The Duchess of Kent’s funeral at Westminster Cathedral will be attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla today, and Katharine had a secret double life teaching in a local school
Key members of the royal family – including Princess Kate and Prince William – will gather to honour the life of the Duchess of Kent today as her funeral takes place.
The wife of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin will be laid to rest this afternoon after her coffin was taken from her home of Kensington Palace yesterday to start its final journey. Her heartbroken husband bowed as his wife’s body was taken from the royal hearse into Westminster Cathedral, where traditional Catholic rites and a vigil took place.
The Duchess of Kent’s funeral at Westminster Cathedral today will be attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla, as well as other members of the Royal Family – marking the first time in 400 years a British monarch has attended a Catholic funeral.
Katharine, Duchess of Kent, died aged 92 on September 4. In many ways, she was one of the most trailblazing members of the House of Windsor, determined to forge her own path, even living a secretive double life after stepping back from royal duties after decades of officially representing the crown.
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The Duchess of Kent joined the Royal Family on her marriage to the late Queen’s cousin, Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, in 1961.
She spent decades supporting the crown, and conducting official engagements as a working member of the monarchy, despite some major heartbreak she suffered behind closed doors.
The Duke and Duchess of Kent had three children: George, the Earl of St Andrews, born in 1962, socialite and famed beauty Lady Helen Taylor in 1964, and Lord Nicholas Windsor, who arrived six years later.
However, the Duchess suffered two tragedies when it came to further pregnancies, which she revealed later left a huge mark on her.
In 1975, she was pregnant with what would have been her fourth child when she contracted German measles, and after much deliberation with medical and spiritual advisors, she sadly had to end the pregnancy due to the health risks.
Two years later, in 1977, when she was 44 years old, another tragedy struck, and her son Patrick was stillborn.
“It had the most devastating effect on me,” she later admitted. “I had no idea how devastating such a thing could be to any woman. It has made me extremely understanding of others who suffer a still-birth.”
She tried to bury herself in her work and concentrate on her royal duties as a distraction, but the grief she had been trying to push away eventually overwhelmed her. In 1979, she was admitted to hospital for nearly two months of “treatment and supervised rest”.
In 1997, nearly twenty years on from the ordeal, she candidly revealed, “I think it would be a fairly rare individual who didn’t cave in under those circumstances. It was a horrible thing to happen, and I didn’t think I gave myself time to get over it.
“It was not a good period, but once I’d come out and returned to a state of normality, I quickly realised that it does happen to a lot of people. I have never had depression since.”
In 1994, the Duchess converted to Catholicism, and two years later, found new purpose in one of the greatest passions of her life – her love of music – and stepped away from royal duties.
She began something of a secret double life, flying under the radar and working at Wansbeck Primary School in Hull part-time as a music teacher – with only the headteacher had any idea she was a member of the Royal Family.
Known simply as “Mrs Kent” to her pupils, she spent 13 years happily bringing talent and confidence out of her pupils as she taught them music, many of whom came from very poor backgrounds.
“Only the head knew who I was. The parents didn’t know, and the pupils didn’t know. No one ever noticed. There was no publicity about it at all – it just seemed to work.
“Why I don’t know, but it just did. I taught children from the youngest possible age right until the end of primary school,” the Duchess later said. I took them out into the town of Hull. I had a little choir and they sang in the hospital. A lot of the children came from single parent families and very deprived areas.
“It was very, very rewarding because even children from really tough backgrounds – the music did such wonderful things. It really did. They would get up and sing solos. I don’t remember a child ever saying they didn’t want to do their music.”
The Duchess also revealed that the late Queen totally supported her decision to take on the part-time job.
Katharine will be remembered as one of the most empathetic royals, and she officially gave up her HRH styling in 2002, focussing on the causes and charities she worked with that were close to her heart in a typically low-key fashion.
In another rare interview in 2011 with Alan Titchmarsh, the Duchess discussed her under-the-radar career, and said music was an “underrated subject” and that she believed an art course should be “one of the compulsory GCSEs”.
The headteacher of Wansbeck Primary said in response to the Duchess’s death, that she was “an inspiration to the children when she taught music here over many years. She was a dedicated teacher…with passion and showed the most amazing commitment to our school. Her kindness, compassion and talent for teaching lives on in the children she impacted during her time here.”
