Kate (17 page)
Authors: Claudia Joseph
Kate watches Prince William’s investiture into the Order of the Garter in June 2008.
(© Getty Images)
Although during her time in the city Kate attracted a great deal of attention from Italian men, notorious for chatting up British girls, she steered clear of any romantic entanglements, maintaining the modesty for which she had become known at Marlborough. ‘We were all pretty well-behaved girls,’ a friend remembers. ‘She was rather shy around boys. She never seemed really comfortable with the attention. She would get embarrassed if they approached.’
While some of the other students took advantage of their new-found freedom, dating boys, drinking heavily and experimenting with drugs, Kate gained a reputation amongst the other students as a demure English rose. ‘Kate would like a glass of wine – and always had a few glasses with dinner – but she couldn’t really handle her drink,’ one fellow student recalled in an interview with
The Mail on Sunday
. ‘She would get giggly and silly after a few glasses, so then she would stop. She was never interested in getting really drunk or letting herself lose control. While others were doing drugs around her, she wouldn’t be judgemental – in fact she was quite interested in what they did to you. It was simply that she did not want to try them. I never saw her smoke either.’
When Kate was halfway through her course, her devoted parents, Michael and Carole, flew over to the city for a long weekend, staying in a nearby hotel. But while her father melted into the crowd – a trait his daughter appears to have inherited – Carole made much more of an impression. ‘Kate was never someone who sought the limelight,’ one fellow student recalled in
The Mail on Sunday
. ‘She was sociable and fun but a bit of a wallflower.’ She went on to say: ‘Her mother was very different to Kate. I think Kate very much takes after her dad.’
Towards the end of the course, before she returned home for Christmas, Kate attended a fashion show held by the American Johns Hopkins University. While the other students revelled in the opportunity to drink themselves into oblivion, Kate nursed one glass of wine all night. ‘It was held in a small club and everyone sat on the floor on cushions,’ her friend reported in
The Mail on Sunday
. ‘It was quite a drunken affair with everyone downing shots, cocktails and all sorts of concoctions. This was a typical example of when Kate made a glass of wine last the whole evening. It was clearly most people’s intention to get hammered, but not Kate’s. She didn’t like getting out of control, but this didn’t mean she wasn’t sociable. She would mingle and she loved to dance.’
Over the next eight months, Kate did some more travelling. Some reports indicate that she had been in Chile during her gap year, although when or what she was doing there is not known – and nor is whether this was definitely the case. She did go on a summer holiday with her family, to Barbados, staying at the exclusive Sandpiper Hotel in Holetown, halfway along the west coast of the island. The hotel, which has its own sandy beach, is surrounded by lush gardens brimming with tropical flowers, where Kate spent many hours sunbathing and reading.
‘They went to Barbados on holiday pretty much every summer,’ a friend reported, ‘but interestingly they would go at the beginning of the season – the end of July or the beginning of August – which is when it is cheaper. The seriously wealthy do not go at that time of year – they tend to go around Christmas.’
It may have been to Barbados that Kate went on holiday with Ian Henry. That summer, Kate, who loved sailing, had crewed a yacht around the Solent. It was while she was in Southampton that she met fellow deckhand Ian, from Taunton in Somerset, with whom one tabloid claimed she had conducted a brief romance, going on a secret holiday to the Caribbean. ‘We are very good friends,’ he admitted to the
Daily Mirror
after news of her relationship with Prince William broke, ‘but I have not spoken to her for a while. We met a couple of years ago through sailing. I was crewing on a boat at Southampton and Kate was on another. Occasionally, we would sail together. She is a fun girl. I would call her bubbly, outgoing and down-to-earth. I did not know that she and William were an item. She is very reserved and does not like being in the spotlight.’
After their summer romance, the two were headed in different directions, Ian to oxford and Kate to St Andrews. It was there that she would meet her prince.
W
earing a sheer black lace dress over a black bandeau bra and black knickers, Kate Middleton sashayed down the catwalk in the university town of St Andrews in Fife, revealing her lissom figure.
Under the watchful gaze of Prince William, who paid £200 for a front-row VIP seat, the 20-year-old brunette, towards the end of her first year at university, was taking part in a charity fashion show sponsored by the designer yves St Laurent. The annual Don’t Walk show proved to be a turning point in the life of the English rose, who had arrived at Scotland’s oldest seat of learning the previous autumn. Now, just seven months later, she found herself in the prince’s inner circle and had attracted the attention of the most eligible bachelor in the Western world.
‘I was over the moon when Kate first wore my dress on the catwalk because she has got a fabulous figure and she looked absolutely brilliant in it,’ said designer Charlotte Todd, a fashion and textiles graduate. Speaking after it had been confirmed that Kate and William were an item, she added: ‘It is fantastic to think that one of my designs has been modelled by a woman who might one day become the Queen.’
Set in the tiny seaside town of St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland, once the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland and now renowned as the home of golf, the University of St Andrews is overlooked by the ruins of an eleventh-century cathedral tower and of St Andrews Castle. Founded in 1413, it is the oldest university in Scotland and one of the most prestigious in the British Isles, consistently achieving high rankings in the
Sunday Times
university guide. Boasting alumni such as King James II of Scotland, Nobel Prize winner Sir James Black, Edward Jenner, who discovered the smallpox vaccine, First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond and novelist Fay Weldon, it is a university favoured by bright, affluent students.
