Kate (12 page)

Between their births, the family had to cope with a sad loss when, on 10 June 1954, Valerie’s father Frederick suddenly died of a stroke at the age of 64. His wife Constance, and indeed the whole family, was devastated. There was also sad news on the business front: William Lupton & Co., the family firm that had been founded in 1773, the oldest company in Leeds, finally closed its doors in 1958, leaving Christopher and Tony without a job. The closure prompted Tony and his wife Mary to follow Peter and Valerie down south, the first generation of the Middleton family to leave behind their northern roots, with Christopher the only one of the siblings remaining in Leeds. Tony began working for the textile company Courtaulds, and he and Mary, who had four children – John, Gillian, who was born in 1951, Timothy, born in 1959, and Elizabeth, 1962 – settled in the same town as their siblings, in a house named Beechlawn in leafy Eghams Wood Road, just a mile away from Peter and Valerie. So the eight cousins, who were all similar ages, were brought up together.

By this time, the rest of the family was spread around the world: Christopher and his family were in Leeds; Maurice, now a wine merchant, was managing Saccone & Speed in Nairobi, where his daughter Matita went to Loreto Convent School; and Margaret was living in Barnet, north London, with her husband Jim Barton, a talented violinist who played chamber music, and their daughters Penny, who was born in 1957, and Sarah, who was the same age as Timothy.

The Middletons mourned when Peter’s aunt Anne, olive’s younger sister, died in 1967, from leukaemia and tuberculosis, at the age of 79. She was the last remaining member of his parents’ generation of the family, most of whom had fallen during the First World War, and the woman they had turned to after their mother died. But it was the sudden death of Mary Middleton on 19 November 1975 that sent shock waves through the family. She died of breast cancer at the age of 51, leaving her husband Anthony, her elderly mother Constance, who was at that time living in a nursing home in the village of Penn, Buckinghamshire, and sister Valerie totally bereft. Her two elder children, John, 26, and Gillian, 24, had not yet married and the younger ones, Timothy, 16, and Elizabeth, 13, were both still at school. Less than two years later, on 19 July 1977, Constance died of coronary artery disease, leaving Valerie to mourn both her sister and her mother, who had been staying with her. Constance might have reached the grand old age of 90, but her loss was still keenly felt. Within a year, though, Valerie’s sadness was supplanted by joy when she found out she was about to become a grandmother herself.

Kate’s grandparents were living in a detached house in Vernham Dean, a pretty village nestled in the North Wessex Downs, in Hampshire, when their eldest son, Richard, told them that they were going to become grandparents. His wife Susan, the daughter of a journalist, whom he had married in 1976 – the year after his aunt Mary’s death – was expecting her first child. That child, Lucy, who was born in 1978, brought a welcome ray of sunshine to disperse the dark clouds that surrounded them. But it would be their third grandchild, Kate, who would in time move the family to the very top of the social ladder.

Chapter 11
Michael Middleton and Carole Goldsmith

H
aving arrived in a glass coach at St Paul’s Cathedral, Lady Diana Spencer walked down the aisle on the arm of her father, Earl Spencer, in a £9,000 ivory taffeta and antique lace gown with a 25-ft train, designed by David and Elizabeth Emmanuel. Watched by 3,500 guests, the 20-year-old aristocrat took 3½ minutes to walk up to the altar to marry Prince Charles, 32, dressed in the uniform of a naval commander, at 11.20 a.m. On 29 July 1981.

The royal couple pledged their troth in a traditional Church of England service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, before walking out of the cathedral to the sound of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’. The streets were lined with 600,000 people – and another 750 million watched on television – as Prince William’s parents travelled back to Buckingham Palace in an open-topped landau, emerging on the balcony shortly afterwards for the long-awaited kiss.

The marriage took place in a week when Shakin’ Stevens was riding high in the charts with ‘Green Door’, in the year Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Making your Mind Up’. The film
Chariots of Fire
was pulling in vast audiences and thousands had lined the streets to watch the first London Marathon. The royal wedding was welcomed by a Britain in the grip of a recession and reeling from a series of assassination attempts on world leaders, including America’s new president Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and the Queen: teenager Marcus Sergeant fired six blank shots at the monarch from a starting revolver at that summer’s Trooping of the Colour ceremony. Also that year, Peter Sutcliffe had been found guilty of the yorkshire Ripper murders, Bobby Sands had died whilst on hunger strike in the Maze prison and race riots had broken out in Brixton, Toxteth and Chapeltown. The country needed a reason to party.

