Kate (18 page)
Authors: Claudia Joseph
‘She went out with William for six or seven weeks when they first arrived at St Andrews,’ her mother later confirmed to newspapers. ‘All three of them are best friends . . . She really wants Kate to marry Wills so that she can be sure of going to the wedding. If he falls for someone else, she’s worried that she might miss out . . . Carly has always been very close to Kate and William, and that has never changed.’
Kate, too, met someone who would win her heart during her first year at university. Rupert Finch was a 22-year-old law student in his final year at St Andrews when he first met Kate. Unsurprisingly, he was a keen sportsman. A gifted cricket player, not only was he a member of the university team, but he also managed the squad during a summer trip to South Africa. Rupert was brought up by his parents, John and Prudence, in a large farmhouse in Fakenham, Norfolk, on land owned by Prince William’s uncle Earl Spencer. While his father farmed the land, his mother ran horse-riding excursions. It is not known when Kate and Rupert’s friendship turned to romance or whether it continued after he left university the following summer to join the law firm Mills & Reeve as a trainee. Showing great discretion, he has never spoken about their relationship and says that he intends never to do so.
William and Carly split up around the time of Raisin Weekend, an annual festival of hedonism and celebration held on the last weekend of November. Freshers are entertained by their academic ‘parents’, or mentors, a tradition that supposedly dates back centuries. Typically, freshers attend a tea party thrown by their mothers, go on a pub crawl with their fathers and then put on fancy dress for the traditional foam fight. Although this event, the culmination of the weekend’s revelries, takes place in St Salvator’s Quadrangle, outside Kate and William’s hall of residence, there was no sign of William during the festivities, and if Kate was there, she stayed under the radar.
The break-up with Carly was perhaps the catalyst for some soul-searching on the prince’s part. Although he had made some good friends by the time he returned to Highgrove on 15 December for the Christmas vacation, he was having second thoughts about his choice of university and was thinking of switching to a campus closer to home. Feeling lonely and, in the small, relatively remote town, isolated from his old friends nearer home, William was finding it difficult truly to settle in. He was also frustrated by the attention from American students, who gawped at him and followed him around like sheep. Prince Charles pointed out to his son how detrimental giving up on St Andrews would be for his public image but it is Kate who is generally credited with being the person who persuaded him to stay at St Andrews in the long term after his ‘wobble’, as it was dubbed by royal aides. Next term, she suggested that he might feel happier if he changed to a geography degree instead of continuing with history of art, and he did so at the end of his second year.
‘Living in a hall of residence for the first year was a good move,’ he later commented. ‘That’s where I met most of my friends. Immediately, you are all put together – a whole load of people in similar positions – and it was a lot of fun.’
Despite William’s doubts about his choice, both he and Kate returned to university on 9 January – her 20th birthday – for the remainder of their freshers’ year. By the time she sauntered down the catwalk that April, they had both found their feet and settled into the student lifestyle, albeit in slightly different ways.
While William’s first public appearance since arriving at the university, having declined to attend high-profile events such as the freshers’ ball, signalled his intention to become more involved in student life, Kate’s stroll down the catwalk revealed a more daring and adventurous side to the hitherto demure young lady.
Her increasing confidence was also revealed by her bullish approach to the controversial Kate Kennedy Club, an elite organisation for male students along the lines of oxford’s Bullingdon Club. The club has been criticised for being sexist and generally chauvinistic. William, ever cautious, initially turned down membership, but Kate co-founded a rival organisation, the Lumsden Club, for female students only. The club aimed to forge better ‘town and gown’ relations. Named after Louisa Lumsden – a prominent nineteenth-century figure in St Andrews, who was made a dame in recognition of her services to female education – the club aimed to promote the arts and raise money for women’s charities by holding a series of fundraising social events, such as a Red-Hot Martini cocktail party and a Pimms party, throughout the year.
