Kate

by Claudia Joseph

  After her husband’s death, she was forced by penury to move with her daughter Joyce, then 13, and Ronald to a condemned flat in Dudley Road, a scruffier street in the neighbourhood, parallel to Clarence Street. As she had to go out to work – she was on the production line at Keeley & Toms, making mincemeat, during the war and then worked at the Tickler’s factory, producing jams, jellies and pickles – she farmed her children out to her parents, who lived in nearby Spencer Street, and her elder daughters.

  ‘My mum had to work hard to bring us all up,’ says Alice. ‘She did not like leaving her children; she had no choice. She wasn’t a bad lady, but she had a temper. You only had to say one word and she would take her shoes off and throw them at you. She would take the odd swipe at her kids herself, but woe betide anyone else who said or did anything to hurt them. She would defend them to the death. She liked a drink and smoked, and who could blame her with what she had to put up with. In those days, everybody was hard up.’

  Alice’s daughter Pat still remembers visiting the Dudley Road flat. ‘In the corner of the kitchenette, there was one of those old-fashioned boilers, like a three-corner bath, which had a fire underneath to warm the water,’ she recalls. ‘Granny Edith used to put coal in it. All the washing went in the boiler and she used to do the Christmas puddings there as well. She was the star for making Christmas puddings in the whole family. They were beautiful. The lavatory was next door to the boiler, in the same room. She loved her drink. She used to send my mother with a jug to the Havelock Arms to get some ale. The jug was orange with a pearly sheen and a picture of tulips on the side. I can remember seeing that throughout my childhood.’

  On 26 February 1938, less than two months after her husband’s death, Edith’s third daughter and fourth child, Hetty, got married to bricklayer George Clark at Uxbridge Register office. She was seven months pregnant with the first of their eleven children, all of whom were brought up on benefits in a council house. ‘She had a lovely nature, Hetty,’ says Alice. ‘She would give you anything. I don’t know how she managed to look after all those children.’

  A year after Hetty left home, life was to change again for the Goldsmith family. The Second World War loomed and the menfolk were off to fight. Ronald was eight years old when England declared war on Germany at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939. Although his father was already dead, his brothers-inlaw Bill Tomlinson and Henry Jones, who were the main male influences in his life, were stationed away from home. While Bill worked on operation Pluto, in which a team of scientists, oil engineers and army officers constructed a giant oil pipeline under the English Channel, Henry was stationed in Rochester, Kent, looking after prisoners of war.

  Their wives, Alice and Ede, worked at Hoover’s munitions factory, making caps for shells, and looked after their brother Ronald and their own children, Pat, who was five when war broke out, and Harry, who was three. ‘During the war, if women only had one child, they had to go out to work,’ recalls Pat. ‘They had to do so many hours a week. So both my mum and Aunt Ede worked at the factory and took it in turns to look after us. Mum would die for you. She’d give up her last slice of bread. I remember her during the war telling my dad that she had already eaten so that he would let her give him her meat ration. But she was very strict. My dad was about 6 ft tall and Mum is about 5 ft 4 in., yet she ruled him with a rod of iron.

  ‘Ron was living in that terrible, decrepit flat, but he was the loveliest person. He had a very hard time of it – he was never even taken to the dentist – but he was very popular because he had a lovely nature and sense of humour. Everybody loved him. He was a real softie.’

  During the war, many children in towns and cities were evacuated to the countryside for their own safety. Pat was one of the nearly three million people, the majority of them children, who were moved away from home under operation Pied Piper, which began two days before the declaration of war. She left London at the beginning of 1940 but was so homesick that her mother took her back to Southall with her just before the Blitz. ‘I was staying in a miner’s cottage in Wales,’ she says, ‘and I would see all the miners come down the valley singing. I can remember seeing all these black faces because there were no baths in the mines then. I remember my dad saying, “yes, that used to be me.” My mum came to visit me after I had been there about nine months. I cried so much when she was leaving that she took me back home with her. Neither Ronnie nor Harry was evacuated.’

  In fact, Ede’s son Harry stayed with Edith and Ronald during the war. ‘My mother did night work when dad was in the army,’ he remembers, ‘so I stayed the night with my nan, was taken home in the morning to go to school and went back to Dudley Road every night to sleep, except weekends. Ronald and I would often have to get up in the middle of the night and go to the air-raid shelter.’

  ‘We all grew up together through the rest of the war, bombs and all,’ says Pat. ‘one night when Mum was working at the Hoover factory, Dad and I were in the shelter in the garden when our front door was blown in by a bomb that dropped nearby.’ Southall was struck by German bombs several times. In August 1944, for example, a V-1 flying doodlebug destroyed several houses in Regina Road, a few streets away from Dudley Road, littering the area with rubble and broken glass and killing the occupants.

  Edith’s youngest daughter, Joyce, had left school and begun working at the factory with her mother, juggling this with looking after her younger brother and helping out with the other children. ‘Ronald and my mum were very close,’ says Joyce’s daughter Ann. ‘She used to look after him quite a bit. They were quite often hungry as kids, so they used to go to Mitchell’s, the grocer’s shop opposite, and they would give them food and help them out. It was sometimes hard for Edith to make ends meet. She would pawn things on the Tuesday and take them back out another day. I remember my mum telling me she bought Ronald his first pair of long trousers. He must have been about ten. He was really excited.’