By the time Britain was celebrating its fairy-tale wedding, Kate’s parents Michael and Carole Middleton had been married for 13 months and were living in the village of Bradfield, 30 miles from Windsor in the Royal County of Berkshire. Although Michael was virtually the same age as Prince Charles – he is seven months younger – his wife was six years older than Diana. Already expecting their first baby, the newly-weds could not have anticipated that their eldest child would one day marry into the royal family herself.

Carole, a glamorous air stewardess, in her tailored blue jacket with a scarf around her neck, an A-line skirt and a pillbox hat, had met her future husband during the ’70s when she was working at British Airways. The daughter of a working-class couple, Ronald and Dorothy Goldsmith, who had climbed up the social ladder through hard graft, she came from a humble background. Her looks, however, were far from ordinary. ‘Carole wasn’t a girl for make-up,’ remembers her cousin Ann Terry. ‘She was a very natural girl who was happy in jeans and a sloppy jumper, more of a country girl. But she was very pretty. While our cousin Linda was the brains of the family, Carole was the beauty.’

In those days, working as an air hostess at British Airways, the national flag carrier formed in 1974 when BEA merged with BoAC, was a coveted job. Kim Sullivan, daughter of Carole’s cousin Pat Tomlinson, worked with Carole at Terminal 1. ‘British Airways was very exciting in those days,’ she says. ‘It was on the cusp when flying was for a privileged few with money but was opening up to the masses. It was a good job, there were lots of good-looking young people there and it felt like you belonged to a large club. It had a feeling of being glamorous – a bit like in the Leonardo DiCaprio film
Catch Me If You Can
.’

Carole soon attracted the attention of Michael, a flight dispatcher at the new company. He became her first serious boyfriend. Staunchly middle class, Michael was able to trace his lineage back through his blue-blooded grandmother olive Lupton to the seventeenth-century aristocrat Sir Thomas Fairfax. It was a match made in heaven as far as Carole’s mother Dorothy was concerned. ‘Carole had one or two boyfriends, like anybody else, but nothing serious,’ says Ann. ‘Mike was her first proper love. He came from a good family and was very quiet and unassuming. In those days, when she was young, Carole was unassuming too. They seemed right together. They were good for one another. Dorothy was very happy about it. I think it was all her dreams come true. She would die to be alive today to see what’s going on.’

Michael had followed in the footsteps of his father Peter, a pilot instructor at British European Airlines, in the hope of flying high, but he switched from pilot training to ground crew. He did six months’ training in which he learned how to use the computer system, before undertaking on-the-job training. By the time he met Carole, he was responsible for coordinating aircraft between arrival and departure and at the same grade as a captain. The job entailed working both in the terminal and airside, managing the loading of cargo and luggage, working out how much fuel was needed, dealing with awkward passengers, authorising take-off and ensuring aircraft were away on schedule. One of around 130 dispatchers earning the equivalent of about £35,000 today, he was quite a catch in his blue uniform, with its brass buttons, red hat and four gold stripes to denote his rank.

Colleague Dave Gunner, who joined BEA in 1960, remembers both Michael and his father Peter and describes them as being very different personalities. ‘Peter was a captain and I was a lowly dispatcher,’ he says. ‘I met him on several occasions and he came across as very autocratic and aloof. He seemed disdainful of us and didn’t talk to us. I think Mike joined as a graduate trainee. He was quite young when he came to us. I was surprised when I met him because he was so pleasant.

‘He was quite a high-flying bloke but he was disenchanted because he had to work with us plebs on the ground,’ jokes Dave. ‘But everyone on the ground aspired to be a dispatcher. It was still a management-grade job. My last memory of him is from when I went to Malta in 1975. He dispatched our Trident 3 aircraft and he blocked off the forward Pullman seats for our family.’

