Kate (2 page)

The only daughter of Ron Goldsmith, a painter and decorator from Southall, and Dorothy Harrison, a shopkeeper from Hetton-le-Hole, a Durham coal-mining town, Carole came from humble roots. She had her parents to thank for the fact that she was given a decent education and a loving family home. Their upbringing had not been nearly as comfortable as hers.

Dorothy—Kate's maternal grandmother—was born into abject poverty. She was the daughter of Thomas Harrison and Elizabeth Temple. Thomas grew up in northeast England, close to the historic town of Durham, where his father and several generations before him had been coal miners. One of six siblings, Thomas was just fourteen years old when his father, John Harrison, was killed during World War I, a few weeks before armistice. The loss of her husband and the brutality of coal mining impelled Thomas's mother, Jane, to try to carve out a different path for her son, and she apprenticed him to her carpenter father, determined that at least one of her children would learn a trade.

It turned out that she was tremendously forward thinking, for during the Depression of the late 1920s, as the demand for coal decreased, the industrial areas of the northeast were badly hit and mining no longer offered the job security it had for so many previous generations in Thomas's family. Fortunately, there was a construction boom after the war, and tradesmen were in great demand. Thomas was therefore able to put his carpentry skills to use and spent the interwar years working in different parts of the northeast. It was while living in Easington Lane, a village near his mother, that he met Elizabeth
Temple, the daughter of a farmworker. She already had a daughter, Ruth—scandalously born out of wedlock—a sweet child who Thomas took to at once.

Kate's great-grandparents, Thomas and Elizabeth, married in 1934 and moved back to his home village of Hetton-le-Hole. A year later Elizabeth gave birth to her second daughter, Dorothy, and life passed by uneventfully until the outbreak of World War II, when Thomas was called up to fight. Unlike his father, Thomas survived the war, and on his return, fearing that there wouldn't be enough work in the north of the country, he moved his family down to Southall on the outskirts of London, where he hoped to find enough employment to support his family.

Life postwar was tougher than Thomas had ever experienced. He found it hard to make ends meet and was forced to live in a dilapidated house in Bankside at the edge of the Grand Union Canal. Elizabeth contributed as much as she could, raising chickens and growing vegetables on a small farm nearby, but Ruth and Dorothy often had to go without. Despite their poverty, the two parents worked extremely hard, and Dorothy came to admire them and appreciate the values they instilled in her. As she grew into adolescence, she turned out to be a feisty girl with a steely determination to achieve. She dressed well and went out to earn money as soon as she was able, finding work as a sales assistant in local shops. It was while working in a branch of Dorothy Perkins that the teenage Dorothy met a young man named Ronald Goldsmith at the wedding of a mutual friend and fell head over heels in love.

Jean Harrison recalled, “Dorothy had met Ron when she was just sixteen. She used me as an excuse to go to a dance so that she could meet him again and they started courting. Ron
was a very nice and easygoing person. He would always say hello and stop for a chat whenever I saw him.”

At the time, Ronald Goldsmith—Kate's maternal grandfather—was working for his brother-in-law's haulage company, though his real love lay on the more creative side, in painting, baking, and making things. Ron was a kind, gentle man, liked by all who knew him, and, much like Dorothy, he had come up the hard way. His father, Stephen Charles—known as Charlie—worked as a construction laborer and, later, in a factory. Although he had managed to survive World War I, he died in 1938 of acute bronchitis at only fifty-three, leaving Ron's mother, Edith, with their six children. Fortunately, by this time four of the children were of working age, but Ron and his sister Joyce were still youngsters and needed a roof over their heads. Edith was penniless, so when Charlie died she had no choice but to move to a condemned apartment on Dudley Street, Southall. She took a job working on the production line in the local Tickler factory, which manufactured jams and jellies, but the wages never lifted her above the poverty line. Her older children helped look after Ron and Joyce, but even so, life was relentlessly harsh and food had to be stretched and shared in order to feed the ever-expanding family of brothers and sisters-in-law. When the going got really tough, the ever-resourceful, razor-sharp Edith resorted to pawning various items in order to raise money to feed her younger children. Ron was very close to his mother, and the whole family stayed within a few streets of each other throughout World War II, which was a great support through the hard times.

