Dolly, on the other hand, wore an avant-garde feather coat with knee-high boots and what looked to be a pair of emerald tights.
The pair were last spotted together in October, when they attended the William Hill Showcase Meeting at Cheltenham, but their friendship goes way back. Long considered Zara’s best friend, Dolly became Princess Anne’s lady-in-waiting in 2024. A former NHS midwife, she helped to deliver Zara’s third child, Lucas Tindall, on the floor of Zara’s bathroom at Gatcombe Park after the plan for the birth went awry in 2021.
But Dolly’s bond with the niece of King Charles III goes back long before that. (Not for nothing did Zara’s husband, Mike Tindall, joke that the 53-year-old is “more important than I am.”) Dolly was Zara’s maid of honor when the pair tied the knot, and when Zara split from her then-fiancé, jockey Richard Johnson, in 2003, the pair moved in together—they still live close by in the Cotswolds.
Having worked as a maternity practitioner in the NHS in Gloucestershire for 13 years, Dolly also did some philanthropic work using her maternity expertise, working in the unit of a hospital in Kambia, Sierra Leone for a month in 2013. At Kambia, she taught staff basic nursing skills. Before qualifying as a nurse, Dolly studied fashion and Cordon Bleu cookery at Eastbourne College of Food and Fashion, graduating in 1989.