Three Degrees singer Sheila Ferguson: ‘I didn’t want to be a notch on Charles’s bedpost’

Sheila Ferguson was self-isolating at home in Kent for the third week when she heard on the news that Prince Charles had contracted coronavirus. 

She was beside herself with worry.

‘No one is exempt from this dreadful disease,’ says Seventies soul star Sheila. ‘I was watching CNN when the news about the Prince broke.

‘It’s so upsetting — not because he’s heir to the throne, but because I have so many friends, like him, who are contracting the virus.’

She shakes her head disbelievingly.

Sheila and the Prince, whom she fondly calls ‘Charles’, have shared an enduring friendship for more than four decades.

They met at a charity dinner in Eastbourne when he, at 29 years old, was the world’s most eligible bachelor. 

Sheila was the sassy, sexy lead singer of the Three Degrees who dared the Prince to join them on stage. He was immediately smitten. 

‘We were the same age and saw each other a few times — he was very flirtatious,’ she says.

‘It was pretty well known that Charles, because he was such a womaniser, used to have this train where he’d take women. 

The CID, or whoever, would take the train to somewhere in the country and link it up to a telephone pole so they had communication for security. Once we were dancing and Charles said ‘I have a train’. 

I said: ‘Yeah, well I have a plane.’ I didn’t, of course, but it was just a way of coming back.

‘He cracked up. I think because I didn’t succumb to his advances, we just had a laugh together. I thought he was a nice-looking guy, but I also realised there was no future in it, so why go there?

‘There was not going to be a black queen of England and I didn’t want to be just a notch on his bedpost. I kind of valued myself a little more than that.’

This is the first time Sheila has spoken so openly about her relationship with the Prince of Wales. Many of us are, as she says, ‘tying up loose ends’ during these frightening days.

‘Of course, we [she means Charles and herself], being over 70, are in the high-risk category. Not that I feel 72 years old. I keep hearing the word ‘elderly’, and it’s such a shock to know it’s being applied to me, and that my friends and I are at risk. I live in fear of getting it.’

Throughout our interview, Sheila’s moods spin on a sixpence.

One moment, she is her glass-half-full self, relishing the fact she can wander about in no make-up and few clothes; the next, she’s close to tears.

For a sociable creature such as Sheila, who has been single since her partner died nine years ago, isolation is proving to be particularly testing.

‘My daughters [twins from her 24-year marriage, which ended in 2004] contact me every day, whereas before it might have been every couple of months. You need that, because I have no support group. I’ve got great neighbours, but they need to look after themselves — I get that.

‘I tried dating when I was living alone in Majorca. I’d see no one for months except my handyman and gardener, so I signed up to this dating agency. I started out by not saying who I was while I got to know them. When I got to the email stage of letting them know who I was, I’d get: ‘I can’t date you — you’re Prince Charles’s favourite.’ ‘

‘Look, I’m not a would-have-could-have-should-have person. It’s just . . .’ Sheila is close to tears. Like so many of us, she is thoroughly discombobulated by the terrible virus that has turned life on its head.

‘I’ve got one daughter in Dubai, another in Buckinghamshire. I’ve got a mother who is 95 in Philadelphia with my aunts and uncles who are in their 80s and 90s,’ she says.

‘If something happened and I couldn’t get there . . .’

She is sobbing now. ‘I try to keep it in, but sometimes the emotion boils over.

‘While I’ve got this time, I’m writing down what is supposed to happen when I go, for my girls.’

Sheila speaks from a room in her house in which the walls are lined with memorabilia from the proudest moments of her colourful life.

There are photographs of her with Princess Margaret and Princess Michael of Kent, carrying out work for charity, invitations to posh dinners and a telegram from Prince Charles and Princess Diana, sent after Sheila gave birth to her twins in September 1981.

It reads: ‘Congratulations on the birth of your twins. One more girl will ensure the Three Degrees for years to come.’

Sheila was the toast of London and a regular at legendary nightclubs such as Annabel’s and Tramp when she met Prince Charles at a charity gala dinner at the King’s Country Club, Eastbourne, in July 1978.

‘We were sitting across the table from him. The idea was that when the three of us went on stage to sing, he’d have a bird’s-eye view,’ remembers Sheila.

‘That’s when I said to him over dinner: ‘If one were to ask one to join one on stage, would one agree?’

‘He just kind of smiled. He didn’t say ‘Yes’ and he didn’t say ‘No’. I was emboldened by that. When I got up, I asked if he’d like to join us.’

And the Prince did. Within hours, a photograph of him and the group doing a dance called ‘the Bump’ had flashed around the world.