  The family spent all the holiday festivals together. ‘We were a very close family,’ says Pat. ‘At Christmas, when the men were in the army, we had nothing. We used to get together at Aunt Ede’s house or my mum’s house and they would pool whatever food they had. We used to play charades. Ede was great at playing the piano. I can see her now in my mind’s eye playing “Roll out the Barrel”.’

  In 1943 – at the height of the war – Joyce left home, leaving Ronald alone in the condemned flat with his mother. When she turned 18, she married George Plummer, a year her senior, who was a ‘Desert Rat’ in the 7th Armoured Division, fighting in most of the major battles in North Africa, including El Alamein in 1942. After the war, he became a herdsman at osterley Park, a stately home in nearby Hounslow, living in a cottage on the estate and doing the milk round. ‘They met on a blind date during the war,’ recounts Ann. ‘It was love at first sight. He had four days’ leave and then went back to Africa. She went back to work at the factory. She also did fire-watching and worked on the telephones at night.’

  Ronald was 14 years old when the war ended and his brothers-inlaw returned home. The family was fortunate to avoid the dreaded telegram announcing that a loved one had died. Like his brother and sisters before him, Ronald left school at 14, and he began dabbling in a series of jobs to make ends meet.

  On 1 January 1949, the National Service Act came onto the statute books, obliging all men between the ages of 17 and 21 to enlist in the armed forces for 18 months, remaining on the reserve list for the following four years. Ronald was 17 years old and was sent to Aqaba in Jordan. It was during his time in the army that he worked as a baker, a skill that his grandson James, Kate’s brother, would inherit.

  When he came out of the army, he had just turned 18, and he went to work for his brother-in-law Bill Tomlinson as a haulage driver. ‘I have an image of sitting opposite him when I came home from school for lunch,’ says Pat. ‘I can still see him there, looking up at me and laughing. He was the nicest man you could ever meet. Nobody ever had a bad word to say about him.’
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  ‘He was a smashing guy, a top boy,’ adds Harry. ‘We worked together in the ’50s for Alice’s husband Bill, who had set up his own haulage business. He was a good lad. I remember he would always take his hat off whenever a hearse went past. He was a real gentleman, a diamond guy.’

  It was those good manners that attracted the attention of Kate’s grandmother Dorothy Harrison, leading to a love match that would change the fortunes of the two families for good.

  Chapter 5

  Dorothy Harrison and Ronald Goldsmith

  Wearing a white satin Norman Hartnell dress embroidered with gold and silver thread and encrusted with pearls and crystals, Princess Elizabeth stepped into the horse-drawn gold state coach in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. Escorted by the Duke of Edinburgh, who was wearing full naval uniform, and carrying a bouquet of orchids, lilies of the valley, stephanotis and carnations grown in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, Prince William’s grandmother was on her way to Westminster Abbey for her coronation.

  Prince Charles, who was four at the time, watched the glittering ceremony, which took place at 11.15 a.m. on 2 June 1953, alongside 8,251 guests from around the Commonwealth. Princess Anne was considered too young to attend the service.

  It was the very public start of a new age for the royals, but elsewhere, much more quietly, the Harrisons and the Goldsmiths were also about to enter a new era, one that would show how the circumstances of a family can reverse within a couple of generations.

  It was the year when Joseph Stalin died after 31 years in control of the Soviet Union, Hussein was proclaimed King of Jordan and the Korean war came to an end. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Everest, the first issue of Playboy appeared on news-stands and Ian Fleming published the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. It was also the year when Dorothy Harrison and Ronald Goldsmith got married.

  Kate Middleton’s grandparents had met at the wedding of a close friend and were instantly attracted. At the time, Dorothy was working as a sales assistant in Dorothy Perkins and Ronald was employed in his brother-in-law Bill’s haulage company. On 8 August 1953, within two months of watching the royal coronation on their black-and-white television, they walked up the aisle at Holy Trinity Church, Southall. The wedding was simple and traditional. Dorothy, 18, walked down the aisle in a demure ivory dress, accompanied by her two matrons of honour and two bridesmaids, Ronald’s nieces Ann, daughter of his sister Joyce, and Linda, the youngest child of Bill and Alice Tomlinson. Afterwards, the couple were photographed on the steps of the church.

  The family celebrated at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall, a pub that later became notorious as a haunt of racist skinheads. In 1981, two years after teacher Blair Peach had been killed during clashes between police and anti-fascist protestors, the Hamborough Tavern was burned down by Asian youths during a skinhead gig.

  Happy as the two families were, it was hardly a fairy-tale wedding. Neither Dorothy nor Ronald had a penny to their name. Indeed, the bride was so poor that she had to borrow her going-away outfit from Ronald’s sister Joyce, and instead of moving into their own home, they had to squeeze into the Dudley Road flat with Ronald’s mother Edith.

  Nonetheless, the couple soon would prove a formidable match. Although both came from working-class families with little money or education, Dorothy had drive and ambition, while Ronald was artistic. He was a talented painter, carpenter and baker. Together, they climbed the social ladder while other members of their families remained in relative poverty. In a sense, Kate’s family history mirrors those of millions of British people who have aunts, uncles and cousins whom they have never met. When one branch of a family thrives, it is not uncommon for them to lose contact with others.

  ‘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 ch
ildhood. 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.