Those Middleton matriarchs behind Kate’s mettle
AFORMIDABLE role model in the life of the young Catherine Middleton was her grandmother on her mother’s side, Dorothy Goldsmith, known affectionately to some in her family as ‘Lady Dorothy’ — though she was no aristocrat. Her grandfather was a Durham coal miner, her father a joiner. Dorothy left school early to work as a shop assistant at the Dorothy Perkins fashion chain — and at just 18, she married Kate’s grandfather, 22-yearold builder Ronald Goldsmith. The couple settled in a council flat in Southall, West London. In 1955, their daughter Carole was born, and Dorothy was so delighted with her new baby that they bought little Carole ‘the biggest Silver Cross pram you have ever seen’. Today, in 2020, a Silver Cross Balmoral pram, complete with huge curved springs and wire-spoked wheels, will set you back £1,800. In 1955 you did not see many Silver Cross prams on council estates, and this seems to have been the moment when the nickname of ‘Lady Dorothy’ started to be applied to Mrs Goldsmith. ‘We all thought Dorothy was a bit of a snob,’ recalled Ronald’s niece, Ann Terry, who at one point worked beside her in a jewellery store. ‘She always wanted to better herself.’ ‘My grandmother used to grumble about Dorothy,’ remembered another relative. ‘She thought Dorothy always wanted to be the top brick in the chimney.’ After a dozen years of marriage, Dorothy and Ronald were finally able to move out of the council flat to their first proper house — in Norwood Green, at the smarter end of Southall. As for Carole, she left her local state school at 16, and went straight out to work for ‘the Pru’ — the Prudential Insurance Company in Holborn. The Pru and Carole Goldsmith did not get along. She’d never seen herself working in an office, so she asked her father to support her for two more years at school to get her Alevels — economics, English literature, geography and art. These helped her to win a place on the coveted retail trainee scheme of the John Lewis department stores — ‘Never Knowingly Undersold.’ Carole was keen on the idea of a career in merchandising — until she was instructed to knuckle down for a full six months as a sales assistant in the Peter Jones china and glass department. ‘Blow that — I’m not doing that for six months!’ she later recalled. ‘It was really boring.’ Still only 18 in 1973, Carole used her Pitman shorthand to get a job with the ground staff at British European Airways, just about to become the modern British Airways. There she met the handsome and genial Michael Middleton, working in a quietly responsible job as a flight dispatcher. The couple soon fell in love — and ‘Lady Dorothy’ thoroughly approved. The privately educated 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: a distant ancestor of Michael’s was Baroness Airedale, present at the 1911 coronation of King George V.
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.
When the couple married in 1980, it was Middleton money that bought their first home, a Victorian semi-detached cottage in a village near Bucklebury in Berkshire, where they lived with their baby daughters Pippa and Kate.
By 1987, Carole was 32 and pregnant with their third child, James. ‘Oooh,’ she recalled thinking in an interview that she gave in 2018. ‘Bills to pay!’
Within months of James’s birth, Mrs Middleton created her own trading company, Party Pieces — a one-stop, mail-order destination from which you could order anything you needed for a children’s party.
SHE went to the Spring Fair at Birmingham in 1987, hooked up with some suppliers of paper plates and cups, stuck up a self-designed flyer at Kate’s playgroup in Bucklebury — and began stuffing colourful party bags on her kitchen table. These were pre-internet days, and business was slow.
But then Carole had the idea of advertising with a children’s book club which she’d subscribed to. She paid to send out 10,000 flyers, then later 100,000 — and the orders took off. After a year or so, Mike left his job at British Airways in order to help grow the business.
Carole Middleton’s haggling skills became legendary in the direct-mail business.
‘Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth most of the time, but she was a ferocious negotiator,’ recalls one of her suppliers.
‘I remember her almost screaming down the phone on one occasion when I refused to drop my price on something. People could hear her on the other side of the office — and that was in my office with her voice coming through the phone from Bucklebury, or wherever.’
But Carole undoubtedly got results. The Middletons were already millionaires by the time Kate found herself at St Andrews University with Prince William in the early 2000s.