Kate (10 page)

D
ressed in her traditional black mourning gown trimmed with white lace, with tears falling down her cheeks, Queen Victoria sat at her bureau in Windsor Castle and penned a letter to Lord Rowton, private secretary to Benjamin Disraeli. Once again plunged into grief, this time after the death of her favourite prime minister, Prince William’s great-great-great-great-grandmother wrote that day: ‘I can scarcely see for my fast falling tears . . . Never had I as kind and devoted a Minister and very few such devoted friends.’

The date was 19 April 1881 – nearly 20 years after Victoria had withdrawn from public life following the death of her beloved Albert – and the former Conservative prime minister, a favourite of the Queen, had succumbed to bronchitis.

His death, which came a year after he had lost a general election to Gladstone’s Liberal Party, spelled the end of a friendship between the Queen and her minister that had begun in 1868 when he replaced Lord Derby as Prime Minister and was cemented when he won a second term in power in 1874. Disraeli lured Victoria out of seclusion, proclaiming her Empress of India, charming her by kissing her hand, calling her ‘the Faery Queen’ and sending her witty letters. ‘Everyone likes flattery,’ he told the poet Matthew Arnold, ‘and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.’ In return, the Queen made him Earl of Beaconsfield and Viscount Hughenden, sending him bunches of spring flowers and nicknaming him ‘Dizzy’. She sent bouquets of primroses to his funeral. Afterwards, she paid a visit to Hughenden to lay a wreath on his tomb and later had a memorial erected to him in her name.

While Victoria suffered the pain of grief, 30 miles away, in the depths of Holloway Prison, Kate Middleton’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward Glassborow was enduring an altogether different ordeal. Incarcerated in a cramped cell – 13 ft by 7 ft – on one of three wings for male inmates in the jail, the 55-year-old was one of 436 prisoners from the city of London and Middlesex to be held in Holloway when the 1881 census was taken.

Prison records have not survived from that era, so it is impossible to know why the father of seven, who worked as a messenger for an insurance company, was jailed. The most likely explanation is that he was sent down for a short period for a minor offence such as being drunk and disorderly. In those days, Holloway, previously known as the City of London House of Correction or City Prison, was the jail for male and female prisoners sentenced at the old Bailey, the Mansion House or Guildhall Justice Rooms. It also housed debtors; although imprisonment for unpaid debts officially ceased in 1862, debtors were sometimes jailed for contempt of court or non-payment of fines.

Whatever the crime, Edward’s father Thomas would have turned in his grave. He volunteered as a parish constable when he was in his early 20s and arrested dozens of criminals like his son. He was a witness at the old Bailey many times in cases of stealing and pocket-picking, and his evidence condemned many convicts to be transported to Australia and Tasmania. But he gave up that job before his marriage to Edward’s mother Amy on 18 February 1823 and became an insurance company’s messenger. The couple lived at 1 Bartholomew Lane, which at that time was the headquarters of the Alliance Marine Insurance Company, founded by Nathan Rothschild, so it appears that Thomas was such a model employee that he lived on the premises.

By that time, Sir Robert Peel had been appointed Home Secretary and the first rumblings about forming a modern salaried police force for the capital were under way. Law and order had become a major headache for the authorities as people flocked to London during the Industrial Revolution. Australia and Tasmania refused to allow more convicts into the country, and Britain had to find another way of dealing with its criminals. The obvious solution was to reform the police force and build more prisons. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 replaced volunteer constables and night watchmen with a centralised police force of 3,000 men responsible for policing the entire metropolitan area with the exception of the City of London. Clad in blue uniforms and carrying truncheons, they were nicknamed ‘bobbies’ after Peel.

Ninety prisons were built between 1842 and 1877. Holloway Prison alone cost £91,547 10s 8d. It was opened in 1852. Each prison was run by a jailer who essentially made up the rules as he went along, doling out privileges to convicts who could afford to pay for books and letters, more visitors and better food. Many prisoners had to pay the jailer to be released after their sentences were served, being required to purchase a ‘ticket of leave’, the day’s equivalent of the parole system. Those who could not afford to improve their lot ended up sleeping on comfortless wooden beds, eating monotonous food and doing hard labour: walking treadmills and picking oakum – separating strands of old rope to be sold on for use in shipbuilding – were the most common activities, more punishment than purposeful work. Conditions were damp, unhealthy, insanitary and overcrowded, and many prisoners died before they could be released.

