SOMETIMES it was just a fleeting glimpse, or a handshake, or a few words. If you were one of the fortunate ones you were able to spend a decent length of time with her. But however long you were in the presence of one of the most famous women in the world, you never quite forgot it.

The Princess of Wales has been dead now for two decades – the 20th anniversary of that wretched night in Paris falls on Thursday. In some ways, the fact that she died so young – she was just 36 – has given the memory of even the briefest of encounters a sharp poignancy.

“I’ve been very fortunate in my life”, says Derek Shaw, who met her on one of her many official visits to Scotland. “I’m 70 years old and have done lots of things, but I have never forgotten that day, and I have never forgotten her”.

In September 1983 Shaw was works director at the Keiller marmalade and confectionery factory in Dundee, when Diana arrived on an official visit. “There was lots going on before she arrived”, he says. “My mind was more on the security arrangements. And I wanted to make sure our new factory machines were running. `I drove to work along the Kingsway that morning, and it was on BBC radio that she was coming to the factory, and all of sudden it hit me. I remember thinking: oh ****.

“So, eventually, she arrived, and you go through the formalities of her meeting the Lord Provost, the company chairman, and then she was passed to me, and it was just amazing. It was like the sun coming out: it was just incredible. She made you feel so comfortable, made you feel good. We went round the factory and she spoke to everybody. She was interested in everybody. It was absolutely incredible.

“She was different”, Shaw adds. “I had met other Royals. Other Royals didn’t have that look in their eyes – they weren’t interested. Diana’s visit was a long time ago now but I have never forgotten it. She had that sparkle about her, and she brought sunshine to everybody”.

Something about Diana made her uniquely approachable, with people boldly asking her questions they would have hesitated to ask other female royals – Anne, for example. Elaine Robertson, who worked at Keiller, asked outright: “Are you going to have another baby?” (William had been born the previous summer; Harry would not follow until September 1984). Diana blushed, smiled and replied: “That is a very personal question”.

Robertson later told The Herald: “The Princess took it in good part and was not a bit annoyed. I realise it could have been an embarrassing question and I was a little concerned about how she would take it. The Princess, who was absolutely charming and spoke to everyone, was not a bit put out”.

Shaw was originally “a bit annoyed” that the question had been posed, “but the next morning there was worldwide coverage, so it was rather good [for the factory] from that point of view”.

He remembers introducing Diana to all the heads of department as her visit over-ran. “She asked me about my family and that sort of thing. We did the factory tour and she asked about all sorts of things.

“As I said goodbye to her there was a long walk with people on either side, and she crisscrossed it. If there was a young mum, Diana was there, like a magnet.”

One of the women she spoke to was Valerie Gowans, whose mother, Maureen, worked in the factory. Valerie’s daughter, Jennifer, seven months old, lay asleep on her shoulder, and Diana remarked: “She obviously fell asleep because she got fed up waiting”. A few days ago, Valerie recalled: “She just came along, shaking all the hands”. Diana had the common touch, she added. “She was lovely and so down to earth. It wasn’t strange talking to her, because she was so down to earth. She spoke politely, obviously, but she would put you at ease”.

The Herald ran a photograph of Diana accepting a flower from Shaw’s daughter, Cilla, who was 12 at the time. “She was waving it and shouting, ‘Di, Di’”, Shaw recalls, “and Diana came over and took the flower from her, and chatted to my wife and mother in law, who were nearby”. It was a nice day to a somewhat surreal day for Shaw, who to this day has the overalls that the princess wore on that visit, thirty-four long years ago.

In his autobiography the late Jimmy Logan told the story of the Royal Scottish Variety Performance he organised at the King’s Theatre in October 1983. He had lined up the cream of Scottish showbiz to entertain the Prince and Princess of Wales, but the weeks leading up to it did not always go smoothly.

The people who essentially did the Royal couple’s PR were distinctly snotty towards him - they were a “disaster zone”, as he put it. The solid Scottish acts on the bill, and the absence of big-name English stars, did not interest the Glasgow-based TV companies.

But the show, at the King’s Theatre, was a brilliant success, he wrote. At one point, he found himself within a couple of feet of Diana, seated in the Royal box: her face “was looking radiant with the biggest smile in the world. What a beautiful woman she was”. Later, he says of her that she was “an incredibly beautiful woman who made even the most fantastic clothes look even better”.

Andy Cameron was one of the acts on the bill that night, and was fortunate enough to be introduced to Diana afterwards. “I had done my football act, with the half-Rangers, half-Celtic strip”, he says. “I wouldn’t say she had difficulty understanding me … but she thought I was a singer.

“She was stunning. Her eyes were mesmerising. She was just gorgeous. She was really tall… I had to stand on a chair to speak to her. She was a really beautiful woman.

“It was a great show, and Diana was quiet and very dignified, just what you would expect from someone we thought of as a future Queen.

“In some ways she was like the Queen - aloof, in a way - but you could say she was a real person. It was very sad what happened to her. I look at her boys and think how sad it was that they grew up in their formative years without their mother”.

All the proceeds from that show went to the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice, which had been Glasgow’s wedding gift to Charles and Diana in 1981. The couple visited the hospice on May 29, 1990 to officially open it – and even now, 27 years later, people at the hospice recall Diana’s distinct “human touch”.

