‘We all knew as teachers that that year group was moving in “royal” circles,’ recalled Kate’s Marlborough housemistress Ann Patching to Nicholl. ‘They were friends.’
That would definitely help to explain why Kate had switched her university application to St Andrews in August 2000 when she heard that William was going there – as much to be with the circle that would gather around him as with the prince himself. Then, while finishing off her gap year in the summer of 2001, Kate got a job on a yacht based in the Ocean Village Marina in Southampton, where her fellow deckhands ribbed her about making a beeline for William when she got to St Andrews.
‘Obviously you might meet him,’ said her first mate, Paul Horsford. To which Kate replied in a matter-of-fact fashion, ‘I’ve already met him once or twice before.’
Kate gave no more details and would not be drawn, related Horsford to Nicholl. ‘[Kate] was always very professional and very private – and very careful with what she said.’ In olden days young ladies were advised to keep themselves ‘tidy’ in a virginal sense if they were aiming to secure a high-profile husband. Nowadays the intimacy that matters is to avoid getting too close to the press.
The couple clearly saw a lot of each other once they reached St Andrews as fellow students on the smallish history of art course in the autumn of 2001. When William could not attend lectures, Kate sometimes took notes on his behalf, and both were residents of the same old Gothic-looking hall of residence – ‘St Sally’s’, with rooms quite close to each other. They ate in the same hall for meals. They were in groups that tended to breakfast early together, with Kate and William always going for the ‘healthy’ selection: muesli and fruit, not bacon and eggs – and certainly no kippers.
When Wills got back to St Sally’s early in 2002 after his Christmas ‘wobble’, he felt he knew Kate well enough to invite her to join the house-share that he was putting together for that September with fellow Etonian Fergus Boyd and another female student, Olivia Bleasdale. No one makes that sort of offer to a person they do not feel they know and trust – and if you are William Wales you make sure to select someone you feel quite confident will not blab to the newspapers, nor to anyone else.
So here was the first reason why Catherine Middleton is due one day to be Queen Catherine the Sixth. She has all the attributes of the perfect flatmate – steady and reliable, clean and tidy, good company but not too gossipy, smiling and upbeat, and a fluent but not over-chatty conversationalist who could be relied upon to invite her attractive friends to your joint parties. She would never be too loud over breakfast next morning – and she was always good for the rent.
When it comes to the sex bit and the functioning of boyfriend–girlfriend relationships in such a flat-share, readers of an older generation (like the author’s) should be aware that nowadays these emotional complications are more unlikely than likely to feature in student friendship groupings. Fergus Boyd, for example, already had a girlfriend at St Andrews, Sandrine Janet, whom he would later marry but with whom he chose not to share a flat at uni.
Here’s another question about that historic encounter at the fashion show … Having laid out all we know about the serious and purposeful young Kate Middleton being so ‘professional’ and ‘private’ and ‘careful’ – a real buttoned-up little William in many ways – aren’t we somewhat surprised to discover her sashaying down a catwalk in her underwear?
And what about the prince? Have we ever heard of Prince William willingly sitting down in the front row of a fashion show before or since? Which brings us to the extra ingredient in our story, the urgent common cause that brought William and Kate to that student union hall early in 2002 in an atmosphere of unusually high emotion – the tragic catastrophe of the 9/11 attacks on America that had occurred only a few months earlier, just as the St Andrews students were starting their academic year.
This DONT WALK charity gala of March 2002 was their response – a fundraising effort for the families of the nearly three thousand victims of Osama bin Laden’s attacks. The name DONT WALK was taken from the famous, apostrophe-free pedestrian crossing signs in New York, and some four hundred female undergraduates had rushed to volunteer for the fashion parade that the hastily assembled charity committee had thrown together. Someone had used their parental connections to pull in Yves Saint Laurent as a sponsor and other smaller fashion houses followed – among them the up-and-coming designer Charlotte Todd.
Wealthy male undergraduates were pressed for the £200 or so that it took to rent a front-row table and William was one of these – though he paid the money through a friend. No one knew that he was planning to attend, and Colleen Harris, Prince Charles’s press secretary, had even assured Niall Scott, the St Andrews press officer, that William would not be there. As a consequence Scott had encouraged the media to flood into the dramatically lit hall to help generate all the photos and publicity that this good cause – the issue of the moment – deserved.
‘Five minutes after I’d opened the union doors to the press,’ Scott recalled, ‘William walked round the corner with his mates and into the hall and sat down at the table right at the end of the runway. The press thought they’d died and gone to heaven.’
Scott reckoned that he might be destined for a slow and painful death at the hands of Colleen Harris with no chance of heaven when the royal press officer found out what had