Perhaps luckily, neither of Edward’s parents lived long enough to see him jailed. Thomas died at 65 of consumption on 29 December 1860, and Amy followed her husband to the grave four years later, dying of ‘natural decay’ and jaundice. Edward moved into 1 Bartholomew Lane, taking over his father’s job, but things appear to have gone awry, as he ended up on the wrong side of the law.

He would likely have been taken to prison in a Black Maria. There he would have been photographed and examined for distinguishing marks, have had to hand over his personal property and remove his clothes. He would have had his head shaved and been bathed in filthy water before being dressed in prison garb, with the number of his cell stitched on the back of his shirt.

Meanwhile, his beleaguered wife Charlotte, 55, to whom he had been married for 33 years and with whom he had five sons and two daughters, was left at the family home in the East End of London to care for their four youngest children, Amy, 24, Kate’s great-great-grandfather Frederick, a 22-year-old commercial clerk, 16-year-old Charles and Herbert, 14, who was still at school. Their two eldest sons, Edward, 32, and William, 26, had long since left home. Their daughter Charlotte, a milliner, had died of typhoid fever at home five years earlier at the age of 25. The family had moved from Bartholomew Lane, in the heart of the City, to a run-down house in Nelson Terrace, Trafalgar Road, Haggerston, in the parish of the ancient church of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, made famous by the line from the children’s nursery rhyme ‘oranges and Lemons’: ‘When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.’

Fourteen years after Edward Glassborow’s spell in Holloway, the renowned playwright and novelist oscar Wilde would follow him through the portcullis gate. It was in Holloway that he was held on remand, awaiting trial for gross indecency. The author of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
had issued a writ for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, after he accused him of being homosexual. Although Wilde withdrew the case when it became clear that he could not win, he was arrested in the wake of the trial and spent several months on remand at Holloway before being sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol.

By then, of course, Kate’s great-great-great-grandfather had long been released, and he had moved to Leyton, Essex, to build a new life. By the time his third son, Frederick, 27, got married on 1 June 1886 to 23-year-old Emily Elliott at the parish church in Leyton, he was describing himself as a ‘gentleman’, an extraordinary turnaround for a former crook. Edward lived long enough to see all his children settled, quite a feat in those days, although it is not known whether he was invited to their weddings or whether he was ostracised by the family as a result of his past.

His son Charles, 23 years old and a stockbroker’s clerk, married Florence Alderton, who was five years his senior, at Hackney Parish Church on 13 August 1887, but chose his younger brother Herbert to be his witness. Five years later, it was the turn of Edward’s only daughter, Amy, who married a widower twice her age. She was 36 years old and would have been deemed to be on the shelf in those days when she tied the knot with Samuel Alderton, a 65-year-old ivory turner, at Hackney Register office. Again, it was Herbert who witnessed the ceremony. Finally, Herbert himself, a stockbroker of 29 years of age, tied the knot in 1896 at St Andrew’s Church, Leytonstone, with local manufacturer’s daughter Catherine Monahan, 28.

Edward and Charlotte must have been delighted that all their children were married, but they lived barely long enough to meet their grandchildren. On 11 August 1898, Edward died of apoplexy, in other words, following a sudden loss of consciousness, at home in Vicarage Road, Leyton, having suffered from chronic rheumatism. His son Frederick – Kate’s great-great-grandfather – was at his bedside, so the family was certainly reconciled at his death. Less than two years later, on 21 July 1900, Charlotte died peacefully at home of natural causes, at the age of 75. Her daughter-in-law Emily, who was married to her second-eldest son, William, another stockbroker’s clerk, was holding her hand.

After his mother’s death, Frederick, 41 years old and a shipowner’s clerk, moved into his parents’ home in Vicarage Road with his wife Emily and their two children, Amy, 14, and Frederick, 11. Their third child, a son Wilfred, was born in 1905.

