A Tia Maria with ‘Tantie Margaret’ at the bowling club ...and why the new Queen of Denmark will never forget her Scottish roots
SHE is soon to be crowned the new Queen of Denmark – yet Princess Mary’s lavish lifestyle is a far cry from her humble roots.
The Queen-in-waiting – often compared to the Princess of Wales – hails from a working-class fishing village in one of the most deprived areas in Scotland.
The last time she visited Port Seton in East Lothian, where many of her close relatives still live, the ‘down-to-earth’ royal popped into the bowling club for a Tia Maria with her great aunt. Last night, one cousin admitted: ‘It all feels a million miles away from our life here. We are just normal, working-class folk.’
Although born and raised in Tasmania, Crown Princess Mary’s parents – both
Scots – emigrated from the UK in the early Sixties. Her father, John Donaldson, came from a wellknown fishing family in the area – a painting of which is believed to hang in the palace in Denmark.
The glamorous 51-year-old princess, dubbed ‘Mary, Queen of
Scots’, made her affinity with the land of her forbears clear when she included heraldic symbols of Scotland in her coat of arms after her marriage to Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik in 2004. However, little was known about her surviving relatives until The Mail on Sunday tracked them down last week.
Speaking from her modest terraced home in Port Seton, Sandra Flockhart, 70 – Mary’s first cousin once removed – said: ‘We got a real shock when we saw on the news that Queen Margrethe was abdicating. It still hasn’t quite sunk in that we are so closely related to the soon-to-be queen of Denmark.
‘Mary is a lovely girl, always smiling and happy to talk to anyone. She doesn’t have any airs or graces.
‘We last saw her a few months before she got married in 2004. She came to look around and visit my mum, her great auntie Margaret, who she was quite close to.
‘She went down to the harbour to see where her dad’s family had