Read Kate Online

Authors: Claudia Joseph

Kate (6 page)

BOOK: Kate
9.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘Dorothy was the domineering one,’ says their niece Ann, daughter of Ronald’s sister Joyce. ‘She always wanted to better herself. My nan used to call her Dot and it really wound her up. She used to go quite mad. Ronald was a very quiet man, but he worshipped her. He would do anything she wanted. I’ve seen her walk into a newly decorated room and say she didn’t like it and he would strip the wallpaper off and start again. She was never satisfied. She always wanted better. Luckily, Ronald could do it all himself. That’s why she got away with so much. He was brilliant with his hands. He made Dorothy a violin at night school out of wood. He carved it all out and you could play it. He was very, very talented.’

Kate’s mother, Carole, was born at Perivale Maternity Hospital on 31 January 1955, by which time Dorothy’s aspirations were evident. ‘After she and Ronald got married, they lived with my granny Edith until my dad helped them get a deposit for their first home,’ recalls Pat, Alice Tomlinson’s daughter. ‘Dorothy had the biggest Silver Cross pram you have ever seen, and it had to be carried up and down the stairs. My grandmother used to grumble about Dorothy to my mother because she thought she henpecked her Ronald. She thought Dorothy always wanted more and more money. She wanted to be the top brick in the chimney. You got the feeling that she thought she was too good for the rest of us.’

Over the next decade, Dorothy and Ron began to make their way in the world, first moving out of the condemned flat into a council flat in nearby Newlands Close and then buying their own home. With a little financial help from Ron’s successful brother-in-law Bill, who lent them the deposit, they were soon the proud owners of a small house in Arlington Road, a short distance to the north. Pat reveals that it was while they were living there that there was ‘a family kerfuffle’. ‘Dad owned two lorries,’ she says, ‘and used to let Ron take one home with him. But he was doing private jobs with the lorry to get money for Dorothy to buy whatever she wanted. That caused a bit of a row. Mum went absolutely ape. But Dad was more pragmatic. He said to Mum, “It’s nothing I wouldn’t be doing if I needed money. It’s not as if he’s stealing from anybody. I would do it as well.” He was a lovely bloke, my dad.’ Ronald’s sister Joyce also gave the young couple a leg-up. ‘My mum lent them money to buy their first car,’ says Ann. ‘They would ask in a way you couldn’t refuse.’

In 1966, when Carole was 11 – a year after the birth of her brother Gary – Ronald and Dorothy moved into a larger house in Kingsbridge Road, Norwood Green, bought from the General Housing Corporation for £4,950, the equivalent of £135,000 today. The new-build semi-detached house, which had three bedrooms, was in the middle of a council estate on a plot of land that had been bombed during the war.

‘Ron wasn’t an ambitious man,’ says Pat. ‘He went to work, got his wages, came home and got changed. He was contented. Dorothy was the mover and shaker in the family. I think Ron would have been quite happy to stay in Arlington Road, but it was the wrong side of Southall and Norwood Green was more posh.

‘Dorothy was always immaculately turned out. That was another reason why she seemed so intimidating. You couldn’t imagine knocking on her door and finding her in hair curlers. But if she hadn’t been so aspirational, maybe Kate would not be where she is now. She certainly had her priorities right for her own family.’

Ronald and Dorothy stayed in Kingsbridge Road for the next 25 years, until Carole got married and Gary left home. They were very much part of the community. ‘We would go to dances at the local hall,’ remembers Ann, ‘and they would make a great play of being the ones to pay for the band. Once my husband Brian paid to wind them up. Dorothy was apparently beside herself that somebody had stolen her thunder. She always wanted to have one up on somebody. We used to tease her about it, but nobody took it too seriously. We knew what she was like. Everybody in the family was overshadowed by her, but she was always good fun. We used to enjoy dancing and mucking around.’

By the time they moved to Kingsbridge Road, Ron had plucked up the courage to leave Bill’s haulage firm to set up in business as a builder. Although he made a success of it, he was not affluent enough to send his children to a private school – that would come in the next generation. The couple made up for any lack of material things by giving Carole and Gary a loving childhood. Dorothy gave up work when each of the children was little, taking a job at an estate agent in between their births.

