Kate’s great-great-grandfather John was an orphan at the tender age of 14. He and his two unmarried sisters were forced into lodgings. But the family’s run of bad luck did not end there. At about 11.30 a.m. on 13 December 1895, John’s eldest brother, Anthony, was killed in a mining accident. The father of two, who was a hewer at Hetton Coal Company’s Eppleton Colliery, was hailed as a hero after trying to rescue two of his colleagues, deputy John Brown and putter Robert Lawns, but he paid with his life. He was commended in the 1895 Mines Inspection Report:
I should like here to say a word or two in appreciation of the courage and gallantry shown by the men who were amongst the rescuers. The three hewers, as well as the manager, under-manager, overman, and back-overman, all showed that they possessed the qualities which in the past made pitmen famous for heroism in the time of danger; such conduct as theirs should not go without commendation, and I am pleased to have the opportunity in this report, to show my appreciation of it, and I regret that one of them should have lost his life in the plucky attempt made to rescue Brown and Lawns.
Such a run of tragedy seems extraordinary by today’s standards and would be enough to destroy lesser men. But John Harrison had lived a tough life in which illness and death were by no means unusual.
At the age of 22, on 23 February 1897, John married domestic servant Jane Hill, 21, the daughter of a joiner at the colliery, at Houghton-le-Spring Register office. They moved into a miner’s cottage on Chapel Street in the suburb of Hetton Downs. Eleven months later, they celebrated the birth of their first child, Jane, named after her mother and grandmother. For the young couple, it marked a new beginning. Another generation of the Harrison family had been born and it was the end of the nineteenth century, the dawn of a new era. The next century would bring terrible wars and extraordinary advances that could never have been foreseen. The Harrisons could not possibly have realised, either, how much their personal fortunes would change and how close they would come to the gilded world of royalty.
Chapter 2
The Harrisons 1901–53
It was 2 February 1901. The weather was bitterly cold and snow was falling. Queen Victoria had died 11 days earlier. Prince William’s great-great-great-grandfather Edward VII rode behind his mother’s coffin as the cortège snaked its way through the streets of London. Its final destination was St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. After a state funeral attended by the great and good of the Commonwealth, Victoria’s body lay in state for two days before being laid to rest beside that of Prince Albert in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore House.
Queen Victoria’s death heralded a new age. Eighteen months later, Edward VII and Alexandra were crowned king and queen by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Westminster Abbey – a little later than expected, as the 59-year-old monarch was diagnosed with appendicitis shortly before the date originally set for the coronation. The King donated osborne House, where his mother had died, to the state and lived at Sandringham House in Norfolk, as he had done before his accession. His son George – Prince William’s great-great-grandfather – and his wife Mary, who by then had four children, including the future Edward VIII and George VI, lived in york Cottage on the estate.
John Harrison would have read about the coronation in the newspaper or heard the news at the local pub. But he would have given little thought to the lives of the royal family and could never have guessed that his great-great-granddaughter would one day be so close to the country’s rulers. He had more pressing matters on his mind, such as raising enough money to make ends meet. John was not long married to Jane, and the couple lived in a cramped cottage in Chapel Street, Hetton Downs, with their three-year-old daughter Jane and baby son Ernest. Jane’s sister Sarah Hill lived with the family and helped out with the daily chores, but it was still a tough existence and the couple hoped that their children would be able to make a more comfortable future for themselves.
They had a second son, John, in 1902, but it was their fourth child – Kate’s great-grandfather – who was to make his mark. Born on 23 June 1904, he was named Thomas after Jane and Sarah’s father, who was a carpenter and joiner. A devoted grandfather, he spent many hours with the young boy and when his grandson was barely out of short trousers, he began to teach him the rudimentary skills of his profession.
Thomas was just five years old when King Edward VII collapsed, suffering from bronchitis, while on holiday in Biarritz. A heavy smoker – he is reputed to have smoked 20 cigarettes and 12 cigars a day – he then suffered several heart attacks following his return to Britain. He died on 6 May 1910, his wife Alexandra and mistress Alice Keppel at his bedside. He had just been told by his son George, Prince of Wales, that his horse Witch of the Air had won that afternoon at Kempton Park. ‘I’m very glad,’ the King replied. They were his final words. George V and Queen Mary were crowned at Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911. Afterwards, the King and Queen travelled to India, visiting their subjects. During the trip, the King indulged his hobby of hunting, shooting 21 tigers.
Three years later, on 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria–Hungary, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. The event sparked the beginning of the Great War. Life would never be the same again. Thomas Harrison was too young to fight in the First World War, but it had a major impact on his formative years, as Hetton-le-Hole, which had a population of 13,673 at the turn of the century, became a shadow of its former self. Hundreds of miners from the area volunteered for the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Durham Light Infantry, while the women and children had to adapt to life without them.
