The family tragedy that helped the Middletons make their millions

Kate, Pippa and James all attended £32,000-a-year Marlborough College

Duchess of Cambridge's great-grandmother set up a trust fund



Trusting: Carole and Michael Middleton were able to put their three children through private school thanks to a trust fund

It is the conundrum that has perplexed royal watchers ever since a 20-year-old Kate Middleton sashayed down the catwalk in her see-through dress and caught the eye of Prince William.



The tale of their up-and-down romance and glittering marriage are the stuff of fairy tales.

Yet there has always been one rather mysterious missing link in the story: just where did the money come from to pay for Kate’s private education and a life surrounded by the children of the rich?

All three Middleton children, Kate, Pippa and James, attended the prestigious Marlborough College where boarding fees for a single year cost more than £32,000.

Rubbing shoulders with the privileged will have added hugely to the cost of their upbringing.



And their parents’ careers as a pilot and airhostess, or their then fledgling business, Party Pieces, have never seemed to explain how they could afford the bills.

In fact the answer to the Middleton millions lies in a tale of heartbreak and loss during the First World War and is symbolised by a simple headstone that stands among the poignant rows of graves at the Rue-Petillon Military Cemetery in Fleurbaix in northern France.

This is the last resting place of Maurice Lupton, a 28-year-old captain in the 7th battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, who died on June 19, 1915, two months after going to war.

During the next two years he was followed to a soldier’s grave by his two brothers, Lionel and Fran.

For the Lupton clan, this was a tragedy: three sons cut down in the prime of life.

But their untimely deaths were to have much wider repercussions than the family could ever have anticipated.



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Expensive education: Pippa Middletonand her sister, the future Queen of England, the Duchess of Cambridge both attended the £32,000-a-year Marlborough College in Wiltshire

The Lupton brothers were Kate Middleton’s great-great uncles and it is their fate that accounts for her family’s apparent wealth – and a trust fund, established by the surviving women of the family – worth more than £3million.

It was Kate’s great-great-great grandfather Frank Lupton, who first found commercial success. Born in 1813, a century before the war, Frank was a keen businessman, with an eye for a bargain.

It was he who expanded the family firm, William Lupton and Co, buying an old cloth mill and letting it out to weavers who bought their cloth to his warehouse every Friday for him to inspect.

Gradually, he began making fancy tweeds, livery tweeds and police uniform fabrics and bought a finishing plant, which meant he was involved in every stage of the manufacturing process.

Frank and his wife Fanny had five children (their eldest son Francis was Kate’s great-great grandfather) and lived in Beechwood, a sprawling Victorian mansion in the village of Roundhay, seven miles north of Leeds. Theirs was an affluent household with six servants. They socialised with the great and good of Leeds and involved themselves in the politics of the day – their son Charles was the first Lupton to go to public school, setting a tradition which would carry right down through the family to Kate, Pippa and James.

When Frank died of heart disease at the age of 70, in 1884, he left his four sons a staggering £64,650 in his will, the equivalent of £5.7 million today. His son, Kate’s great-great grandfather Francis, was a Cambridge graduate when he inherited his share – the equivalent of nearly £1.5 million. But the money did not buy him happiness.

His wife Harriet, a vicar’s daughter, died of influenza two weeks after the birth of their fifth child, leaving him heartbroken, according to his nephew Charles Athelstane Lupton, who wrote a family history, The Lupton Family in Leeds.

‘For many years he never talked about her to the children. He rarely took holidays. It was some 30 years before he would go abroad again. And we remember what a joy such holidays were to him in his young days. He devoted himself to the business and to civic work.’

By 1914 and the start of the Great War, Francis was 65 and his five children were Fran, Maurice, Anne, Lionel and Kate’s great-grandmother Olive, who was 32. All three boys were in Territorial Army.

Maurice was the first to go to war. He joined the Leeds Rifles, became a captain in the 7th battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, the Prince of Wales’ regiment, and was shipped to the support trenches in Belgium as part of the all- territorial 49th (1st West Riding) Infantry Division.

He arrived on April 19, 1915, and died exactly two months later, at the age of only 28 – one of 2,050 members of the Leeds Rifles to be killed on active service in France and Flanders during the war.