‘She was a good mother,’ says Ann. ‘She was very proud of both of them. She played with them a lot and was into their education. She wasn’t well educated herself, but she wanted them to do well, better than she had done. They were two nice kids. Carole loved dancing. If
Top of The Pops
was on, she would stand in front of the telly and dance her heart out. She was a proper girlie girl. She loved pink and was very fair-headed. Gary was a terror when he was little. He painted the sideboard, shook talcum powder everywhere and dug up Dorothy’s pot plant on the stairs. He was a bugger. If he was quiet, you knew he was getting into trouble. When he was older, he was very good-looking. I remember he could take Michael Jackson off brilliantly; he was better than Jackson himself. He and Carole got on very well.’

During the ’70s and ’80s, Dorothy, who was always slim and beautifully dressed, earned pin money at Collingwood Jewellers in Hounslow High Street, where Ann was the manager. ‘She learned her trade from me,’ says Ann. ‘I needed a part-timer and she was looking for work. She was a good saleswoman, but she was a bit of a snob. The whole family used to call her “Lady Dorothy”.’ In years to come, Gary would also work in the jewellery shop on Saturdays. Meanwhile, Carole, eight years younger than Ann, took a job as a Saturday girl at C&A while she was at secondary school.

It was on New year’s Day 1971, just weeks before Carole’s 16th birthday, that her grandmother Edith, the powerful matriarch of the Goldsmith family, passed away. The indomitable widow, who had brought up six children virtually single-handed, died of a stroke at the age of 81 in a council flat in Havelock Road. It was she who had instilled in her children a sense of the importance of hard work.

Kate’s mother Carole celebrated her 21st birthday on 31 January 1976. By then, she had begun working, perhaps lured by the glamour of the position, as an air stewardess at British Airways. It was a job that fulfilled her love of foreign travel and would ultimately lead her to her husband.

Sadly, later that year, on 24 August 1976, her grandfather Thomas – Dorothy’s carpenter father – died of pancreatic cancer at home in North Road, Southall. It was a tremendous loss for the family, who were deeply indebted to him. It was he who had broken with family tradition, learning a trade instead of going down the mines, and moving the family down south. He had lived under five monarchs and survived two world wars, and that wealth of experience was now lost to the family for good.

Dorothy was 41 years old when her father succumbed to cancer. Within four years, her daughter’s wedding – to a middle-class British Airways flight dispatcher called Michael Middleton – would finally fulfil Dorothy’s dreams of prosperity and respectability, cement the family’s precarious social status and lead to the birth of a royal bride. Over the previous decades, there had been hard times and moments of triumph. yet, looking at Kate now, it is hard to believe that just 50 years ago her grandmother was struggling to make ends meet in a condemned flat on the outskirts of London.

Chapter 6
The Middletons 1838–1914

S
tanding on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in the dwindling hours of the balmy evening of 28 June 1838, Queen Victoria watched the fireworks in Green Park and reflected on her day. She had been woken at 4 a.m. by the sounds of guns in the park, crowds gathering, soldiers marching and bands setting up in anticipation of her long-awaited coronation at Westminster Abbey, which was greeted by deafening cheers from the crowds.

Wearing an 8-ft velvet and ermine train and holding an orb in her left hand and a sceptre in her right, she walked regally out of the abbey at 4.30 p.m., having been crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, for the procession back to the palace. ‘I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a nation,’ the 19-year-old monarch wrote in her diary afterwards. ‘The enthusiasm, affection and loyalty were really touching. I shall ever remember this day as the proudest day of my life.’

Two hundred miles north of the palace, in the industrial town of Leeds, Kate’s great-great-great-grandfather William Middleton, a solicitor, probably read about the coronation in the local newspaper while having breakfast with his new wife, Mary. The couple had been married for four months and had set up home in a terraced house on the outskirts of the town, where they brought up their large family. On Coronation Day, Mary was already pregnant with their eldest son, Kate’s great-great-grandfather John, although it is unlikely that she would have known yet that she was with child. Her son would grow up in very different surroundings from the Harrisons and the Goldsmiths.

Unlike Kate’s other ancestors, William, the 30-year-old son of a joiner and cabinetmaker from Wakefield, a small town 15 miles south of Leeds, was educated and trained in a profession. He had moved to the larger town after qualifying as a solicitor and was now wealthy enough to provide for a family.