Also that summer, she and her co-stars joined him at a polo match in Windsor, at which Camilla Parker Bowles was also present.

‘We were in a sort of VIP area,’ Sheila says. ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen a polo match. To be quite honest, I was looking at the Argentinian players because they were drop-dead gorgeous. It was a fascinating sport — to be able to control a horse and hit a ball like that. At half-time, I walked over to where Charles was standing with his cap under his arm.

‘Camilla [Parker Bowles] was there. She’d come to see him play as well. But she couldn’t say anything because I think she was married at the time. I just remember catching eye contact between them.

‘He said to me: ‘Would you like to see my car?’ I said: ‘Yes sure.’ He took me over — it was a convertible — and in the middle of the car he had all of our cassettes. He was a fan.

‘It didn’t really dawn on me that I was with a future king of England. I knew it, but he was just a guy.’

After the polo match, the Three Degrees then received an invitation from the Palace to perform at Charles’s 30th birthday party, in November 1978.

‘We had a flat in Park Lane,’ she says. 

‘I came in one day, got the post, ripped it open and it was an invitation from the Queen to his 30th birthday party. I remember trying to find some Sellotape to tape it back together again because I hadn’t realised there was a royal seal on it.

‘We performed at his 30th at Buckingham Palace. They had no stage, so they built one between two rooms for us. The sound couldn’t be more than ten decibels because the Queen Mother was there, as well as all the dignitaries of Europe. So, the Queen had a box in her lap with red, yellow and green lights. Green meant the sound volume was OK.

‘We opened with Giving Up, Giving In. When we looked around, we got the green light.’

After the performance, the Three Degrees were asked to join the Prince as his guests.

‘When we had got changed, he walked us into the party,’ she says. ‘Before that, I handed him his birthday present, which was a solid gold pen that had a little clock on it, because I’ve got this fascination for clocks and watches.

‘He opened it and said: ‘That’s beautiful.’ He put it inside his breast pocket in his tuxedo. I thought that was really sweet.

‘When he escorted us into the main ballroom, it was like walking in arm in arm with Mr Darcy [from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice]. The Red Sea parted.

‘I thought: ‘This is out of a fairy tale. I can’t believe three black chicks from the ghetto have got to this point.’

Sheila was born in poverty in Philadelphia. Her mother suffered with mental illness, so she was shunted from aunt to aunt and, by the age of ten, had attended 13 schools.

At the age of 14, she met and was signed by her manager, Richard Barrett. They had become lovers within the year. It was a horribly abusive relationship, but one that saw Sheila and the Three Degrees achieve astonishing fame. She and Barrett separated shortly after Sheila met Charles. 

‘Richard was jealous of the attention any man paid me,’ she says. ‘Throughout the time I knew Charles, he was always in the background. He was very abusive and I felt I was between a rock and a hard place.

‘We were in London when one evening I went out and came back to my hotel, and all over my room he had left signs that were very vulgar such as ‘bitch for sale’. I tore them down off the door, and thought: ‘This is ridiculous. I can’t live like this.’

Desperate to escape the torment of the relationship, a distraught Sheila took an overdose of pills and tried to slit her wrists.

After she had swallowed the tablets, she began to regret her actions.

‘I called Helen [Scott, her fellow group member] and said: ‘I don’t want to die.’

‘She called an ambulance and we went to whatever hospital in London. Once you’ve had your stomach pumped, you don’t try that again, believe me.’

Before she was discharged, Sheila saw a therapist who advised her to dump her manager. She did. Within a year, she had met and married businessman Chris Robinson, while Prince Charles had started a relationship with his future bride, Lady Diana Spencer.

‘The last time I saw Charles was when we performed at Balmoral,’ she says. ‘We were wearing catsuits and he was wearing a kilt. When I met him I said: ‘So look who’s wearing the pants now.’

They did, though, always remain friends.

‘There was always a way to contact Charles if I wanted to, and vice versa. We had a way of doing it through a mutual friend,’ she says. ‘We exchanged books and we exchanged letters.

‘When [Princess] Diana died, I sent a handwritten letter. I thought he’d been so dignified in the way he handled things. He never once cracked in public. Our mutual friend gave him the letter over brandy and cigars.

‘He said the Prince’s eyes watered, which was something that touched me deeply because it meant he took it in the way it had been meant. It was a personal thing.’

Sheila was equally touched a decade later when she was approached to be an Ambassador for the Prince’s Trust.

‘I was told that Charles said: ‘Sheila Ferguson will be perfect. She comes from the kind of roots that will be good for our charity.’

Again, her smoky voice is thick with tears: ‘My heartfelt wishes go out to Charles and his family.’

As do all of ours.