Let us start with the coal-mining. Kate Middleton’s great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side, John Harrison, came from Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham. Today Hetton is effectively a suburb of Sunderland, but it was a mining village in its own right in 1896, when John, aged twenty-two, married domestic servant Jane Hill, by whom he would father nine children, including Kate’s great-grandfather, Thomas. For some twenty years John went down the pit every working day, until he was trampled in a freak accident by a runaway pit pony. After being laid out flat on his back for months, Great-great-grandpa was compelled to take early retirement, and for the rest of his life he could walk only with the help of a stick.
Great-grandfather Thomas, known to the family as ‘Tommy’, was too canny to follow his father down the pit. He trained as a joiner and in the 1930s headed south to London with his wife Elizabeth, settling in the western railway depot suburb of Southall, where his carpentry earned them enough to buy a two-bedroomed terraced house facing the Grand Union Canal. There Tommy and Elizabeth raised Kate’s grandmother Dorothy, who left school early to work on the high street as a shop assistant at a branch of the Dorothy Perkins fashion chain – and was known to family and friends as ‘Lady Dorothy’.
Strong and aspirational women play an important role in the history of Kate Middleton’s family – starting with her great-grandmother Edith Goldsmith who smoked twenty Woodbines a day, brought up six children and, when widowed, went to work in the local jam factory. In 1953, just two months after Elizabeth II’s coronation, Edith’s twenty-two-year-old son Ron, a builder, who had left school at fourteen, married Lady Dorothy, then just eighteen.
Ron and Dorothy – Kate’s grandparents – settled in a council flat in Southall, and 1955 saw the birth of their daughter Carole, Kate’s mother. Delighted with her new baby, Lady Dorothy bought little Carole – in the words of one spiteful relative – ‘the biggest Silver Cross pram you have ever seen’.
In 2020, a Silver Cross Balmoral pram, complete with huge curved springs and wire-spoked wheels, will set you back £1,800 – and if that is a little too rich for your pocket, you can slum it with the lesser Kensington model at just £1,500. These prices come from John Lewis – to this day the Middletons’ favourite store, motto: ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’.
‘We all thought Dorothy was a bit of a snob,’ recalled Ron’s niece, Ann Terry, who worked beside her in a jewellery store. ‘She always wanted to better herself.’
Living upstairs in their cramped and unheated Southall flat that lay under the Heathrow flightpath, the Goldsmiths had to manhandle their Silver Cross perambulator up and down the staircase every time baby Carole needed some air.
‘My grandmother used to grumble about Dorothy,’ remembered another relative, ‘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.’
After a dozen years of marriage, Dorothy and Ron were finally able to move out of the council flat to their first proper house – in Kingsbridge Road, Norwood Green, near Ealing, at the smarter end of Southall. By now Carole was about to enter her teens, but she only attended the local state school and then left when she was sixteen, since Ron could not afford to send her to teacher training college. Carole went straight out to work for ‘the Pru’ – the Prudential Insurance Company in Holborn.
The Pru and Carole Goldsmith did not get along. She had never seen herself working in an office, so she asked her father to stake her for two more years at school to get her A-levels – economics, English literature, geography and art. These helped her to win a place on the coveted retail trainee scheme of where else but John Lewis, learning her shopkeeping in the china and glass department at the Peter Jones branch on Sloane Square, Chelsea. Carole was loving the idea of a career in merchandising, until she was instructed to knuckle down for a full six months as a sales assistant on the shopfloor.
‘Blow that!’ she said in 2018 in an interview with the Telegraph. ‘I’m not doing that for six months – it was really boring.’
No office and no shopfloor for Carole Goldsmith! Still aged only eighteen in 1973, she used her Pitman shorthand to get a job at BEA – British European Airways, just merging with British Overseas Airways Corporation to become the modern British Airways – and she also brushed up her schoolgirl French to secure a position with the ground staff. There she met the handsome and genial Michael Middleton, somewhat less forceful than her, but working in a quietly responsible job as a flight dispatcher, sharing with the pilot legal responsibility for passenger safety of the flights he supervised. The couple soon fell in love – and Lady Dorothy thoroughly approved.
Michael Middleton was exactly the sort of husband that Carole’s mother had hoped her daughter would snag – charming, good-looking and rolling in class, plus a bit of money. The Middletons could trace their descent to Tudor times, while their money went back to Yorkshire wool production during the Industrial Revolution. Shrewdly invested through a variety of trusts, the inheritance had cushioned the family for generations. Michael had been privately educated at Clifton College, Bristol’s top public school, before moving to British Airways in hopes of becoming a pilot. Grounded by poor eyesight, he had switched to ground-crew work, where he met Carole.
When the couple married in 1980 it was Middleton money that
