his home while he was recuperating and began a seven-year friendship that included regular letters and occasional phone calls.

Emma May, 16, wrote that she won a bravery contest for the way she coped with Turner's Disease, a genetic condition that stunted her growth and created kidney problems. Diana presented the award at Emma's school six years ago, and promised to keep in touch. She did just that, Emma wrote, and they began an exchange of correspondence that included a letter from Diana this June.

Philip Woolcock, 45, a social worker, told the Daily Telegraph he and his wife had carried on a friendship with "the real Diana" since 1991, when the princess first learned through her charity work that their 18-year-old daughter Louise was dying of cancer.

After comforting the girl with calls and bedsides visits until her death in 1992, Diana dropped in on the parents and confided, in tears, that her marriage was falling apart, Woolcock said.

"Judy and I simply couldn't believe that here was the future queen confiding in us," he told the newspaper. "She spoke to us with such honesty and compassion. . . . That visit made us feel that life was probably still worth living after our terrible loss."

Other Britons aided by Diana said in interviews that they, too, felt her all the more empathetic because she did not hide the suffering in her own life. "She knows that homelessness can happen to anyone," George said. "In a sense at some point she must have felt homeless herself."

Among the mourners at Kensington Palace this week was Danielle Stephenson, 8, whom the princess had visited five times after the girl had heart surgery at London's Royal Brompton Hospital in May. Diana had also given the child her direct phone number at the palace and taken her calls.

"She gave our patients what none of us was able to give - this magic," said hospital spokeswoman Averil Slade. "She came here as often as three times a week. She'd bounce in unannounced, in jeans and trainers, sit on people's beds and talk for hours."

Another mourner was Vincent Seabrook, 27, who showed up at the palace with a memorial plaque tracing his bond with Diana in verse.

Seabrook was homeless and shivering in a doorway four years ago, he recounted, when Diana stopped to give him food and the phone number of Centrepoint. The two kept in touch, the charity gave him shelter and he later found work as a security guard.

Information prepared by Gannett Suburban Newspapers was included in this report.