This is not the first time I have met Chelsy Davy. Back in 2010, when I was 21 and she was 24, we crossed paths in a club on the King’s Road. Her glassy blue eyes widen when I tell her this: “Oh God,” she mutters. I am quick to tell her not to worry — it was me who was the idiot, falling onto her table of friends and spilling her very expensive bottle of vodka. I expected her to have me thrown out — instead, she was extremely forgiving. She even helped me clean my dress.
“Aw!” she says. “That was nice of me.”
Davy, now 30, is keen for me not to paint her as a partier. Every time I hint at her being a good-time girl, she smiles and quickly dismisses it. But when I’ve spoken to friends who are on the fringes of her circle, they’ve all given me variations on the same theme: she’s the life and soul.
Now she is a picture of understated sophistication, with sleek hair, long limbs and a striking face — much more angular than it appears in photos — dressed in a pared-down combination of skinny jeans and a monochrome Bella Freud jumper. But a quick Google search brings up a ton of photos of the Davy the nation was so fond of during her relationship with the naughty-but-nice Prince Harry: her head thrown back in laughter, dressed in the sort of unfussy outfits you’d find on a university campus (ripped jeans, aviators and strappy vests), sometimes with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. There’s no avoiding it: Chelsy Davy is fun.
Her resistance at being seen simply as the gregarious ex of a royal is understandable. Most people are unaware of how successful she is in her own right, having been admitted to Allen & Overy, a magic-circle London law firm, when she was 27. “The law thing was a challenge,” she tells me. “Ever since I watched A Few Good Men when I was young, I wanted to be a lawyer. I loved the legal minds. But it got to the point that I wanted something that was mine and I also wanted to go home.”
In late 2014, she quit and began a new project in a totally different field that would take her back to Africa, where she was born. It began when she saw an emerald necklace her brother’s friend had bought for his girlfriend. “I found out it was a Zambian emerald. I started doing some research and learning about the array of African gemstones and how beautiful they are.”
She quickly enrolled on a gemology diploma course.“It was all about the chemical structure. I was in a lab a lot. We had to identify 500 different stones before the exam. It was amazing — I’m quite a geek like that.”
While studying, she launched Aya, a luxury jewellery company that ethically sources all its materials from Africa; pieces are available on her website, aya.co.uk, at Plukka in Burlington Arcade, and Baar & Bass in Chelsea. Staggeringly, she has done all this in less than a year, and it’s not just a celebrity-endorsed project: she is the mastermind of everything, from start to finish.
“I went to the mine and I was like a child, running around looking at the sorting house and the pit. Picking up an emerald for the first time was amazing. To think that they were created millions of years ago, hundreds of miles under the ground, in very set, specific circumstances. It is mind-boggling.” Her passion for Aya is obvious as she gesticulates with her bejewelled hands while talking about sourcing gems or building a classroom block in the mine area (the company has a strong focus on giving back to the communities it works with). The jewellery itself is very delicate — the elegant emerald, ruby and tanzanite rings are stackable and the necklaces feature pretty gold elephant tusks as a homage to her home.
Though she has spent a sizeable portion of her life in Britain, Africa will always be under her skin. She grew up on farms in Zimbabwe, “running around barefoot with buffalos and elephants everywhere”, and her upbringing sounds adventurous and idyllic in equal parts. She talks of climbing trees, chasing baboons and being told off by her parents for picking up snakes.
Her mother, Beverley Donald, is a former Coca-Cola model and Miss Rhodesia 1973 (photos of her in her modelling days show a retroussé nose and pale eyes; she could be mistaken for Chelsy now). Her father, Charles Davy, is a safari farmer, one of the largest private landowners in Zimbabwe.
This remote, rural upbringing made her naturally “quite tomboyish” — she is genuinely perplexed when I refer to her as “glamorous” at one point. (“Am I seen as glamorous?” she says, before breaking into one of her many fits of giggles.) When she moved to an English boarding school at 14, there was a culture shock: “Everyone was wearing make-up and I was, like, ‘What?’ I’d never worn shoes before.”
She did her degree in economics at the University of Cape Town, where the days were “8am to 5pm” and any free time was spent outdoors, at the beach or climbing Table Mountain. She came back to do a masters in law at Leeds, where she couldn’t believe how little work was required in comparison: “It was so much fun. Too much fun,” she says, rolling her eyes.
Now, she’s back and forth between Africa — Zimbabwe, with family, and Zambia where the mine is — and her London home in Chelsea. She describes her relationship with the UK as being “really turbulent” and having “changed over the years”. She loves her friends here and the English sense of humour, but isn’t so keen on the weather. “But then, no one is,” she adds.
She gets up at 6am most days “like a stick of dynamite” to work on Aya, and says her King’s Road clubbing days have been over for years. “I go to festivals and parties,” she says, “but not clubs.” She loves electro music and listens to it while she runs, four or five times a week. She’s someone with masses of energy to burn and when she goes out dancing, she “could dance all night”.
So: running, partying — what are her other passions? “I’m not sure partying is a passion,” she corrects me with a laugh. “Having fun, maybe. My favourite thing is to be with my family. And travel.”
Her slight caginess is justified. During her time with Prince Harry, the British press was intrusive and always on her doorstep. “I found it tough,” she says. “It’s not something you get used to.” And although press interest around her has cooled, it has by no means disappeared.
A few days before we meet, an online story runs with the headline “Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy pulls a hair from her mouth as she walks along a London street”, with a photo of her innocently brushing something away from her lips. Twitter goes into meltdown over its irrelevance, but Davy is unfazed. “It’s obviously less than ideal,” she says calmly. “But it’s not invasive.”
She says she “gets left alone now” and although “that part was quite hectic, it’s not like that any more” — the subtext being that “that part” was her relationship with Harry. I ask her if it’s a relief to go into her thirties feeling free from that level of press surveillance. “Of course,” she says quietly. “It’s nice no matter what age.”
At this point, I can’t skirt around it any longer and ask if she and Prince Harry are still in touch. “I think we will always be good friends,” she says firmly. And that’s all she will say.
She has no regrets from her twenties, although “just like you regret falling on my table, I probably fell on a table too”, she jokes. Davy loved that time and said it was a decade of achieving, seeing and doing a lot of things. “It was quite balanced,” she says. “I never lost sight of my ambitions.”
Although she is focused on Aya, she hopes that family and marriage (“a very beautiful thing”) are in her future, too. For now, though, she’s happy carving out her own identity with her business. “I want to be my own person. I want to create something amazing and make a difference.”
As we finish the interview, I tell her that, in the flesh, she reminds me of the actress Vanessa Kirby.
“What’s she in?” she asks.
“She’s about to appear in The Crown,” I say. “It’s about the, erm, royal family.” Davy lets out one of her infectious laughs.
“Right, I think it’s probably time to …” her publicist trills, ushering her out to a black cab. “I’m going to Chelsea. Do you want a lift?” she asks me. I tell her I’m getting an Uber to Soho and she gives me a hug goodbye.
“Who was that?” my driver asks, nodding at the leggy blonde.
“Chelsy Davy. I just interviewed her.”
“Oh yes? Who is she?” he asks.
“She’s a Zimbabwean businesswoman,” I hear myself say. And I hope very much that, some day soon, that’s what the rest of the world will call her, too.
Photographs: Jermaine Francis. Styling: Olly Paton. Hair: Tracey Cahoon using Ojon haircare for Cahoonas LSOH. Make-up: Jo Frost at CML Hair & Make-Up using Liz Earle