Kate’s great-grandfather Frederick Glassborow, a 24-year-old banker at the London and Westminster Bank, 5 ft 9 in. Tall with brown hair and brown eyes, was conscripted into the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman on 12 August 1914 and attached to Benbow battalion ten days later. The battalion formed part of the First Royal Naval Brigade in the Royal Naval Division, known as ‘Winston’s Little Army’ and created when the navy formed a division of surplus sailors to fight alongside the army.

Military records state that Frederick was one of 2,000 raw recruits to be sent to a training camp in Walmer, Kent – at most he had two days’ musketry training – before being dispatched to Belgium to support the Belgian army in their defence of Antwerp, a cause close to Churchill’s heart. Churchill himself was at the city’s Hotel de Ville, not far from the front line at Vieux Dieu, on 6 October 1914, when he ordered the Naval Division to hold the line of forts forming the inner defences of the city. But while the Belgian troops manned the forts, the British were positioned in shallow, flooded trenches, with 500 yards of cleared land in front of them, making them perfect targets for German gunfire. After two days, Churchill gave the order to withdraw, but it failed to reach the division commander, Commodore Wilfred Henderson, and the brigade was bombarded by heavy shelling. In the confusion, some battalions withdrew by train. Others, including Benbow, were left stranded, without transport, unable to cross the bridge over the River Schelde because it had been destroyed by the retreating Belgians and unable to catch a train as the line had been cut by the Germans. In order to evade capture, Commodore Henderson decided to take his exhausted men across the border into Holland, which was neutral.

Frederick was one of 545 men and officers from Benbow battalion, led by Commander Fargus, to be interned by the Dutch at the English Camp in the city of Groningen, after making it into the Netherlands. This proved to be his saviour. Billeted in a purpose-built wooden hut in the place he and his fellow soldiers dubbed ‘Timbertown’, he was able to use a gym, recreation hall, library, classroom and post office. A football pavilion was converted into a bar, where the men could entertain visitors. They produced their own newspaper, had sports teams who played against local clubs, an orchestra and a theatre company named Timberland Follies, and they were even allowed out of camp on the strict condition they did not try to escape.

Two weeks after he and his men had been forced to flee to Holland, Commodore Henderson sent a letter to the adjutant general of the Royal Marines, Sir William Nicholls, describing the fiasco. He reported that the men arrived at the front on 6 October and had begun digging trenches but were hampered by lack of equipment, the fact that some of the men had never handled a pick or shovel, and the absence of food, water, communications and orders. Two of the battalions had suffered without water for 24 hours in the trenches and four battalions had no food for 36 hours other than a quarter-pound ration of meat. The men had been issued with charger-loading rifles three days before leaving Britain but had never been trained to use them. There was no organised transport, no signalling equipment apart from a few semaphore flags, one bicycle per battalion for messengers and no horses for the officers. ‘The men had not received their khaki clothing and were still in their blue jumpers, and therefore without pockets in which to carry food and ammunition,’ he added. ‘only a small proportion had received greatcoats . . . and [the men] suffered very considerably from the cold. The absence of haversacks, mess tins and water bottles proved a great disadvantage.’

Frederick was granted leave from Holland on 22 March 1917, which was extended until 26 May 1918. His file notes: ‘Appreciation for the excellent work done at Consulate General, Rotterdam.’ He arrived back in England on 4 March 1919 and was demobbed six days later, remaining with the 2nd reserve battalion.

Frederick survived the war but some of his cousins were not so fortunate. Herbert, a clerk and father of two from Leytonstone, who enlisted at the age of 36 on 2 December 1915 as gunner No. 86318 in the Royal Garrison Artillery and was sent to France, was disciplined for neglect of duty at the end of the war. He was sentenced to 14 days’ field punishment No. 2, and was shackled in irons for up to two hours a day, a penalty generally considered harsh and humiliating by the men. His record states: ‘While on active service. Neglect to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.’

Another cousin, James, who was a gunner in the Royal Horse Artillery, was only 21 years old when he was wounded in a mustard gas attack on 6 October 1917. He was treated at Bradford War Hospital and the injury affected the rest of his life. He was awarded a temporary pension on discharge because of his general weakness, having been categorised as ‘20 per cent disabled’. James’s older brother Charles, a 24-year-old corporal in the 11th Australian Light Trench Mortar Battery, was killed on 14 March 1917, and is remembered with honour at the cemetery in Armentières where he is buried.