Gradually, William followed Kate’s lead and began to immerse himself in student life. They were often to be spotted drinking and chatting at Ma Bells, the bar in the basement of the St Andrews Golf Hotel, which is close to the university and overlooks the seafront. Known as ‘yah yah Bells’ because of its reputation as a hangout for the university’s Sloane Rangers, it was often heaving in the evenings with students dancing to the resident DJ. Other favourite haunts were The Gin House, a few streets away in South Street, and Broons, which was close to the halls of residence in North Street. Occasionally, he and his friends would head to the Byre Theatre in Abbey Street, on the other side of town, which was the perfect haven for an anonymous night out. ‘Everybody thinks I drink beer, but I actually like cider,’ Prince William commented in one of the official interviews he gave during his time as a student – part of a strategy to keep the press at bay.
William also took up sport again, joining the university’s athletics club, playing rugby and Sunday league football, and becoming a member of the St Andrews water polo team. A keen waterskier and surfer, he could often be spotted in the North Sea riding the waves, being towed on skis or, if the weather was rough, being dragged on a giant yellow inflatable tube shaped like a banana. He began going on early-morning runs along the sea wall in order to keep fit and work off the adverse effects of his student diet. Not only had he developed a fondness for takeaways and fast food, but he was regularly spotted buying treats from the Burns Sweet Shop in Market Street or pick ’n’ mix in Woolworths.
By the end of their first year, Kate had become close enough friends with the next but one in line to the throne to be invited to share a flat the following year with him and two of their closest friends in the heart of town. It was a new, confident Kate who left St Andrews for the summer holidays.
But despite her elevation into royal circles, the 20-year-old undergraduate still had to pay off her student debt. She was hired by upmarket catering firm Snatch to serve drinks at one of the social events of the season, the Henley Regatta, and was paid £5.25 an hour. ‘Kate’s a superb barmaid,’ owner Rory Laing told newspapers. ‘We hired her at the Henley Regatta and hopefully she’ll be coming down to Cowes to work at our Snatch bar here. As we only employ former public-school pupils, she fits our profile brilliantly. She’s a pretty girl, so she takes home plenty in tips.’
That summer, Kate revealed a unique ability to balance two very different aspects of her life – those of royal playmate and hard-up student – showing the combination of sophistication and girl-next-door ordinariness that would be the making of her.
K
ate Middleton looked the belle of the ball in a stunning flapper-style dress as she stood in a marquee in the grounds of her parents’ grand red-brick house at a party to celebrate her 21st birthday. Sipping champagne and greeting guests, she chatted to friends from Marlborough College and St Andrews University, all dressed, like her, in ’20s costume, and kept an eye out for Prince William, who was guest of honour.
Although the couple had been sharing a flat in the university town during the previous academic year, William’s appearance at Kate’s party in June 2003 – five months after her actual birthday – underlined how close they had become. He arrived late and left soon after the sit-down dinner, before dancing got under way, returning home to Highgrove to prepare for his own coming-of-age party the following week.
Royal commentators have speculated that Kate’s birthday party saw the beginning of a romance that has gripped the nation for many years. But only a handful of the couple’s close friends really know when their friendship turned to love.
Rumours about the nature of William and Kate’s relationship first began to emerge after the spring vacation in 2002, towards the end of their first year at St Andrews, when William announced that he was planning to move out of the hall of residence and into a flat with three friends, one of them Kate. At that stage, Kate and William laughed off suggestions that they were dating, insisting that they were ‘just good friends’, although William was young, free and single, and Kate on the verge of becoming so. Her relationship with Rupert Finch was on the wane – and her love affair with William was on the horizon.
William and Kate teamed up with Fergus Boyd, the son of a country solicitor from the village of Broughton Gifford in Wiltshire, and olivia Bleasdale, who was also studying history of art, and found a flat in one of the most sought-after streets in the town.
