Prince William Scrubs Toilet; Charms World

Dec. 12, 2000 -- It was the most astonishing of royal pictures. Crouching by a sparse functional toilet in sweatshirt and sandals, his royal hands in enormous yellow rubber gloves, the future monarch of Britain was on all fours, scrubbing a toilet in a remote Chilean village.

On a 10-week charity volunteer expedition to southern Chile, Britain’s Prince William had insisted on being treated as a “normal.”

And he meant it. His trip has included teaching English in the village of Tortel, about 950 miles south of the capital Santiago, doing kitchen duty and scrubbing the bathroom to name just a few.

Photographs and footage of the young prince’s Chilean adventures were released thanks to an arrangement by Buckingham Palace to ensure William’s privacy was preserved while also satisfying media interest.

Not an institution to let go of banner headline value stories, the British media has predictably gone mad over the photographs.

“Wills Royal Flush,” ran the front page headline in The Mirror. “Wills Cleans Throne” screamed The Sun with the cover shot of the young royal on all fours.

Sky television ran a special program on the trip several times throughout the day. “Can He Fix the Monarchy? Yes, He Can,” declared the News of the World, which devoted its entire front page to a photo of William in a hard hat, helping to build a walkway in Chile.

“What has emerged from the expedition is a prince more at ease with his role than previously thought,” the upscale Sunday Times said.

What the Royal Doctors Ordered

The down-to-earth pictures of the second-in-line to the British throne is just the sort of new image the royal family has been hoping for.

After facing murmurs of discontent over its handling of William’s mother Princess Diana’s death and numerous collapsing royal marriages, the only really royal moment this year has come from the oldest family member, the “Queen Mum” when she turned 100 this August.

Now it looks like it’s time for a new generation to charm the British masses.

A fawning, royal-crazed public is not the tall, handsome 18-year-old’s only fans. Rave reviews have also come his way from co-workers for a self-deprecating performance in Tortel.

These included a homeless teenager trying to kick drugs who teased the 18-year-old William and called him “Little Princess.”

William apparently showed true leadership qualities according to the organizers of the Raleigh International trip and the prince was quick to adapt. “He’s obviously arrived on the expedition with an excellent attitude. I think he approached it as if he was like anybody else,” said project leader Malcolm Sutherland.

‘I Am a Wombat’

The pool video released to the media also had footage of him struggling to draw a penguin and a wombat, the animal whose name he adopted during a game devised to teach 10- and 11-year-old students English.

“My name is Will. I am a wombat,” he wrote on a board. The accompanying picture bore little resemblance to the burrowing Australian marsupial, a fact the prince willingly acknowledged.

His efforts at a penguin were no more successful. “I don’t know how much of a penguin this is,” he laughed.

William, whose father Prince Charles is heir to the throne, was stranded for five days on a Chilean beach where he was battered by freezing rain and relentless gales.

The tent he lived in while was stranded was by far the worst dwelling the young royal has had to inhabit, the prince says, though the leaky-roofed nursery where he sleeps on the floor with 15 others is hardly much of an improvement.

But it was not all plain sailing for the people’s prince. One team leader explained how he had given the prince a ticking off for being lazy at the start of his adventure, and William recalled how tough it was to get used to cramped, communal conditions.

“You don’t have any secrets. You share everything with everyone. I found it difficult to start with because I am a very private person. But I learned to deal with it,” Prince William said.

ABCNEWS’ Nathan Thomas in London, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.