Middletons Family

In the 30 years that they have lived in the area, they have become familiar faces at village shows, local pubs and shops, earning the almost impenetrable loyalty of those who know them.


“Carole and Michael are a couple whose only crime has been to start their own business and do well for themselves and their children,” said one long-standing friend. “The fact that they raised a daughter who won the heart of Prince William should be to their credit, but I’m afraid that a lot of people are still obsessed by class in this country, and some of them will never forgive the Middletons for being middle-class.”

Michael Middleton, 61, the Leeds-born son of an airline pilot, was working as an air steward for British Airways when he met his future wife Carole Goldsmith, now 55, in the mid-1970s.

Miss Goldsmith, a builder’s daughter from Southall, Middlesex, was an air stewardess for the same airline.

In 1979, after Mr Middleton was promoted to the role of flight dispatcher for BA at Heathrow, where he kept track of the airline’s fleet on the ground, the couple bought a modest Victorian semi in Bradfield Southend, a village near Reading, and married in 1980.

It was from there that they started their Party Pieces children’s partyware business in 1987, which became a huge success and enabled the couple to move to a modern five-bedroomed house, set behind trees in the neighbouring village of Bucklebury, in 1995.

It also enabled them to send their three children, Kate, Pippa and James, to Marlborough College in Wiltshire.

In the past year Kate’s younger siblings have proved to be rather less publicity-shy than their parents.

Pippa, 27, works part-time in marketing and PR for Table Talk, an events catering company, and devotes the rest of her working week to The Party Times, an online magazine and offshoot of the family business. In October she rode roughshod over the family’s vow of silence by inviting The Sunday Times to the local pub to discuss the venture (with her mother’s approval) while stopping short of saying anything at all revealing.

James, 23, dropped out of his English degree course at Edinburgh University to start his own cake-making company, another spin-off from his parents’ firm. Last year he attracted criticism for publicising his venture by appearing in Hello! magazine, baking 21 cakes to celebrate the publication’s 21st birthday.