Kate (7 page)

Two years later, his eldest son John, who was 24 years old and, like his father before him, had qualified as a solicitor, found himself a wife and moved out of home. A chip off the old block, he too married a woman of a lower social class, Mary Asquith, 23, the daughter of a cloth finisher who had been brought up, as his mother had been, in the crowded workshops off Briggate. The couple wed on 27 August 1863, at the parish church in Leeds, and moved to their own home in Potternewton, two miles south of Gledhow. In 1865, their happiness was crowned by the birth of their first child, Gilbert. Having given birth to their son and heir, Mary went on to have two daughters, olive, in 1870, and Ellen, in 1872.

The union of the Middleton and Asquith families was compounded the following year when John’s younger sister Anne, by then 31 years old, a spinster by the standards of the age and unlikely to find a husband, fell in love with Mary’s younger brother John, a cloth finisher like his father. They got married at the same church as their siblings on 22 October 1873. But the family’s wealth and stature could not shield them from tragedy, and less than five months after they got married, on 16 March 1874, John, Anne’s husband and Mary’s brother, died of scarlet fever at home in Cumberland Road, Headingley, and she was forced to move back home to her father and stepmother.

By then, William and Sarah had moved down the road to Hawkhills, a sprawling mansion in Gledhow Lane, Chapel Allerton. Sadly, it has since been demolished, although the gateposts and lodge still remain. They socialised with the upper echelons of Leeds society, people such as Sir John Barran, an innovative entrepreneur in the fabric industry, who introduced the use of the bandsaw in fabric cutting, having been inspired by its use in the manufacture of wood veneers. A Justice of the Peace, Lord Mayor of Leeds and later Liberal MP, he lived 500 yards down the road in Chapel Allerton Hall, set in 41 acres of parkland, which he mortgaged to buy Roundhay Park for the people of Leeds. He is commemorated by a drinking fountain, presented by him, in the centre of the park.

The Middletons also knew James Kitson, who ran the Monkbridge Iron and Steel Company with his brother Frederick. He moved into Gledhow Hall in 1878. There was great excitement in the village when he married his second wife, Mary, in 1881. James, who was president of the Leeds Liberal Association, organised the campaign for Gladstone’s re-election to Parliament in 1880, and Sarah and William may well have met the Prime Minister at the Hall. Husband and wife were both dead by the time of James’s greatest triumphs. He was created a baronet in 1886, elected as a Liberal MP in 1892 and became Lord Mayor of Leeds in 1896. The Middletons would no doubt have been thrilled to hear about the visit Kitson received in 1902 from the former prime minister the Earl of Rosebery, who was escorted to Gledhow Hall by 200 torchbearers.

While the couple enjoyed their retirement, their son John was working his way up the career ladder. He and his wife Mary moved into a house on the Leeds Road in Far Headingley, a village three miles west of Potternewton. The road ran from Leeds to otley, where the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale grew up, and in Victorian times the area was a magnet for prosperous, middle-class families. It was there that John and Mary brought up their increasing brood. William, named after his grandfather, was born in 1874; twins Caroline and Gertrude arrived in 1876; and Kate’s great-grandfather Richard Noel, known as Noel, was born on Christmas Day 1878. Their eighth child and youngest daughter, Margaret, was born in 1880.

A gifted solicitor, John handled all the legal work for the flourishing Leeds Permanent Benefit Building Society, and his hard work was soon rewarded. In 1881, he was appointed vice president of the Leeds Law Society, becoming president in 1882, a role he held for two years. In 1883, he was also elected an extraordinary member of the council of the Incorporated Law Society.

William lived just long enough to see his son’s achievements but spent the last months of his life paralysed as a result of a brain disorder. He died on 21 December 1884, at the age of 77 – a good age in those days – leaving his family to celebrate Christmas without him. After what must have been a miserable winter, his widow Sarah followed him to the grave just three months later, fracturing her skull when she was thrown from her carriage. She died of a brain bleed at home at Hawkhills on 3 April 1885, having suffered from concussion.

