Landmine victims and those working to help them, like North Yorkshire's Paul Heslop, are to benefit from a £1 million donation from the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

Paul, whose parents Judith and Peter, run the Mallyan Spout Hotel in Goathland, was one of the Halo Trust workers who showed Diana round the minefields of Angola during her high profile visit there last summer.

Now a group of organisations dealing with landmine issues are to share the £1 million, part of the first £13 million of the fund to be distributed.

Another £7 million will go to seven other causes and the remaining £5 million will be distributed among about 100 other charitable causes.

All six charities of which the Princess was either patron or president at the time of her death last August will each get a one off payment of £1 million.

They are homeless charity Centrepoint, the English National Ballet, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the Leprosy Mission, the National AIDS Trust and the Royal Marsden NHS Trust.

However, Christopher Spence, chairman of the trust's grants committee, said it would have been impossible to please everyone.

"With the fund now standing at a little over £40 million, we believe £13 million to be an appropriate level of distribution at this stage in the Fund's development - it is, coincidentally, the same sum of money donated to the fund by the public in the weeks immediately following the Princess's death."

The Memorial Fund has received more than £40 million since the Princess died in a car crash in Paris last August.

Martin House Hospice in Boston Spa, near Tadcaster, said it had already written to the fund and hoped that sick children in the county would benefit from future pay-outs.

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