The First World War had a devastating effect on the Lupton family, wiping out nearly an entire generation of men and plunging the whole family into mourning. Only three out of seven male cousins survived – Arthur’s son Arthur and Hugh’s sons Hugo and Athel – leaving the family businesses short of young men to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But the war also had a great effect on the women of the family, as they were left to fend for themselves. Many hundreds of thousands of men were killed or maimed during the war, and it has been estimated that in the interwar years there were some two million ‘surplus women’ who could not hope to find a husband. The Lupton women were no different. Although olive was already married at the start of the war, her sister Anne died a spinster and the majority of her female cousins did not find husbands.
Robbed of the chance to find a husband, Anne also found it difficult to get work after the war, despite having dedicated herself to good causes. In 1914, she had become secretary to the Leeds General Hospital Committee, raising funds for men in military hospitals, and later she had worked on the local Pensions Committee, advising disabled soldiers. It was she who had persuaded her father to rent the house to them. But, despite having been presented to King George V and Queen Mary twice, in 1916 and 1918, and getting a mention for her war work in the London Gazette in 1920, her application for a post as Inspector of Local Committees was rejected because she was a woman. She later had to endure the ignominy of being rejected by the family firm because she was female.
Fran’s widow Dorothy, nicknamed Dort, was one of the more fortunate. Despite having a four-year-old daughter, Ruth, she soon managed to find herself a second husband, her late husband’s cousin Arthur. The couple married in 1919 and their son Tom was born the following year. They moved into a house on the edge of Chapel Allerton, and Arthur split his time between supervising the farm at Beechwood, where he had grown up, playing polo and hunting. On 14 December 1928, while riding with the Bramham Hunt, he was involved in a horrific accident. After failing to take a fence, his horse threw him and rolled on top of him, fracturing his pelvis. He died eleven months later, when his son Tom was only nine years old, leaving Dorothy a widow for the second time. Within a year, his father Arthur had died, his end hastened by grief.
Chapter 8
Noel Middleton and Olive Lupton
Lying in bed after giving birth at her home, Fieldhead House, in the yorkshire village of Roundhay, Kate’s great-grandmother olive Middleton cradled her newborn son Peter and prayed for a new dawn.
Married for six years to solicitor Noel Middleton and approaching her fortieth birthday, the mother of three wanted to give her sons Christopher, four, Anthony, three, and now Peter the idyllic upbringing she had been denied. It was 3 September 1920 – two years after the end of the Great War – and olive had already suffered more pain than most people experience in a lifetime. Her mother Harriet had died when she was ten, leaving her in the care of a succession of housekeepers, nannies and governesses, and her brothers Fran, Maurice and Lionel had been killed in the war. Now she was watching with sadness as her father faded away before her eyes, overwhelmed with the grief of losing his wife and three sons. He died five months later, as much of a broken heart, it seems, as of any other cause, leaving his daughter a wealthy woman but a saddened one.
Despite being dealt such a terrible hand, olive was stoical about her experiences. After all, she was fortunate. Not only was she wealthy in her own right and married – quite a feat in those post-war days – but her husband Noel had returned from the battlefields of France, where he had worked as a driver for the Royal Army Service Corps.
The only other member of the family to have been so lucky was her cousin Hugo, a Wellington School and Trinity College alumnus, who had won a Military Cross for his service in France. On 17 July 1920, he married Joyce Ransome, the daughter of a family friend, Leeds University professor Cyril Ransome, who came from Far Headingley. Her brother Arthur would find fame a decade later when Swallows and Amazons, the first of his series of children’s novels, was published.
After the war, Noel gave up his partnership at solicitors W.H. Clarke, Middleton & Co. in South Parade, Leeds, to join olive’s family business, William Lupton & Co., as a cashier. Olive’s sister Anne, who was single, had hoped to fulfil her brothers’ role at the company but was rebuffed because she was a woman.
