Bluebloods, an odd job man, a war hero ... and a womaniser
ONE attribute that has endeared Camilla to the nation over the years is her common touch – joshing with the public, happy to defer, ready to take a joke.
Maybe that’s because, among her blueblood ancestors, there’s a central core of working-class stock. Her father’s mother, Margot Tippet, was the daughter of an odd-job man – and the granddaughter of a London butler, Henry Harrington, who polished silver below stairs.
Harrington was considered courteous and efficient and rose to be a gentleman’s gentleman in the Belgravia household of a much decorated Army general, Sir Richard England. Harrington and his wife had 12 children who grew up to become clerks and saleswomen, garage mechanics and shop assistants. One was a jobbing violin player.
Harrington’s granddaughter Margot started work as a milliner but with the outbreak of the
First World War retrained as a secretary. In her job, she met the journalist Philip Morton Shand, who was working at the War Office. His Eton and Cambridgeeducated father was engaged to Irish author Constance Lloyd, who ditched him for Oscar Wilde.
Shand Snr went on to wed Augusta, a shipping heiress, and their son Morton was schooled at Eton, Cambridge and then the Sorbonne in France. He and Margot married in 1916 and nine months later she gave birth to a son, Bruce Middleton Hope Shand – Camilla’s father. Morton went off to serve in the Royal Field Artillery – and that, effectively, was the end of the marriage.
Margot remained close to Morton’s parents and it was they who largely brought up her son.
By now she’d cast aside her working-class origins and remarried. Her second husband was a golf-course designer, Charles Tippet. For a time, Camilla’s infant father spent time with his mother and stepfather in the US. Morton, an incorrigible womaniser, married three times more. In 1926, he was kicked out of France after a divorce from his third wife, the daughter of velvet manufacturers in Lyons. The divorce judge told him:
‘Turn your attentions to another country!’ Soon after, he was sued for bankruptcy and in another divorce hearing was denounced by the judge, who said ‘a little wholesome publicity might curb your behaviour’.
Margot was no more a mother than Morton was a father, and their son was soon back in England with his grandparents before being shunted off to Rugby public school.
Bruce Shand grew up to be admired by all who knew him, and during the Second World War he won the Military Cross twice before being interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. On his release, he married Rosalind Cubitt. It’s long been rumoured that Rosalind’s mother, Sonia, may have been the daughter of Edward VII and Alice Keppel, Camilla’s great-grandmother. Indeed, Camilla is said to have introduced herself to Prince Charles with the words: ‘My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers – so how about it?’
Keppel was a mistress of the King and a question mark hangs over the paternity of Keppel’s second daughter Sonia, Camilla’s grandmother. If Sonia really was Edward VII’s daughter, it means Camilla is a second cousin once removed of Prince Charles.
Kicked out of France, sued for bankruptcy and publicly shamed