Carole and Michael dated for a few years before moving into a modern flat eight miles from Heathrow, in Arborfield Close, just north of the M4 in Slough. In those days, Slough was a sprawling industrial suburb dotted with factories; the headquarters of Mars and Citroën were there and it was home to Dulux paint. It was not the ideal place to bring up a young family, so the couple started looking for a home in the countryside, eventually settling on the tiny red-brick village of Bradfield Southend.

Eight months after moving into their new home, on 21 June 1980, the couple got married 27 miles down the road at the Parish Church of St James the Less in the village of Dorney on the banks of the River Thames in Buckinghamshire. Not, naturally, as grand as St Paul’s, St James the Less was nonetheless an idyllic venue for the marriage of the woman who was to become Prince William’s mother-in-law. The church is picturesque and typically English; large parts of the building date from the twelfth century and it is decorated with restored medieval paintings. Carole, 25, arrived in a horse and carriage with her father Ronald, then 49 years old, who walked her down the aisle. Her proud mother Dorothy, 44, sat on the left in the front row. Across the aisle were Michael’s parents Valerie, 56, and Peter, 59, who was a witness.

Ronald’s sister Joyce and Carole’s cousin Ann were her only relatives to be invited to the wedding apart from immediate family. ‘Carole had everything that it was possible to have,’ Ann recalls. ‘A beautiful white dress, four bridesmaids and lovely flowers. They even had a horse and carriage. Afterwards, they had their reception at a local manor house. There was a big posh dinner and a band. They went abroad on honeymoon, I can’t remember where. You wouldn’t have expected them to have done anything else.’

It was Carole’s marriage to Michael that made a reality her family’s aspirations for her and moved her up the social ladder. Although his family was not in
Debrett’s
or
Who’s Who
– or on the
Sunday Times
Rich List – they were more educated and affluent than her own. A totally different affair to her parents’ wedding – the reception had been held in the local pub, with Dorothy borrowing a going-away outfit – Carole’s big day was fit for a princess.

Catherine Elizabeth Middleton was born, with a mop of dark hair, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading on 9 January 1982 – five months before Princess Diana gave birth to Kate’s future husband Prince William. On 20 June that year, she was christened at the local church, St Andrew’s, a flint-and-chalk building on the banks of the River Pang that still has its graceful fourteenth-century north aisle. At the ceremony, Michael wore a traditional dark suit with a striped tie and Carole wore a floral Laura Ashley dress. ‘The christening was somewhere posh as well,’ remembers Ann. ‘Catherine was dressed in a full-length white christening gown and we moved on to the manor afterwards. Catherine was a little bit dumpy, with a cheeky round face.’

Twenty months later, on 6 September 1983, her sister Philippa, known as Pippa, was born at the same hospital. The two girls later snootily nicknamed ‘the Wisteria Sisters’ in society circles because they were ‘highly decorative, terribly fragrant and with a ferocious ability to climb’ had arrived in the world. Pippa was baptised in March 1984 at the same church where her sister’s christening had taken place.

With two young children, Carole immersed herself in village life, making friends with the other locals and taking the two girls to the mothers-and-toddlers playgroup that was held on Tuesday mornings at St Peter’s Church Hall. ‘It was a chance for the mums to meet other mums and chat,’ says Lindsey Bishop, who started the group in 1980, ‘and for the children to meet other children and play.’

Later, Kate – known as Catherine in those days – and Pippa went on with the other local children to St Peter’s Preschool, which was chaired by Audrey Needham, wife of the churchwarden, on the other weekday mornings. ‘Her mother used to come along with the other mums and the children would play together,’ she says. ‘They would walk down along the footpath to the church hall. Every year, we would have a nativity play and the children would dress up and sing Christmas songs and rhymes. Afterwards, we would have a fair to raise money for the school.’

In those days, Carole had yet to launch her party-planning empire Party Pieces, but she was already showing the business acumen that would make it a roaring success: she’d begun making up party bags to sell to other mothers. Lesley Scutter, who lived opposite the family, remembers encountering her in the village. Her daughters Lindsey and Helene went to the same toddlers group and preschool. ‘Carole would take her turn, like everybody else at the toddlers group, as mothers’ helper, making teas, coffees and squash, washing children’s hands and mopping up puddles on the floor. I remember her bringing her party bags in for us to see and make orders. It was something she felt she could do at the same time as having children.