The town is overrun by students, who make up a third of its population, wandering around the town on foot, cycling between lectures or frequenting its many pubs and bars, often wearing the distinctive red undergraduate gowns. Prominent in the town’s newsagents is the student paper
The Saint
, one of only four in Britain to retain its independence from both the students’ union and the university.
The Saint
had contributed to the university’s growing reputation for a wild social life when it conducted a survey, picked up by the national press, revealing that students had very active sex lives and had been known to make love in the laundry rooms in their halls of residence and even in the ruined cathedral.
Kate almost certainly went up to St Andrews before the start of the Martinmas Semester on 24 September 2001 for freshers’ week. She moved into St Salvator’s Hall – deemed by most students to be the best hall of residence because it is set on the quadrangle in the heart of the old university buildings – for which she paid £2,000 for a year’s rent. Although her room was modest – it was furnished with a wooden bed and desk and had a tiny basin – the rest of the hall of residence was more impressive, boasting a wood-panelled dining room and a common room with a stone fireplace, parquet floor, red rugs and comfortable armchairs.
Outside the gates of St Salvator’s College, also on the quadrangle, the initials PH are spelled out in cobblestones, marking the spot where Protestant martyr Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake. Legend has it that a student who steps on those cobblestones will be cursed to fail their degree. Traditionally, the only way for a student who has stepped on the stones to lift the curse is to take a May Day dip in the North Sea.
It was at St Salvator’s Hall, nicknamed Sally’s, that Kate first encountered the prince, an inevitability considering he was studying for the same degree, history of art, and living in the same hall of residence.
William Wales, as the student prince styled himself, arrived at the university after freshers’ week, claiming he did not want to disrupt the lives of ordinary students. Greeted by a battery of photographers and thousands of curious residents and students, he drove down from Balmoral, announcing that the Queen Mother had sent him off with the words: ‘If there are any good parties, invite me down.’ In an interview before the start of term, he quipped: ‘I knew full well she would dance me under the table.’
The Queen Mother had links with the university herself. She had visited several times, receiving an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 1929, when she opened its younger Hall, and having Queen’s College named in her honour. On the surface, St Andrews was the perfect place for the prince to study, quieter than most university towns, near Balmoral and far from the London paparazzi. It was a choice that delighted the Queen, whose cousin James ogilvy had also studied art history at St Andrews, and she hoped that the arrival of her grandson would give a boost to the image of the monarchy in Scotland.
However, ever mindful of his role in life, the prudent prince decided that the best way to avoid adverse publicity was to create a barrier between himself and the other students, closeting himself in his room or the university library, spurning invitations to join clubs and societies, and avoiding student parties. It was a decision that blighted his first term at St Andrews, as his self-imposed exile made it impossible for him to integrate into normal student life. ‘I thought I would probably end up in a gutter completely wrecked,’ he admitted in a candid moment, when asked in interview why he had not attended freshers’ week, ‘and the people I had met that week wouldn’t end up being my friends anyway.’
Nonetheless, the prince was able to make some new friends, as well as catching up with a few fellow students whom he already knew. Although William and Kate lived on different floors at the hall of residence, as it was organised into single-sex storeys, they gradually bonded over shared interests as they worked and played together. Kate’s lineage might not have been as blue-blooded as the prince’s, but they had an enormous amount in common, both having been brought up in rural surroundings – Kate in the village of Bucklebury and William on his father’s Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire – and sharing a love of the countryside (a prerequisite for fitting into the royal family, where hunting, shooting and fishing, watching polo and going to the races are the norm). The two teenagers had both been to exclusive public schools, in neighbouring counties, where pupils socialised with one another both in and out of school and played against each other in sports tournaments – another interest they had in common. While Kate was good at hockey and netball, William had an aptitude for rugby, soccer and polo, and they were both keen skiers and tennis players. After school, they had spent their gap years broadening their horizons and travelling around the world. Some reports suggest they had both been to Chile.
Slowly, Kate became a member of the prince’s St Andrews set, which included Bryony Daniels, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, Virginia Fraser, whose father is Lloyd’s of London underwriter Lord Strathalmond, and army officer’s daughter olivia Bleasdale.
It is not known how Virginia and olivia first met William, but Bryony, who was brought up in Paines Manor, a Jacobean farmhouse in Pentlow, Suffolk, by her parents David and Pauline, met the prince during her first week at St Andrews when they began studying geography together. Olivia, the daughter of Royal Artillery officer Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Bleasdale, may have met the prince during her schooldays at the exclusive Westonbirt School, which is only a mile from Highgrove, and Ginny might have been introduced to him by Kate, who would have met her during her brief time at Downe House, former pupils of which include Prince Michael of Kent’s daughter Lady Gabriella Windsor.
However, although Kate and the other girls were all spotted as potential girlfriends of the prince, at that stage there was no romance. Kate threw herself into university life while William kept a low profile for fear of tarnishing the royal name. That meant no drinking excessively, taking drugs or kissing in public.
Despite his determination to keep a low profile, within weeks William was dating Carly Massy-Birch, a pretty, fresh-faced brunette who worked as an actress after graduating, appearing in a few stage and radio plays. She too had a lot in common with William, having been brought up in Axminster in the Devon countryside, where her parents, Mimi and Hugh, ran a farm. She, William and Kate were close friends, remaining so even after the relationship between Carly and Will disintegrated and he began seeing Kate.