When olive gave birth to her and Noel’s fourth child, a daughter Margaret, known as Moggy, on 29 June 1923, the couple’s happiness was complete. Together, they created a carefree family home. Fairfield – a substantial Edwardian villa at 12 Park Avenue, an exclusive tree-lined street in the suburb of oakwood by Roundhay Park – was full of voices and laughter. Gentle and kind, with a relaxed temperament, olive was a natural mother, and the children thrived in their surroundings. They had a governess, who taught them with their second cousin Francis, the eldest son of Hugo Lupton and Joyce Ransome. In The Next Generation, Francis remembered:
When I reached school age, my mother taught me for a while, but I later shared a governess with my cousins, Peter and Margaret Middleton. They lived at oakwood, some three miles away, and I clearly remember that I used to start out each morning with a lift on a horse-drawn milk float which took me for a mile or so along the way, while my mother caught me up on a bicycle.
Noel, who had a keen interest in music, was chairman of the Northern Philharmonic orchestra and organised many musical soirées in Leeds between the wars. He was also interested in photography and shared with his wife a love of painting.
The whole family used to gather at Beechwood, the Lupton family’s old seat, where olive’s father Francis had been brought up with his brothers Arthur, Charles and Hugh, and which was now home to Arthur’s daughters Elinor and Bessie, two spinster sisters.
The family spent a lot of time outdoors in the countryside and summer holidays were spent camping in the Lake District or staying in their holiday house in Kettlewell, one of the prettiest villages in the yorkshire Dales, which overlooks the Wharfedale Valley to the north of Skipton.
It was while they were in the Lake District during the summer of 1936 that olive was taken to hospital with peritonitis, a blood infection, after her appendix burst. There were complications and, on 27 September, at the age of 55, she died, ripping the heart out of the family. She left £52,031 in trust for her children. It was a fortune in those days, but the money could not make up for the loss to the Middleton siblings. Peter was only 16 years old when his mother died and Margaret was barely a teenager. Yet another generation of Lupton children was left to make their way in the world without a mother. Olive’s sister Anne, who was seven years younger than her and the only one of her brothers and sisters still alive, became a shoulder for Noel to lean on and a good friend to the children.
After the First World War, following the deaths of her father and three brothers, Anne, unmarried and with no ties, had decided to go travelling, visiting Asia and South America. Her adventures enthralled her nieces and nephews. When she returned to England, she set up home at 7 Mallord Street, Chelsea, with Enid Moberly Bell, an equally inspiring and inexhaustible woman, who was not only a prolific author but also the founder and first headmistress of Lady Margaret School in Fulham and a vice chairwoman of the Lyceum Club for female writers and artists. It was in Mallord Street that Anne found out about the death of her sister.
In those days, Chelsea was not an exclusive, well-heeled haven for investment bankers and celebrities but a quarter of London inhabited by artists, writers and poets. One of the women’s neighbours was the artist Augustus John, who commissioned the Dutch architect Robert van t’Hoff to design a cottage for him at No. 28 after a chance encounter in a pub. The painter Cecil Hunt, whose wife was a leading figure in the suffrage movement, resided in Mallord House, and author A.A. Milne, a former journalist and assistant editor at Punch, who created the children’s stories about Winnie the Pooh for his son Christopher, lived at No. 13, a red-brick house with a wrought-iron fence an
d leaded windows.
Anne fitted well into the progressive, bohemian milieu of Mallord Street. She had inherited her father’s social conscience and worked on improving housing conditions in Fulham, for which she was awarded an MBE. She was also involved in the creation of the Quarry Hill estate in inner-city Leeds, which opened in 1938 as the country’s largest municipal housing scheme, to replace the back-to-back housing of the Victorian era, a cause that had been close to her father’s heart. The new flats became iconic and were modern and well equipped, with solid-fuel ranges, electric lighting and state-of-the-art refuse collection, but the buildings were demolished in 1978 because of structural defects.
Three years after olive’s death, the family faced another challenge, the outbreak of the Second World War, and another generation of Luptons went off to fight for their country. It was on Peter Middleton’s 19th birthday, 3 September 1939, that war was declared. While his older brother Christopher joined the Royal Artillery and Anthony went into the army, Peter joined the RAF. He got his wings at RAF Cranwell, an experience he shares with Prince William.