At first, Thomas’s father John, who had just celebrated his fortieth birthday when war broke out, remained at home, looking after his young family – he now had another two children, Wilfred, seven, and Norman, five – but eventually he was forced to enlist. In March 1916, the British government, in response to the rising losses on the Western Front – Britain lost 75,000 men at ypres and 60,000 at Loos – and the dwindling number of volunteers, introduced conscription for single men between the ages of 18 and 41. By May, the order had been extended to married men. It was just two months before John Harrison’s 42nd birthday, an accident of birth that would change the course of his descendants’ lives.
John enlisted with the Duke of Cambridge’s own Middlesex Regiment in the neighbouring town of Houghton-le-Spring. The 43-year-old corporal was killed in the trenches just three months before armistice, on 24 August 1918, one of 201 soldiers from Hetton-le-Hole not to return from the battlefields. His name is inscribed on a war memorial outside the working men’s club in the town – a granite plinth and statue of a soldier resting on a reverse rifle with his head bowed. It bears the inscription: ‘Erected by the members of Hetton and District Working Men’s Club in memory of fellow members who died for their country in the Great War 1914–1918’.
The conflict finally drew to a close at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. That day, a declaration of peace was read to the community of Hetton-le-Hole. Thomas was 14 years old. His world had changed irrevocably. Spurred on by his father’s death, he was apprenticed to his maternal grandfather – now the only male role model in his beleaguered family – and became the first Harrison to learn a trade.
Not long after the war’s end, the royal family suffered a bereavement of their own. While Thomas lost his father, George V lost his son. Prince John, his sixth and youngest child, died of an epileptic seizure on 18 January 1919. He was a year younger than Thomas. The Queen wrote to her husband: ‘The first break in the family circle is hard to bear but people have been so kind and sympathetic and this has helped us much.’
The interwar years were not good ones for the North-east. The war had damaged Britain’s trading position with regard to exports such as textiles, steel and coal. Heavy industry went into decline and mining bore the brunt of the slump. In 1923, 170,000 miners were employed in Durham alone. Over the 16 years before the outbreak of the Second World War, many of them lost their jobs
as demand for coal decreased. A series of strikes crippled the country and Britain slumped into a depression. Miners concerned about dangerous working conditions, reduced pay and longer hours took part in the 1926 General Strike in support of the Trades Union Congress, as well as holding two national coal strikes. Finally, the 1929 stock market crash brought the Great Depression. Demand for British products collapsed and levels of unemployment increased from 1 million to 2.5 million. The industrial areas of the North were hardest hit, especially the collieries. Mining was no longer a job for life.
However, there was a huge building boom after the war – a third of all houses built before 1939 were erected in the previous two decades – and tradesmen were much in demand. Grateful for his grandfather’s carpentry training, Kate’s great-grandfather Thomas spent the years between the wars moving around the north of England to find work. By 1934, the 29-year-old house joiner was living in the village of Easington Lane, a few miles away from Hetton-le-Hole, and going out with a girl from Tudhoe, a village just south of Durham. Elizabeth Temple, who was a year older than Thomas, was the daughter of a farm worker who had turned his hand to gardening after the war. A ‘fallen woman’, she had an illegitimate daughter, Ruth, from a previous relationship.
Even so, times had changed and the young couple would have enjoyed a very different romance from their parents and grandparents before them, travelling to Durham and Sunderland for dates, going to dance halls and jazz clubs, spending the evening at the pictures, listening to the wireless or gramophone. Within months, they had fallen in love and both their families were delighted when they got engaged. They were married on 12 May 1934 at the parish church in Tudhoe, with Thomas’s brother Albert and Elizabeth’s sister Maggie as witnesses. Ruth was barely a year old.
After their wedding, the couple moved back to Thomas’s home village of Hetton-le-Hole, where a year later, on 26 June 1935, Kate’s grandmother Dorothy was born. It was Dorothy’s pursuit of property, prosperity and respectability that would lead Kate to the throne of England. But she was helped by a number of political events that drove her family south, towards the royal family.
Dorothy was barely six months old when King George V died at Sandringham at 11.55 p.m. on 20 January 1936. A heavy smoker, he had suffered from a series of persistent breathing problems, including emphysema, bronchitis and pleurisy. According to the diary of the royal physician, Lord Dawson, the King’s final words were ‘God damn you’, mumbled to a nurse as she administered a sedative. Dawson admitted giving him a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine that night to hasten his death and relieve his suffering.
The Harrison family would have been glued to the wireless again at the end of the year, when George V’s son Edward VIII, having caused a constitutional crisis by becoming engaged to Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, decided to renounce his right to the throne. On 11 December 1936, his abdication speech was broadcast throughout Britain and the Empire: ‘you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love,’ he said.
That burden of responsibility was passed to his brother, King George VI, who had never expected to inherit the crown. His wife Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, never forgave her brother-inlaw for removing her family from their peaceful existence at 145 Piccadilly and throwing her daughters Elizabeth, ten, and Margaret, six, into the limelight.