The princess sat beside an elderly man as he stroked the hand of his wife, who was dying. “I love my wife today as much as I did the first day I met her”, he told the Princess. His words touched her so much that as she was leaving the hospice she returned to the couple and handed the man a bouquet of flowers for his wife. Diana had received the flowers on arrival from a young girl whose mum was a patient there.

“Princess Diana was lovely – very normal, very kind – and she spent a great deal of time listening to and talking to the patients,” recalls Anne McBryan, the hospice’s former head of fundraising. “She understood that the people there were going through very difficult times – and I do believe seeing her and having her there made things a little bit brighter for them.”

Diana was very natural, she added. “You didn’t feel at all nervous when you were speaking with her. She had this genuine ability to put people at ease and, of course, all eyes were on her. Straightaway you felt as if you had met her before. It was a great gift.

“She was very insightful into people’s feelings … she had a great humanity about her. She had the lovely little touches that made people feel good”. Referring to the hospice that bears Diana’s and Charles’s name she said: “People are suffering from a lot of losses in their life when they are terminally ill, and even if it is just respite from that for a wee while, that is something, isn’t it?”

Her sons, Danny and Mark, acted as stewards, helping to show people around, and were in the line-up to meet her. Mark, 46, says now: “She struck me as being incredibly confident in that charismatic sort of star quality that people talk about.

“I had been involved in the hospice for such a long time. When this person, possibly the most photographed woman in the world at the time, was standing there, it brought home to me the enormity of what it was for the hospice to be opening.

“She seemed very at ease, with a very ready smile. Goodness knows how many people she had smiled at that week, and yet you still felt there was no boredom that you or I might possibly show if we were doing these things”.

There was nothing of the “shy Di” persona that the world remembered from her earlier days: “she was a woman who was very much in command of herself”. Mark recalls being “a little starstruck” by her and a “great buzz” on the day itself.

His mother also happened to have been at that Jimmy Logan-organised gala night at the King’s Theatre in 1983. “She was fabulous, and she met us all afterwards”, she recalls. “She said to me she was hungry, and she had taken a piece, a lunch, and she had had it in the car when she was coming [to the theatre]”.

“What always struck me about Diana”, says Stan Gilmore, “was that she wasn’t really interested in meeting the Lord Provosts and the Chief Constables. She wanted to spend time with ordinary people. She was much happier doing that, and they loved her for it.”

Gilmore and his wife, Dr Anne Gilmore, the founder and chief executive of the hospice, welcomed the Royal couple and their entourage in 1990. Dr Gilmore died in 1998, but Stan recalls her pride at welcoming Charles and Diana. “It was a lovely moment for Anne, who had worked so hard in the early days to get a hospice for Glasgow. Both Royals spent time with the patients and the staff – but everyone wanted to see Diana. Diana was really lovely – she chatted and sat on the beds and put everyone at ease. She really listened to people – you didn’t feel like she was rehearsed or asking stock questions. She was very natural and seemed genuinely interested in what people were saying.”

The Edinburgh Pentlands MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind was Secretary of State for Scotland when on April 29, 1988, he accompanied the Charles and Diana to the royal opening of the Glasgow Garden Festival. He remembers an “extraordinary” photograph of the three of them, entranced by a fireworks display. “She was charming”, he said earlier this week. “She struck me as a rather splendid, very attractive princess, carrying out her public responsibilities”.

Sir Malcolm later met the princess at a Buckingham Palace luncheon the day after an evening diplomatic reception for overseas ambassadors, High Commissioners and senior diplomats, all of whom had solemnly stood in a line to have a brief conversation with the Queen and other members of the royal family. It was, furthermore, the first reception attended by Princess Diana.

In conversation with her over lunch, Sir Malcolm, then a junior Foreign Office minister, asked if she had enjoyed the reception. “She smiled and said, ‘yes, it was a lovely occasion, but I made a terrible mistake which I won’t do again’.

“A number of the ambassadors had asked her if she had ever been to their country and, being polite, she had said, ‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t, but I would love to, one day’. And that morning her office had received several calls from embassies and High Commissions, asking if a date could be fixed up for her to visit, on the basis of these polite exchanges.”

Sir Malcolm’s final meeting with the princess came when she invited him, as Foreign Secretary, to Kensington Palace. “It was after she had separated from the Prince of Wales. She was interested in a possible overseas programme of events and thought it would be helpful to discuss it over lunch”. He laughs as he says: “I managed to find a space in my diary, if I can put it that way.

“I was of course aware that I had not been invited for the pleasure of my company: she had a serious purpose which she discussed in a serious way, but she made it an extremely relaxed occasion”.

Lunch over, the princess accompanied Sir Malcolm to the front door, only to find that his official car had yet to arrive. She insisted on them both returning upstairs for another coffee. “I later wrote to thank her for the lunch”, Sir Malcolm adds. “To my astonishment she wrote back to say how grateful she was for how much time I had been able to find in my diary. She was extremely courteous. One couldn’t help but be very impressed”.

Diana had her flaws, of course. But her sincerity and her people skills are what many remember of their encounter with her. Even those who were in the vicinity of the princess but didn’t actually meet have their imperishable memories. One former BA cabin crew member found herself on a royal flight taking Charles and Diana abroad, but did not get close to her. Even so, she remembers, Diana had a special air about her: one, she says, that could almost be described as “other-wordly”.