It was another anxious time for Noel, who had seen his wife’s family almost wiped out by the First World War, but ultimately a kinder one, as the family celebrated a marriage, a birth and political honour.
On 6 December 1941, the family was reunited at Christ Church, Chelsea, when Christopher, by then a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, got married to Dorothy Martin, the daughter of a builder, who was three years older than him. His aunt Anne signed the marriage certificate in his mother’s place. Once again, she was holding the family together, keeping her home in Chelsea open for friends and relatives passing through London. She was eventually driven out by the bombing and set up home in a rented house in Midhurst, Kent, where she continued to get involved in war relief work.
A year later, on 18 November 1942, the family celebrated again when Jessie Kitson, great-niece of the 1st Baron Airedale, who had been a close friend of Peter Middleton’s great-grandfather William, became the first female Lord Mayor of Leeds. She was a lifelong friend of Arthur Lupton’s daughter and Anne’s cousin Elinor, who once joked that she and Jessie were ‘the two worst-dressed ladies in Leeds’. The family were delighted that Elinor, a Cambridge graduate in classics who lived in the family home, Beechwood, became her Lady Mayoress.
Then, in 1943, Noel became a grandfather for the first time when his daughter-in-law Dorothy gave birth to Philippa. The first member of the Middleton family to be born outside Leeds, she arrived into the world at the Fulmer Chase Maternity Hospital in Berkshire, where many wives of junior officers gave birth.
Despite being a leading centre for manufacturing, Leeds survived the war largely unscathed. Local legend had it that the thick black smoke produced by the city’s industries prevented enemy planes from spotting their targets. Nevertheless, some 70 people were killed during attacks, the worst of which happened in March 1941, when the town hall, the station, the Quarry Hill estate and Leeds City Museum were all bombed, the museum suffering the loss of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Meanwhile, Waddingtons, the local board game and playing card manufacturers, rose to the challenge by supplying British servicemen held in prisoner of war camps in Germany with games in which they had secreted maps to aid them in their attempts at escaping.
None of the Middleton brothers was killed during the war, and the family must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when the end came. In Leeds, thousands danced in the streets, clambering up on top of the lions in front of the town hall to celebrate VE Day. On 13 May 1945 there was a victory parade through the town, attended by thousands despite the pouring rain.
The end of the war spelled the beginning for a new generation of Middletons as they celebrated their new-found freedom. Both Kate’s grandfather Peter and his brother Anthony fell in love in those heady post-war days, with two ravishing sisters.
Peter, who became a civilian pilot after being demobbed, was the first brother to take the plunge, getting married at the respectable age of 26. He tied the knot with Valerie Glassborow, 22, the daughter of bank manager Frederick Glassborow, on 7 December 1946 at the Norman parish church in Adel, the oldest church in Leeds. The marriage proved the foundation for another love affair, between Peter’s older brother Anthony, a 29-year-old cloth manufacturer, and Valerie’s sister Mary, 23. They got married on 5 April the following year at the parish church of St John in Moor Allerton, cementing the warm relationship between the two families.
Sadly, Noel did not live long enough to walk his youngest daughter Margaret down the aisle when she wed musician James Barton eight years later. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 72 on 2 July 1951, leaving in his will the equivalent of £1.3 million, which was split between his four children. Kate’s grandfather Peter, who was 30 when his father died, also inherited a bronze bust by Jacob Epstein, an oil painting by local artist George Graham and a picture of himself by Edward Neatby, an accomplished Leeds-born painter of landscapes and portraits.
Noel’s sister-in-law Anne, who had played such a major role in his children’s lives, outlived him by 16 years, but after the death of Enid Moberly Bell in 1966 she seemed to wilt. Crippled by arthritis, she died the following year of leukaemia and tuberculosis, contracted during the First World War. She was 79.
Chapter 9
The Glassborows 1881–1954
Dressed in her traditional black mourning gown trimmed with white lace, with tears falling down her cheeks, Queen Victoria sat at her bureau in Windsor Castle and penned a letter to Lord Rowton, private secretary to Benjamin Disraeli. Once again plunged into grief, this time after the death of her favourite prime minister, Prince William’s great-great-great-great-grandmother wrote that day: ‘I can scarcely see for my fast falling tears . . . Never had I as kind and devoted a Minister and very few such devoted friends.’