It was in Leeds that he had met and fallen in love with 27-year-old Mary Ward. William would have been considered her social better – she was the daughter of a milliner who lived on Briggate, the town’s main thoroughfare, running from the newly opened Corn Exchange to the River Aire – but she was a young woman who seems to have been determined to make something of herself.

In those days, Leeds was a thriving town. It had flourished from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and workers poured into the factories, mills and workshops. Coal was brought into the town centre by steam trains from Middleton Colliery and the streets were lit with gas lamps. There was a courthouse, a prison and a bank. But behind the elegant timber-fronted façade of Briggate, which was one of the oldest streets in Leeds, home to rich merchants and coaching inns, were narrow alleyways and courtyards crowded with back-to-back cottages and workshops. Conditions were squalid and insanitary, as there was no proper drainage or sewerage, and there was terrible pollution. Cholera was rife and there was a high death rate. Body snatchers ransacked cemeteries and rioting was common. Dickens described it as ‘the beastliest place, one of the nastiest I know’.

While Mary was well acquainted with the less salubrious areas of Leeds, her husband could afford to offer her a better lifestyle than her father had been able to provide. So, after they got married, they moved northwards, settling in a house in St George’s Terrace, a street on the outskirts of the town.

It was there that John – Kate’s great-great-grandfather – was born on Valentine’s Day 1839, almost a year to the day since his parents had got married. Over the next decade, the couple went on to have another seven children – Edwin, Anne, Leonard, Arthur, Robert, Charles and Margaret. All their children were scholars, a rarity in Victorian England, where most people were uneducated and illiterate, but not surprising for the offspring of a professional man.

As he became more successful, William craved a house that befitted his new social status and decided to move to the wealthy suburb of Gledhow, just east of the village of Chapel Allerton, which was fast becoming a popular retreat for the middle classes. Gledhow Valley, a strip of unspoiled woodland through which a stream runs into a lake, is now a conservation area. By 1851, the family had moved into Gledhow Grange, a substantial house in Lidgett Lane, which ran northwards out of the heart of the village.

Down the road was the magnificent seventeenth-century Gledhow Hall, now a listed building, which was built on monastic land once owned by Elizabeth I and was the subject of a painting by J.M.W. Turner. When the Middletons moved to the area, Gledhow Hall was owned by Thomas Benyon, 50, a flax mill proprietor who employed 652 flax spinners and linen, canvas and sailcloth manufacturers. He and his wife Anne, 36, lived in great luxury, with 13 servants including a butler, housekeeper, lady’s maid, two housemaids, cook, kitchen maid, laundry maid, footman, coachman, governess and two nursery maids. The couple had bought the Hall after their marriage in 1835, a lavish affair for which Anne wore a £140 dress – a staggering £11,000 in today’s money – and the cake weighed 335 lb. They had five sons and daughters – Jane, thirteen in 1851, Anne, twelve, Mary, nine, William, eight, and Joseph, seven – who were roughly the same age as the Middleton children, and the families became close friends. They were devastated when Mary died as a result of a perforated stomach ulcer in 1854.

Four years later, there was great excitement in the village when Queen Victoria came to Leeds to open the new town hall, designed by Cuthbert Broderick, the architect of a series of imposing public buildings in the city centre. Little did William Middleton realise how closely the paths of his and the Queen’s descendants would one day cross.

Sadly, the Middleton siblings’ idyllic childhood was brought to an end on 15 June 1859, when their mother Mary died at the age of 48 after a short illness that left her with an obstructed bowel and peritonitis, a blood infection that was untreatable in the days before penicillin. John had yet to reach his 21st birthday; his youngest sister, Margaret, was just nine. Mary was buried three days after her death in the graveyard of St Matthew’s Church, Chapel Allerton, leaving the family bereft and rudderless.

Unable to care for eight children on his own, William cast around for another wife. Within two years, he had married his sister-in-law, Sarah Ward, who was twelve years younger than him, and she had moved into the family home, becoming stepmother to his brood. The couple were comfortable enough to have two servants: a cook and a housemaid.

BOOK: Kate
9.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Taneesha Never Disparaging by M. LaVora Perry
Fair-Weather Friends by ReShonda Tate Billingsley
The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon
Red Card by Carrie Aarons
His Heart for the Trusting by Mondello, Lisa
Draykon by Charlotte E. English