Peter Shand Kydd

Who was Peter Shand Kydd?

Peter Shand Kydd was the former stepfather of Diana, Princess of Wales and an heir to the wallpaper fortune built by his father Norman Shand Kydd. He was half-brother to the former champion amateur jockey William Shand Kydd.

Shand Kydd sold the family business in 1962 and moved his family to Australia, where he became a sheep farmer. After selling the sheep farm and returning to England, Peter Shand Kydd began an affair with Diana's mother Viscountess Althorp, while married to his first wife, Janet Munro Kerr. After divorce proceedings were finalized for both Shand Kydd and the Viscountess, they were married on 2 May 1969 and lived in Buckinghamshire and Aldwick, West Sussex, finally settling on a 1,000 acre farm on the remote Scottish island of Seil. Their marriage faltered, and Shand Kydd had an affair with Marie-Pierre Becret Palmer, who ran a champagne-importing business in London. Shand Kydd married Marie-Pierre in 1993 and their relationship lasted until April 1995. Afterwards he chose to live close to his first wife Janet.

By his first wife, Shand Kydd had three children. Their elder son, Adam, was born in 1954 and became a novelist, before dying in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 2004, of a suspected drug overdose. Shand Kydd's younger son, John Shand Kydd, known as Johnnie, was born in 1959, and is a renowned photographer, with more than 70 works in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.