Kate (11 page)

After the end of the Great War, Frederick returned to his job as a manager with the London and Westminster Bank, where he met Constance Robison, a bank manager’s daughter from Leytonstone. The couple, both 30, sealed their union on 24 June 1920 at Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, an Anglican church built by Sir John Soane. They shared a love of travelling and when a job came up managing the bank’s Valencia branch, Frederick was the first to volunteer. It was there that their son Maurice was born on 16 April 1922. Nearly two years later, on 5 January 1924, the family was completed with the birth of Kate’s grandmother Valerie and her twin sister Mary. By then, Frederick was the sub-manager of the bank in Marseilles, on the south-east coast of France. It was an idyllic place in which to bring up children, but, as was traditional, Maurice was sent to prep school and public school in England. His second wife, Helen, remembers him telling her that the tour operator Thomas Cook used to make sure he arrived safely at his destination. ‘He was sent off with a label with his name on it round his neck,’ she recalls. ‘That wouldn’t happen nowadays.’

On 21 December 1932, when Valerie was just eight years old, Frederick senior died at the age of 73 while his son and his family were visiting. Frederick suffered a brain haemorrhage at his home in Lismore Road, Herne Bay, Kent. His son was at his bedside. He left £1,000 to his three children, a reasonable sum in those days but not one that made their fortune. It was the next generation of Glassborows who would gain real financial security when they married into one of Leeds’ wealthiest families.

It was two months before Frederick Glassborow’s 50th birthday when England declared war on Germany and he faced the prospect of living through another world war. While he was too old to fight, Maurice, who was just 17, was desperate to join the navy. Too young to join the British Royal Navy, he signed up to the French navy, where he would have taken part in the Battle of the Atlantic against the Axis powers, later transferring to the Royal Navy when the family returned from Marseilles to Britain. Frederick escaped on a ship, with the bank’s records stuffed into sacks, shortly before Marseilles was occupied by enemy forces in November 1942. As his ship was waiting to leave the port, it was heavily bombed by German aircraft. It must have been a terrifying experience, but he coped with it with typical composure.

On his return to Britain, Frederick was transferred to the North, where he became manager of the Leeds branch of the Westminster Bank, in Park Row. He was active in the life of the city, being appointed chairman of the Institute of Bankers and of the Banking Advisory Committee of the Leeds College of Commerce, a member of the Council of the Leeds Chamber of Commerce, treasurer of the Economic League in the West yorkshire region, as well as a Freeman of the City of London. These networking skills would eventually have beneficial repercussions for all his children.

While Maurice married into one of the country’s most illustrious theatrical dynasties, Valerie and Mary landed the sons of one of Leeds’ richest and most influential families. Frederick saw all three of his children happily settled and retired to Folkestone, Kent, where he died suddenly on 10 June 1954, at the age of 64, from a stroke caused by high blood pressure. He left his wife the equivalent of £323,000 – comfortably off but a widow in her 60s. She lived another two decades, long enough to see all her grandchildren grow up but not long enough to see her pilot grandson Michael marry air hostess Carole Goldsmith, or to meet her great-granddaughter Kate.

Chapter 10
Peter Middleton and Valerie Glassborow

D
escribed by Sir Winston Churchill as the ‘first splash of colour’ after the long years of war, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the Duke of Edinburgh on 20 November 1947 heralded a new age of peace and optimism for Britain in the aftermath of the conflict.

The 21-year-old princess had saved up her clothing coupons to buy the fabric for her dress: ivory duchesse satin woven from silk created by Chinese silkworms. Designed by couturier Norman Hartnell, it was embroidered with seed pearls in patterns inspired by the Botticelli masterpiece
Primavera
. Wearing a silk-tulle veil and diamond tiara lent to her by her mother, Queen Elizabeth, she walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in front of 2,000 dignitaries and guests on the arm of her father, King George VI.

Afterwards, the young couple, who received 2,500 wedding presents from across the globe, moved into their first home, a five-bedroom house in Sunningdale, Ascot, which they leased until they moved into Clarence House in London two years later. Their new home, Windlesham Moor, was set in 58-acre grounds, and had four reception rooms, including a dining room, a 50-ft drawing room and a Chinese room. This was where they were living when Prince Charles was born on 14 November 1948.