Despite his father and stepmother’s deaths, John did not ease up on the workload. As well as becoming head of the family firm, he began to develop into a leading figure in Leeds society, founding the Leeds and County Conservative Club and acting as an election agent for Tory parliamentary candidate Richard Dawson in 1885 and 1886. He and Mary split their time between their four-storey bow-fronted townhouse in Hyde Terrace, Leeds, near the family firm, and their new country home, Fairfield, in Far Headingley. Both houses were crammed full of antiques, oil paintings, silver and crystal.

Less than three years after his father’s death, John too was summoned to a higher bar. He had been suffering from angina, probably brought on by the stress of work and his parents’ deaths. He died at home in Far Headingley on 16 July 1887, a month after Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, at 48 years of age. He is buried in the family vault at Chapel Allerton cemetery. His obituary in the
Law Times
, dated 6 August 1887, stated: ‘His death, which was comparatively sudden, was hastened, if not occasioned by the strain of a five days’ trial in London on a matter concerning the Leeds estate.’

After John’s death, his widow Mary and her children moved into Hyde Terrace, but their mother barely outlived their father. She died two years later, on 22 September 1889, of typhoid fever and a pulmonary embolism, while staying in a cottage in the fishing village of Filey, near Scarborough, 70 miles away. Thus, two generations of the same family were extinguished within seven years.

Kate’s great-grandfather Noel was only ten years old when he became an orphan, but he was not penniless. His mother Mary, having inherited nearly £5,000 from her husband, left £13,627 in her will – the equivalent of £6.7 million today – meaning that her children would be able to be educated privately and live the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. Noel also inherited a family heirloom, a sapphire ring, which he cherished.

In the 1891 census, his oldest brother, Gilbert, by then a 24-year-old solicitor, was listed as resident in a boarding house in Filey, with William, an engineering student, and his sisters. Noel, who would have been 12, was in lodgings in Bilton-cumHarrogate, 15 miles north of Leeds. It is not known whether the rest of the family was living in Filey while Noel attended school in Harrogate or if they were just on holiday.

At that time, the spa town of Harrogate was one of the fashionable places to be seen. It was popular with the English aristocracy, and nobility from across Europe came to bathe in its waters. Samson Fox, the great-grandfather of actor Edward Fox, was mayor of the town for three successive years, 1889–92 (a feat not achieved since), and one of its great philanthropists. He lived in the magnificent Grove House estate, where Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was a regular visitor. During the period, the future Edward VII’s mistress Lillie Langtry performed in
The School for Scandal
at the Promenade Inn theatre, the D’oyly Carte opera Company had a season there and oscar Wilde gave a lecture on dress.

On 26 January 1892, the family came together when Gilbert got married to Alice Margaret Joy, a spinster two years his senior, but the reunion was short-lived. By now 13 years old, Noel was sent to the boys’ public school Clifton College, in Bristol, as a boarder. Alumni included Field Marshal Haig and artist Roger Fry, and Noel was in the same year as Edwin Samuel Montagu, the Jewish Liberal politician who was appointed Secretary of State for India towards the end of the First World War.

After Clifton, the lure of home proved great and Noel moved back to the North, going to Leeds University before, following in the family tradition, he became an articled clerk. He lived with his four older unmarried sisters, olive, Ellen, and twins Caroline and Gertrude, and three servants, in the family home they had inherited from their parents in Hyde Terrace. Gertrude was very religious and artistically gifted; she drew illuminated manuscripts and embroidered altar cloths.

The family spent many holidays together in Filey, where tragedy struck once again. One summer, when Noel was 20, they went for a walk along Filey Brigg, a rocky promontory that juts out 1,600 metres into the sea. When they got back to the shore, they were devastated to discover that Margaret, the youngest, who was 18 at the time, had disappeared. Her body was never discovered and the family returned to Leeds haunted by her death.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Noel worked his way up from articled clerk to solicitor (he qualified in 1903 when he was 25 years old) and began to mingle with the great and good of Leeds. He could often be found in London, at his Mayfair club, the Albemarle, where oscar Wilde had been accused of sodomy by the Marquess of Queensberry at the turn of the previous century. Just before the start of the First World War, he bought a house in the village of Roundhay. There, his path crossed that of the beautiful olive Lupton, who came from one of Leeds’ richest and most illustrious families. It was a union that would bring Noel untold success and riches, and lead his descendants to the gates of Buckingham Palace.