The date was 19 April 1881 – nearly 20 years after Victoria had withdrawn from public life following the death of her beloved Albert – and the former Conservative prime minister, a favourite of the Queen, had succumbed to bronchitis.
His death, which came a year after he had lost a general election to Gladstone’s Liberal Party, spelled the end of a friendship between the Queen and her minister that had begun in 1868 when he replaced Lord Derby as Prime Minister and was cemented when he won a second term in power in 1874. Disraeli lured Victoria out of seclusion, proclaiming her Empress of India, charming her by kissing her hand, calling her ‘the Faery Queen’ and sending her witty letters. ‘Everyone likes flattery,’ he told the poet Matthew Arnold, ‘and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.’ In return, the Queen made him Earl of Beaconsfield and Viscount Hughenden, sending him bunches of spring flowers and nicknaming him ‘Dizzy’. She sent bouquets of primroses to his funeral. Afterwards, she paid a visit to Hughenden to lay a wreath on his tomb and later had a memorial erected to him in her name.
While Victoria suffered the pain of grief, 30 miles away, in the depths of Holloway Prison, Kate Middleton’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward Glassborow was enduring an altogether different ordeal. Incarcerated in a cramped cell – 13 ft by 7 ft – on one of three wings for male inmates in the jail, the 55-year-old was one of 436 prisoners from the city of London and Middlesex to be held in Holloway when the 1881 census was taken.
Prison records have not survived from that era, so it is impossible to know why the father of seven, who worked as a messenger for an insurance company, was jailed. The most likely explanation is that he was sent down for a short period for a minor offence such as being drunk and disorderly. In those days, Holloway, previously known as the City of London House of Correction or City Prison, was the jail for male and female prisoners sentenced at the old Bailey, the Mansion House or Guildhall Justice Rooms. It also housed debtors; although imprisonment for unpaid debts officially ceased in 1862, debtors were sometimes jailed for contempt of court or non-payment of fines.
Whatever the crime, Edward’s father Thomas
would have turned in his grave. He volunteered as a parish constable when he was in his early 20s and arrested dozens of criminals like his son. He was a witness at the old Bailey many times in cases of stealing and pocket-picking, and his evidence condemned many convicts to be transported to Australia and Tasmania. But he gave up that job before his marriage to Edward’s mother Amy on 18 February 1823 and became an insurance company’s messenger. The couple lived at 1 Bartholomew Lane, which at that time was the headquarters of the Alliance Marine Insurance Company, founded by Nathan Rothschild, so it appears that Thomas was such a model employee that he lived on the premises.
By that time, Sir Robert Peel had been appointed Home Secretary and the first rumblings about forming a modern salaried police force for the capital were under way. Law and order had become a major headache for the authorities as people flocked to London during the Industrial Revolution. Australia and Tasmania refused to allow more convicts into the country, and Britain had to find another way of dealing with its criminals. The obvious solution was to reform the police force and build more prisons. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 replaced volunteer constables and night watchmen with a centralised police force of 3,000 men responsible for policing the entire metropolitan area with the exception of the City of London. Clad in blue uniforms and carrying truncheons, they were nicknamed ‘bobbies’ after Peel.
Ninety prisons were built between 1842 and 1877. Holloway Prison alone cost £91,547 10s 8d. It was opened in 1852. Each prison was run by a jailer who essentially made up the rules as he went along, doling out privileges to convicts who could afford to pay for books and letters, more visitors and better food. Many prisoners had to pay the jailer to be released after their sentences were served, being required to purchase a ‘ticket of leave’, the day’s equivalent of the parole system. Those who could not afford to improve their lot ended up sleeping on comfortless wooden beds, eating monotonous food and doing hard labour: walking treadmills and picking oakum – separating strands of old rope to be sold on for use in shipbuilding – were the most common activities, more punishment than purposeful work. Conditions were damp, unhealthy, insanitary and overcrowded, and many prisoners died before they could be released.
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