The Queen has spoken of the “anger” she felt after fighting off a man who tried to sexually assault her on a train as a teenager, during an interview with John Hunt and his daughter.
Camilla said: “I was reading my book and, you know, this boy, man, attacked me and I did fight back and I remember getting off the train and my mother looking at me and saying, ‘Why is your hair standing on end? And why is a button missing from your coat?’
“I had been attacked but I remember anger. And I was so furious about it.”
She added that the attacker was “somebody I didn’t know” and that “this sort of boy, I thought it was an old man, [but he] was probably not a great deal older than me”.
Her comments came during a special New Year’s Eve episode of Today on BBC Radio 4, guest edited by Theresa May and the BBC presenter Emma Barnett, in which the Queen invited Hunt and his daughter Amy to Clarence House. They have set up The Hunt Family Fund to support charities and projects that will inspire young women. Among the initiatives it will work with are those aimed at tackling domestic violence and abuse.
The Queen said that she had “sort of forgotten” the attack she suffered, which had “lurked” at the back of her mind for decades, adding: “You bury things like that.” She said she had been inspired to speak out after seeing the courage of the Hunt family.
The BBC racing commentator lost his wife and two of his daughters in a triple murder. Carol Hunt, 61, was fatally stabbed by Kyle Clifford, who raped Louise, 25, his former partner. Clifford then used a crossbow to shoot both her and her sister Hannah, 28, at their family home in Bushey, Hertfordshire, in July 2024.
John Hunt with his wife, Carol, and three daughters
Speaking to John and Amy Hunt in the Garden Room at Clarence House in an interview recorded on November 27, Camilla told them how proud their family would be of them for their work to raise awareness of sexual violence.
The Queen said: “I would just like to say, wherever your family is now they would be so proud of you both.
“And they must be from above, smiling down on you and thinking, ‘My goodness me, what a wonderful father, husband, sister’. They’d just be so proud of you both.”
Hunt, who has previously said that he continues to speak to his late wife and daughters, told the Queen: “I used to say, ‘I couldn’t do it without you’ but now I say, ‘I can do it with you’.”
He told the Queen that there were no signs that Clifford, who had spent Christmas 2023 with them, was intent on causing his “perfect” family any harm. When he knocked at the family home in Bushey in July 2024, Carol spent time talking to him to try to help him move on with his life before he stabbed her eight times.
Hunt said: “She was surprised to see him, three weeks after the breakup of the relationship. But she was not scared.
“And I wouldn’t have been scared either. She engaged him in conversation. She asked what he’s going to do so that he can eventually have a fruitful relationship with a woman. These were doorstep conversations, seconds before he stabbed her eight times.”
Clifford, 26, was sentenced to a whole life order at Cambridge crown court in March for the three murders.
In an impact statement, Hunt told Clifford that he could hear “the screams of hell” awaiting the murderer and quoted from his late daughter Louise’s favourite book To Kill a Mockingbird: “I want you to see what real courage is. Instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.”
Hunt told the Queen: “You do gain wisdom and confidence that, all right, it’s not the future you wanted, but there is a small fragment of future that exists still for you.”
The Queen’s own experience sheds new light on her decades-long campaigning to tackle violence against women.
She said: “I thought if I’ve got a tiny soapboax to stand on, I’d like to stand on it. And there’s not a lot that I can do except talk to people and get people together.”
Speaking of the attack she experienced, the Queen said: “It sort of lurked for many years and when the whole subject about domestic abuse came up, and suddenly you hear a story like John and Amy’s, it’s something that I feel very strongly about and, you know, want to do.”
She added: “You bury things like that.”
The incident first came to light in Power and the Palace, the Inside Story of the Monarchy and 10 Downing Street by Valentine Low, the former royal correspondent of The Times.
Guto Harri, Boris Johnson’s former spokesman, said the Queen had told Johnson, then prime minister, about it as she discussed opening new rape centres with him.
Harri told Low: “The serious conversation they had was about her being the victim of an attempted sexual assault when she was a schoolgirl.
“She was on a train going to Paddington — she was about 16, 17 — and some guy was moving his hand further and further …”
The Queen, left, aged 16, at an Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord’s
JOHN SILVERSIDE/ANL/SHUTTERSTOCK
When Johnson asked what happened next, Camilla replied: “I did what my mother taught me to. I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel.”
Harri said: “She was self-possessed enough when they arrived at Paddington to jump off the train, find a guy in uniform and say, ‘That man just attacked me’, and he was arrested.”
A source close to the Queen said that she had shared her personal experience with the Hunts not to detract from their story but to help de-stigmatise discussion around violence against women.
The Queen praised the bravery of the Hunts in speaking about their trauma, saying she believed it was “cathartic” to talk.
The source said: “If some good comes of this publication, which is that the wider issues are discussed, it de-stigmatises the whole topic and empowers girls today to take action and seek help and to talk about it, then that’s a good outcome.”