At seventeen, just after the war had ended, Ron got his call-up for national service and was sent to Aqaba in Jordan,
where he worked as a baker, a skill that stayed with him for life. He returned a year later and went to work for his brother-in-law's haulage company. After a few years spent courting Dorothy, he proposed, and they were married on August 8, 1953, at the Holy Trinity Church in Southall. The wedding of Kate's grandparents was traditional and simple. The bride wore an Elizabethan-style lace gown with a taffeta underskirt and an embroidered veil pinned to her hair with orange blossoms. According to Jean Harrison, who attended the ceremony, “They were married when Dorothy was eighteen. She was very young, but she knew Ron was the man she wanted and that was that. The wedding was lovely and they held the reception at the Hambrough Tavern, which was the pub at the top of the road.”

To begin with, the couple moved into Edith's tiny apartment on Dudley Road, a stone's throw from the busy Uxbridge Road, but it wasn't long before Dorothy—or “Lady Dorothy” as Edith and her family referred to her—called on her quiet ambition and moved them out to a nearby council house.

Over the next few years, with a lot of careful saving and some help from Ron's extended family, Dorothy and Ron were able to afford a deposit on a house of their own and moved to a small house on Arlington Road, to the north of Southall. By this time, they were proud parents of a daughter, Carole, and while Ron worked hard—taking evening classes to hone his skills—Dorothy took part-time jobs that she could work around motherhood. “We used to go and see Ron and Dorothy a lot when Carole was a baby,” recalled Jean Harrison. “Dorothy was a very good mother, and very proud of her baby. She stopped working when Carole was born, but she
went back to work once she could. She got a job at a jeweler on Hounslow High Street. I lived nearby, so I would often pop in to see her. She didn't work full time, but she wanted to get back to work. Money was sparse in the early years and she and Ron weren't well off. Dorothy liked nice things, she always did as a little girl.”

Dorothy spent hours walking Carole around in a Silver Cross baby carriage—the same upscale brand used by the royal family—which she and Ron had been saving for ever since she got pregnant. It took some years before another baby graced the prized carriage, for it was not until eleven years later that Dorothy and Ron were blessed with another child. They had been trying for a baby for some time and were overjoyed when Gary arrived. “There was a big age difference between Carole and Gary,” said Jean Harrison. “It's quite possible Dorothy miscarried, but things like that weren't talked about in those days. Ron and Dorothy were very old-fashioned people.” With their family now complete, the Goldsmiths were happily married and earning decent money, and they invested everything in their children.

By the late 1960s, Ron and Dorothy had saved enough money to move to a larger house on Kingsbridge Road in Norwood Green—a newly built semidetached house with three bedrooms. At this point Ron decided to leave the haulage firm and set up as a builder. He had always loved working with his hands and he was talented, having once made a violin for Dorothy from scratch. Dorothy supported his career change; she believed he had the vision and ability to make a success of going it alone.

It was a vision that his children had also inherited. Carole was a hard worker, and like both of her parents, she was determined
to do well in life. It was at British Airways that she met Michael Middleton, a handsome flight dispatcher who had one of the best paid and most important management jobs at the airport—the same rank as captain, though confined to the ground. At Heathrow, Michael was responsible for coordinating British Airways arrivals and departures, managing flight schedules, and occasionally handling passenger- and cargo-related matters. In his navy uniform and red cap, the well-spoken and always immaculately turned out Michael was considered quite a catch among the coterie of air hostesses. But it was Carole who caught his eye. Eventually he plucked up the courage to ask her on a date, and within a matter of months, they were in a serious relationship. Carole, who had never had a long-term boyfriend before, found Michael charming, thoughtful, and fun. Jean Harrison recalled that it was love at first sight, just as it had been for Ron and Dorothy: “Perhaps it is something in the Harrison bloodline. Dorothy's mother, Elizabeth, who we called Auntie Lily, had a long marriage and lots of children, Dorothy fell in love and married her sweetheart, and so did Carole.”