Chapter 7
The Luptons 1847–1930

I
t was a bitter winter’s day, 6 January 1914, and the great and good of Leeds were gathered at the Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel in the city centre for the wedding of the daughter of one of its most illustrious families.

Alderman Francis Martineau Lupton – one of four brothers who held office in the town during the nineteenth century – was giving away his eldest daughter olive, 32, a society beauty, to Noel Middleton, 35, who came from a line of successful and affluent lawyers. They made a handsome couple. Olive was dark, with defined features; Noel had brown hair and hazel eyes. Watched by friends and family, Kate’s great-grandparents made their vows in the Gothic chapel, with its stone pulpit and stained-glass windows, remembering those who could not be with them. Both shared the pain of loss – Noel was an orphan by the age of ten and olive lost her mother when she was still a child – and were bound together by the experience.

Their Nonconformist wedding – the Unitarian Church is Presbyterian in structure and at variance with the Church of England in several of its teachings – was one of the last to be held at the chapel before the outbreak of war six months later.

Olive Lupton came from an illustrious, aristocratic Leeds family who had made their name as wool merchants in the eighteenth century and mixed with the upper echelons of society. Her paternal grandmother Fanny was directly descended from Sir Thomas Fairfax, a leading Parliamentarian general in the English Civil War. Prince William is also descended from Fairfax, through the Spencer line, which means that Kate and William are distantly related – they are in fact 15th cousins.

The daughter of surgeon Thomas Greenhow and his wife Elizabeth Martineau, Fanny had links to many of the great philanthropists and thinkers of the day. She was the niece of the author, philosopher and feminist Harriet Martineau, who herself was a devout Unitarian and mixed in a circle that included Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Charles Darwin. She was also the second cousin of Guy Ritchie’s great-great-grandfather William Martineau. His granddaughter Doris McLaughlin married the war hero Major Stewart Ritchie, a Seaforth Highlander who won a Military Cross during the First World War, meaning that not only does Kate have aristocratic blood, but she also has connections to Hollywood royalty.

The family business, William Lupton & Co., founded in 1773, was the oldest firm in the city when it closed in 1958. Fanny’s husband, Frank Lupton, expanded the company, buying an old cloth mill (against his wife’s wishes) and letting it out to weavers who brought their cloth to his warehouse every Friday for him to inspect. Gradually, he expanded into making fancy tweeds, livery tweeds and police uniform fabrics, and he bought a finishing plant, which meant that he was involved in every stage of the manufacturing process. It was a decision that would benefit the entire family, including his great-great-great-granddaughter Kate, as he slowly became a very rich man.

Family life for Frank and Fanny, who got married in 1847, revolved around their five sons, of whom olive’s father Francis was the oldest. He was born on 21 July 1848, followed by Arthur in 1850, Herbert in 1853, Charles in 1855 and Hugh in 1861. By then, the family was living at Beechwood, a sprawling Victorian mansion down a winding carriage lane in the village of Roundhay, seven miles north of Leeds, which they had bought from Sir George Goodman, who had served as the city’s mayor. They were wealthy enough to employ six servants to cater for their every whim. Sadly, Herbert died when Hugh was a baby, but the other four sons grew up to make their parents proud, doing well at school and becoming model citizens. The family socialised with the city’s elite, involving themselves in the politics of the day, worshipping in the same churches and walking in the same parks.

Like his father before him, olive’s father Francis was sent to grammar school. He was a bright boy and became the first member of the family to go up to Trinity College, Cambridge, which had just opened to Nonconformists. This soon became a traditional route for Lupton sons: his brother Charles and three sons all followed him there. Charles was the first Lupton son to go to the boys’ public school Rugby, which had just opened its prep school, setting a tradition of private education that would carry right down through the family to Kate. Francis took a degree and an MA in history before returning to Leeds. He joined the family firm as a cashier – which, his mother noted in her diary, ‘he likes fairly’ – and was given a commission in the Leeds Rifles. The family was delighted when he fell in love with Harriet Davis, the daughter of the vicar at their local church, St John’s. She lived with her parents and four sisters in the vicarage in Roundhay, and the two families were close friends. The couple got married at St John’s on 6 April 1880, when Francis was 31 and Harriet 29, and they moved to their own home, Rockland, in Newton Park, a hamlet between Chapel Allerton and Potternewton. Olive was born on April Fool’s Day 1881.