The royal wedding ushered in a new dawn for Britain as it emerged from the hardship of the Second World War. The lives of all British citizens, whether they had fought abroad or on the home front, had been turned upside down, and everyone was looking forward to a time of peace.

French couturier Christian Dior’s ultra-feminine 1947 collection echoed the turnaround as men returned to their old jobs and women were sent back to the traditional sphere of the home. Dubbed ‘the New Look’, after the term was used of the style in a
Harper’s Bazaar
editorial, Dior’s dresses and suits with soft shoulders, tiny waists and flowing skirts epitomised the mood of the post-war era. Scandalously extravagant and yet perfectly in tune with the times, the New Look caught the world’s imagination. Rita Hayworth wore one of the new dresses to the premiere of
Gilda
and Margot Fonteyn bought a Dior suit. Such was the furore surrounding the clothes that, although George VI would not allow his daughters to wear the luxurious new style while times were tough, the designer was nonetheless asked to give them a private view of his next collection.

The year 1947 was a time of great change. It spelled the end of the Commonwealth – the partition of India resulting in the creation of the sovereign states of India and Pakistan – the Paris Peace treaties were signed and the International Monetary Fund was launched. Cambridge University voted to allow women full membership for the first time and the French author André Gide won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The year also saw the deaths of Al Capone, car manufacturer Henry Ford and former prime minister Stanley Baldwin. It was an age of new technology: the first instant Polaroid camera appeared, Kalashnikov finalised the design of the AK-47 assault rifle, Hollywood mogul Howard Hughes piloted the enormous ‘Spruce Goose’ on its first and only flight – and there was the mysterious recovery by the US army of a crashed ‘flying disc’ from a ranch in Roswell, Texas.

It was also a year of celebrations for Kate’s grandparents Peter Middleton, 27, and his wife Valerie, 23, in Leeds. Virtually the same age as the royal couple – Peter nine months older than the Duke of Edinburgh and Valerie two years older than the Queen – they themselves had got married a year earlier, on 7 December 1946, and were coming up to their first anniversary when Princess Elizabeth walked down the aisle. Their own wedding, of course, was not in the same league as that of Prince William’s grandparents, but it was a very happy occasion. Peter’s father Noel watched proudly as the young couple said their vows in front of friends and family at the Norman parish church in Adel, the oldest in Leeds, which rivals Westminster Abbey for beauty, and then witnessed their wedding signatures. He must have been sad that his wife olive, who had died of peritonitis before the war, could not be at his side. Still, his sister-in-law Anne took her place and three of his other children, Christopher (already married to builder’s daughter Dorothy), Anthony and Anne, were in the congregation along with Valerie’s parents, Frederick and Constance Glassborow, who were close family friends.

The Glassborow twins, Valerie and Mary, had been brought up in Marseilles, where their father was sub-manager of the Westminster Foreign Bank, between the wars, and they were both bilingual. They met the Middleton boys in their home town of Leeds after Frederick was transferred there in 1943, having fled the German invasion of France.

In an unusual twist, six months later, on 5 April 1947, when Valerie was four months pregnant with her first child, the two families were reunited once more for another wedding, this time that of Peter’s older brother Anthony and Valerie’s twin sister Mary. Tony, 29, who worked with his father Noel and brother Christopher at the family firm, William Lupton & Co., walked down the aisle with Mary, 23, at the Parish Church of St John in Moor Allerton, making them double brothers- and sisters-in-law.

The newly wed couple moved into one of two flats in Stanley Drive, Roundhay, belonging to Anthony’s father Noel, just streets away from Valerie and Peter (who were living in the family home, Fieldhead), and Christopher, who lived in oakwood Park with his wife Dorothy, four-year-old daughter Philippa and two-year-old son Stephen. Their younger sister Margaret had moved down to London and was living a more bohemian and glamorous lifestyle in Carlyle Square, an exclusive enclave off the Kings Road.

In another six months, on 21 September 1947, Valerie and Peter celebrated the birth of their first child, a son Richard, who was born at the Willows Nursing Home in Broad Lane on 21 September 1947, making him a year older than Prince Charles. By then, Peter had left the RAF, where he had been promoted to the rank of flight lieutenant, and was working as a commercial pilot for a charter company. He and his young family continued to live at Fieldhead with his ageing father while they searched for a home of their own.