Kate’s grandmother was a toddler when William’s great-grandfather ascended the throne and just four years old when Hitler invaded Poland. But her parents would have listened with a sense of impending doom to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939, stating that ‘this country is at war with Germany’. Like his father before him, Thomas could not avoid service; unlike his father, though, he survived the war. Ironically, those who worked in reserved occupations, including coal miners, were exempt from military service on the grounds that they were essential to the war effort at home. How Thomas must have rued his step up the social ladder.
While the men of Hetton-le-Hole went off to war, many of the women became ‘Aycliffe Angels’, taking a 25-mile bus journey for 12-hour shifts in the ammunitions factories in Newton Aycliffe.
Sunderland was one of the most heavily bombed areas in England during the war because it was the largest shipbuilding centre in the world. Family life in the region was thrown into chaos as air-raid shelters were dug, blackout curtains fitted, beaches closed and railings removed and melted down to build ships and tanks. Families were issued with gas masks and ration books of coupons. They huddled around the radio in the early evening to listen to the BBC Home Service and were enthralled to read about the morale-boosting visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to a Sunderland shipyard after a series of heavy bombings in 1943.
For once, the Harrisons’ lives mirrored those of the royal family, who insisted on staying in Britain during the war. The King and Queen split their time between Buckingham Palace and Windsor. On one occasion, they narrowly escaped death when two German bombs exploded in one of the courtyards while they were in residence at Buckingham Palace. Afterwards, the Queen memorably stated: ‘I’m glad we have been bombed. Now I can look the East End in the face.’ In total, the palace suffered nine direct hits during the war, and one of their loyal policemen died as a result. PC Steve Robertson, who was on duty at the palace on 8 March 1941, was killed by flying debris when the north side of the building was struck by a bomb. The royals insisted on adhering to the limits imposed on their subjects by rationing, to the extent that when Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, stayed at Buckingham Palace, she remarked on the restrictions on hot water.
After the war, Thomas and Elizabeth Harrison moved down from the North-east to the outskirts of London with their children Ruth and Dorothy. Kate’s grandmother was now within easy travelling distance of both Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, but the family certainly did not have the money to enjoy the lifestyle the capital had to offer. That would come to the next generation.
Now, having reached an era when we can learn about the Harrisons from first-hand information, we have a more detailed picture of just how impoverished they were. Virtually penniless, they lived in a run-down house on Bankside, on the edge of the Grand Union Canal, in Southall, west London.
Ann Terry, who is the couple’s great-niece – the niece of Dorothy’s husband Ronald – would go and stay with them when she was a child during the ’50s. She and her cousins Harry Jones and Pat Charman have keen memories of the poverty in the Harrisons’ household.
‘Thomas was a very dapper little man with a moustache,’ Ann recalls. ‘He and his wife Elizabeth were just ordinary people. They had nothing to be snobbish about. They had a smallholding where they kept chickens. But Dorothy always thought she was one above everybody else. I don’t know where she got her airs and graces from.’
‘They came from nothing,’ adds Harry. ‘They were complete commoners, as poor as poor can be.’
Pat remembers feeling intimidated by Dorothy, despite going to a grammar school herself. ‘She lived in one of the most scruffy streets you could imagine, on a canal bank,’ she says, ‘and went to an ordinary secondary modern school. But she had a way of making you feel uneasy.’
Kate’s grandmother Dorothy was a 12-year-old schoolgirl when William’s grandmother Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in a glittering ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947. Dorothy had yet to even meet her own Prince Charming, but a couple of miles down the road lived the man who was destined to be her future husband.
George VI died in his sleep on the night of 6 February 1952, after 16 years on the throne. He was just 56 years old and was battling lung cancer when he suffered a coronary thrombosis. His daughter Elizabeth, who was about to embark on a tour of Australia, flew back from Kenya for the funeral ten days later. Her coronation took place at Westminster Abbey in
June of the following year. Crowds lined the streets of London to catch a glimpse of the new monarch as she made her way to and from Buckingham Palace in the golden state coach. Others listened to live coverage of the event on the radio or watched it on television.
Thomas Harrison had now lived under five monarchs – remarkable when you consider that his grandfather had been born, lived and died under Queen Victoria. Thomas, though, had more pressing matters on his mind than princes and princesses. He had to earn the money to pay for two weddings. His eldest daughter Ruth was 19 and working as a shop assistant when she married machinist Ivor Pritchard, 25, at the Holy Trinity Church in Southall on 4 April 1953. Four months later, it was the turn of his other daughter, Dorothy; she married Ronald Goldsmith. And it was her ambitions and aspirations that would ultimately lead the family to the gilded gates of Buckingham Palace.
Chapter 3
The Goldsmiths 1837–1918
Working from dawn to dusk as a carpenter to feed his wife and five children, John Goldsmith would have greeted the dawn of 28 July 1837 as any other, by getting ready for work. Waking early in his tiny terraced house in Maidstone, he dressed in a hurry, downed a mug of tea and rushed out of the door, barely glancing at the headlines in the local newspaper, which on that day pronounced the election of the town’s new MP, Benjamin Disraeli, a notorious and debt-ridden philanderer who was one day to be Prime Minister and a great friend and ally of Queen Victoria.
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