Carole's job often took her overseas, so in order to make the most of the time she was in the country, she and Michael decided to move in together. They rented an apartment in Slough, a sprawling industrial town twenty-two miles from Central London and conveniently close to Heathrow Airport. They lived there quite happily for several years, and before long they were engaged to be married. “I remember Carole coming in and showing off her ring,” recalled one of her oldest friends, Martin Fiddler, who runs the Bladebone Butchery in the village of Chapel Row in Berkshire. “Carole, like many of the airport industry, was living nearby and my wife, Sue,
and I got to know her well as she often dropped in. She was always smiling and happy and there was just something lovely and fresh about her; she used to leave a scent of perfume in the shop. She was always chatty, bubbly, and lots of fun. She was delighted to be engaged, and I remember one day she brought Mike in and introduced him. She was a stunning lady and they were a great couple, a really good mixture.”

Michael and Carole were married the following year on June 21, 1980, at the Parish Chapel of St. James the Less in the village of Dorney in Buckinghamshire—two years to the day before Prince William was born. Ron and Dorothy contributed to the wedding, but the amount they gave was a fraction of the total cost, because the Middletons were in a different league. Kate's father, Michael, was comfortably middle class and well off, having had a very different start in life than his bride. His family had the security that money can afford, and like his father and his grandfather, he was fortunate enough to have gone to a private school, receiving a good education and the attendant privileges of boarding school.

Michael also had all the benefits of being part of a close family—Peter, his father, and Anthony, his uncle, had married twin sisters and had four children each—and the eight cousins lived on neighboring streets in the well-to-do Roundhay district in Leeds, where they grew up together. Michael was proud of his father, an airline pilot and flying instructor, and was deeply appreciative of his mother, Valerie, who had spent part of her childhood in Marseilles and had stayed at home to bring up her four sons.

Michael's forebears were wealthy; his mother's father, Frederick Glassborow, worked in a bank, and his paternal grandparents, Olive Lupton and Noel Middleton, were the
descendants of two of the most prosperous families in Leeds. Noel—Kate's great-grandfather—came from a line of famous and successful Leeds solicitors and received an inheritance following the death of his father, John Middleton, that was worth the equivalent of close to $4 million. Noel's wife, Olive Lupton—Kate's great-grandmother—descended from a long line of wealthy Yorkshire wool merchants, and her lineage was equally impressive. An Edwardian society beauty, she had a number of illustrious family members through marriage, including the children's writers Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter, and she could trace her lineage way back to Sir Thomas Fairfax, an attendant at the Tudor Court and a Parliamentarian general in the English Civil War. It is through Sir Thomas Fairfax that the Middleton family can, in fact, trace their lineage to royalty.

Olive's grandfather, Frank Lupton, a forward-thinking man, had expanded the family cloth business by buying an old mill and a finishing plant, thereby enabling his clothing merchants to own all parts of the production process. Philanthropic by nature, he gave back some of his wealth by helping to clear the slums of Leeds; his contribution was recognized by the town council, which named two streets after him. Frank was able to send his sons to public school, and as a result of his fine education, Olive's father, Francis, attended Cambridge University. Tragically, all three of Olive's brothers were killed in World War I, decimating her family, but it was of some relief that her mother had not lived to know of their senseless deaths. Olive and her sister inherited the family wealth on the death of their father and became enormously wealthy, with a personal fortune that amounted to the equivalent of nearly $15 million today. The trust fund Francis
established was set up to ensure the stability of his descendants, and the trustees were instructed to pay the beneficiaries and fund the education of their children. When Olive died, she left behind an estate worth the equivalent of $13 million, to be divided among her four children. That meant Michael's father was a very wealthy man indeed.