Fergus, who was William’s closest friend at university, had bonded with the prince on the rugby pitches of Eton and was now studying the same geography module as him at St Andrews. He had modelled with Kate in the university’s charity fashion show and been on a cricket tour that summer with her boyfriend Rupert in South Africa. Now a financial advisor at Smith & Williamson, he has always remained protective of the royal couple; he is one of the few people who know whether their friendship turned to romance during their second year at university. Certainly, when Kate and William moved in together there were persistent rumours that they were more than friends, prompting the palace to deny that they ‘lived together’, meaning they did not share a bedroom.
William’s presence in St Andrews had a marked effect on the rental market as wealthy American students arrived in the seaside town, willing to pay over the odds to catch a glimpse of their hero. Prices began to rival those in London and students were known to camp on the pavement outside letting agents in their sleeping bags in order to be first in the queue for a flat.
With their connections, the well-heeled trio managed to secure a maisonette in a traditional Georgian terraced house. The friends moved into the apartment in the heart of St Andrews’ old town before the start of the Martinmas term on 23 September 2002. It was the perfect venue for the four students to relax in after spending the day at lectures. The new flatmates took turns preparing supper, a task that William found difficult, despite having had cookery classes at Eton. ‘I cook quite regularly for them and they cook for me,’ he said, in an interview at the end of the academic year, ‘although we haven’t had a house supper for quite a while because everyone’s been doing exams and working quite hard. I’ve got some very good cooks in my house, but I’m absolutely useless, as my paella experience, which was filmed at Eton a while ago, proved. We tend to have chicken, curries and pasta. But we go out to eat quite a lot – whatever we feel like at the time.’
On the whole, the four students kept a low profile, walking or cycling to lectures, shopping at Safeway and spending the evenings at home, listening to William’s R&B music or Fergus’s jazz thumping from their stereos. The prince rarely ventured out during the week – unless it was to attend lectures or visit the university library – apart from on Wednesday afternoons, when he played sport. Both William, who had been voted the university’s water polo captain, and Fergus trained for two hours on Thursday nights in the pool of St Leonards School.
Speaking about living in a communal house, he said: ‘I do a lot of shopping – I enjoy the shopping, actually. I get very carried away, you know, just food shopping. I buy lots of things and then go back to the house and see the fridge is full of all the stuff I’ve just bought . . .We all get on very well and started off having rotas, but, of course, it just broke down into complete chaos. Everyone helps out when they can. I try to help out when I can and they do the same for me, but usually you just fend for yourself.’
The only signs of the town’s most famous resident and his flatmates were the round-the-clock presence of a blacked-out people carrier outside the property, police patrols up and down the street and increased security cameras overlooking the flat, leading locals to describe it as the second most protected street after Downing Street. Security officers would follow William to university, waiting for him in the kebab shop down the road from the lecture hall.
Not long after Kate moved in with William, in late November 2002, her parents bought a flat in the heart of Chelsea. The timing may simply have been coincidental, but it meant that their daughter had a base in London for society parties.
Less than a week later, Kate was spending her first weekend at a shooting party, hosted by William at Wood Farm in Sandringham, Norfolk. She was one of six girls and ten boys, including the prince, who crammed into the six-bedroom cottage. What the sleeping arrangements were was unclear, leading to more speculation about William and Kate’s friendship. That weekend, guests included olivia Bleasdale and Virginia Fraser – who lived in the same street as Kate and William during term time – and Natalie Hicks-Lobbecke, called ‘Nats’ by her friends, an army officer’s daughter who was studying at Bristol University. There had been speculation at various points linking each of the girls romantically to the prince.
A mile down the road, at Sandringham House, William’s father was hosting an altogether more sedate event in the Queen’s Edwardian mansion. Prince Charles’s guests included the Queen of Denmark, who left early because she was suffering from back pain, the Queen’s godson Sir Nicholas Bacon, a barrister who owns thousands of acres of land in Norfolk and shares with Charles an interest in gardening, Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, Jolyon Connell, editor of news digest
The Week,
and landowner Lord Cavendish.