For 13 years, she was known simply as Mrs Kent, a music teacher at a primary school in the Yorkshire town of Hull. It wasn’t until much later that staff and pupils learned that the popular teacher was in fact the Duchess of Kent, a member of the royal family.
Her secret teaching stint was just one remarkable phase of an unconventional – and at times very challenging – life. When the duchess died last week aged 92, tributes poured in for a woman who wasn’t a traditional royal but still dedicated her life to helping others, and was respected for her warmth and kindness.
“The children love working with her,” said the school’s headteacher when her identity was revealed.
“They say she never gets cross – she always looks for the positive.”
Royal beginnings
Katharine Worsley was born into an aristocratic Yorkshire family. Her father was a wealthy landowner and her mother was the granddaughter of the founder of the giant global chemical company ICI. A talented musician who could play any song she heard by ear, she was devastated when she failed to get into the Royal Academy of Music. She briefly worked as a kindergarten teacher and in a children’s home.
Aged 23, she met the Queen’s cousin, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who was an army officer and three years her junior. They married five years later and had three children – George, Earl of St Andrews, now 63, Lady Helen Taylor, 61, and Lord Nicholas Windsor, 55. Tragedy struck in 1975 when a pregnant Katharine contracted rubella and was advised by her doctors to have an abortion. Two years later, another son named Patrick was stillborn.
Turning heartbreak into humanitarian work
She said, “It had the most devastating effect on me. I suffered from acute depression for a while. It was a horrible thing to happen.”
A year after losing Patrick, Katharine was hospitalised for seven weeks with “nervous strain” and later said she was not ashamed of needing help during what was an “awful” time. When Edward, now 89, left the army and became a full-time working royal, Katharine joined him on many of his engagements and carried out thousands of her own, including travelling the world on behalf of Unicef. She was known for both her glamour and her compassion – as well as being patron of the Samaritans, she was also a volunteer, answering phone calls from people going through tough times.
Challenges, change and a lasting legacy
She had more tough times of her own, including suffering from coeliac disease and the debilitating Epstein-Barr virus. Her marriage had its ups and downs – she and Edward led separate lives. In 1994, Katharine converted to Catholicism, the first member of the royal family to be part of the church in 300 years. She began to withdraw from public life from 1996 and in 2002 asked the Queen to rescind her HRH status. But she continued her service to others, including setting up a foundation that helps young people from low-income backgrounds work towards a career in music.
A life true to herself until the end
Unwell in recent years, she didn’t attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral or the King’s coronation and was last seen in public in October, in a wheelchair. The tributes to her have painted a picture of a woman who was true to herself and what mattered to her, despite marrying into the world’s most famous family.
“Who you marry doesn’t change you,” she once said.
“I remained the same person.”