The Glassborow girls’ older brother Maurice, 25, having come out of the navy, was working temporarily as an asbestos manufacturer’s representative. He was married to Monica NeilsonTerry and the couple lived a simple lifestyle in Primley Park Mount, to the east of Moortown Golf Club and three miles north-east of Roundhay, where his twin sisters lived. All four young families spent a lot of time together, especially after the birth of Maurice and Monica’s daughter Matita at Chapel Allerton Nursing Home on 12 December 1947. She was just three months younger than her cousin Richard, and the two sisters-in-law must have appreciated each other’s help and companionship.

Monica Neilson-Terry was descended from the great theatrical dynasty of the day, which numbered John Gielgud among its members. Gielgud’s biographer Jonathan Croall described the family as having ‘large appetites, gracious manners, fine voices and beautiful diction but also a flamboyant temperament, great stamina and an enormous capacity for hard work’. Monica’s great-aunt was the legendary Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry, who made her theatrical debut in front of Prince William’s great-great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria at the age of eight – as Mamillius in
The Winter’s Tale
– and was created a dame by his great-great-grandfather George V. A legend on the stage, she and the actor Sir Henry Irving, with whom she worked for 23 years, transformed British theatre. Offstage, her personal life caused scandal after Victorian scandal. She married three times, was pursued by George Bernard Shaw and eloped with an architect, Edward Godwin, by whom she had two children, a daughter named Edith, and a son, Edward Gordon Craig, who was the lover of Isadora Duncan and father of her ill-fated daughter Deirdre, who drowned in the River Seine at the age of seven.

Dame Ellen was the sister of Gielgud’s grandmother Kate and Monica’s grandfather Fred, a renowned actor-manager, making them second cousins. Monica’s father was the esteemed actor Dennis Neilson-Terry, who died of double pneumonia at the age of 36, when she was just 10 years old. Her aunt was Phyllis NeilsonTerry, a successful stage actress who appeared in the film of John osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger
. Her sister Hazel, who had a role in Joseph Losey’s acclaimed film
The Servant
, starring Dirk Bogarde, was married to actor Geoffrey Keen, who played Frederick Gray, the Minister of Defence, in six James Bond films. So Kate’s lineage includes famous authors, Hollywood actors and stage legends.

Towards the end of the ’40s, Maurice moved down to London with his wife and daughter, leaving his twin sisters up north, where their lives remained as intertwined as ever. By the time Prince Charles was born on 14 November 1948, both Kate’s grandmother Valerie and her great-aunt Mary were pregnant, Valerie with her second child and Mary with her first, a son John, who was born on 10 May 1949. Six weeks later, on 23 June, Valerie gave birth to her second son – Kate’s father, Michael – at Chapel Allerton Nursing Home – an apt location, it would seem. Although its name has since changed, the building would appear to be the same one that backs onto Hawkhills, the house in Allerton Park where Michael’s great-great-grandfather William lived a century beforehand. By this time, Valerie’s husband Peter was a pilot instructor at the Air Service Training flying school, living with his young family in King Lane, west of Moortown Golf Club, and thinking of leaving Leeds and moving south. His father Noel, the patriarch of the family, died suddenly of a heart attack on 2 July 1951, and shortly afterwards the family did move south. At just 30 years old, Peter had lost both his parents. Perhaps it was easier for him to leave his home town behind when his father was no longer there.

Peter landed a job as a pilot instructor at the recently formed British European Airways, which was based at Heathrow Airport and flew to destinations in Europe and North Africa. He became a highly respected pilot and instructor and worked there until BEA merged with the British overseas Airways Corporation in 1974, when he joined the newly created British Airways. In order to be near the airport, Peter moved his young family 200 miles south to the market town of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, set in the Chiltern Hills, an Area of outstanding Natural Beauty. The young couple moved with their two sons, Richard, four, and Michael, two, to Silverthorne, a house in peaceful Grenfell Road, where homes now sell for around £1 million. It was there that they brought up their four children. Their third boy, Simon, was born on 24 August 1952 in Beaconsfield and their fourth, Nicholas, in nearby Chalfont St Giles on 11 September 1956.