At this distance, his letters to his family – which are published in The Next Generation, a sequel to The Lupton Family in Leeds – seem strangely naive: ‘I would not have missed coming out here for worlds,’ he wrote on April 28.

‘We have done no actual fighting yet but only moved about at very short notice, which is great fun.’ The following day, he wrote: ‘I am sitting in a little mud and wood shelter for all the world like playing Indians. Now and then we hear an occasional rifle crack or a shell going over like a wild duck, but not aimed at us, at least I don’t think so.’

Gradually, though, Maurice learned the reality of trench warfare. On June 6, he wrote: ‘Into trenches for six days. I am going to try fitting the field glasses sent by Father on to a periscope so as to see more details of the German trench line because one cannot point a telescope directly at them.

‘They are sometimes extraordinarily quick at picking off little things like periscopes.’

His final letter, written on June 15, four days before his death, is desperately poignant: ‘One afternoon the Germans suddenly started shelling our end of the trench with shrapnel.

‘By sheer mischance, one of these shells did not burst in the air but hit a sand bag wall against which our billet policeman was standing and cut off his leg a little below the knee.

‘He was a tremendously strong chap and chloroform did not seem to have any effect on him, at least not for ages, but sadly he died the next day. All the other deaths we have had in the company have been practically instantaneous, shot through the head while firing over the parapet.’

Lionel set off with his Royal Field Artillery unit around the same time as his brother and had made his way to the Front, riding in cattle trucks and marching on foot, when he found out that his brother had died.

He wrote to his sister Anne: ‘I like your letters about Maurice. They make me feel much happier.

Thanks nan!: it was the trust fund set up by her great-grandmother Olive that funded Kate¿s education, and allowed her to move in the autocratic circles that paved the way for a meeting with Prince William

‘I thought at first that it was an absolute waste him being killed so soon, before he had done anything really good in life but it is lovely to think that he is really having a nice time now.’ Lionel survived the Battle of Loos at the end of August and returned home for a week on leave, but back at the Front, he was wounded on December 1 and sent to a London hospital to recuperate.

He then travelled home for Christmas, where he found his family in mixed spirits – mourning the death of Maurice but celebrating the birth of the first child of his sister Olive and her husband Noel Middleton. The boy, Christopher, was born on Christmas Eve that year.

Lionel returned to the front in April and was killed on July 16, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. Just 24, and mentioned twice in despatches, he is buried at Bouzincourt Communal Cemetery.

In The Next Generation, his nephew Peter – Kate’s grandfather – wrote: ‘Lionel’s battery took part in seven days of continuous bombardment of German lines, which was supposed to destroy all their defences and communications. But the Germans had dug themselves in so deeply that they were not dislodged by the barrage and were able to mow down the British infantry “like ripe corn” when they attempted to advance.

‘The British guns, including Lionel’s battery, just went on firing, with occasional rests to allow the guns to cool. He was passing behind a gun pit shortly after midnight on July 16 when a German shell landed, wounding three men and killing Lionel instantly.’

Fran was still in England when he found out about the deaths of his younger brothers, so he must have felt a certain amount of trepidation when he went out to France in January 1917 with the Leeds Rifles to serve with the all-territorial 62nd (2nd West Riding) Infantry Division.

The oldest of the three brothers, he was 30, had been married for less than three years and his daughter Ruth had just started toddling when he was posted as missing after just six weeks.

His body was eventually recovered and he was buried in Bucquoy, not far from Arras.

Socially mobile: The Manor House, the home of Carole and Michael Middleton, in Bucklebury, Berkshire Old homestead: Oak Acre in Bucklebury was the family home of the Middletons before their daughter became a part of British royalty

‘Despite thorough searching at the time, no trace of his body could be found and it was thought that he might have been taken prisoner,’ reads The Next Generation.

‘But some two months later his body was found near that of the man with whom he had been on patrol. Apparently both men had been blown up by a hand grenade and killed instantly.’

It was a family tragedy too far: grief-stricken by his son’s deaths, Francis limped on for another three years before dying at home from chronic kidney failure at the age of 72.

At his funeral, the minister said Francis was ‘a member of a family which for generations has been associated with the commercial, municipal, educational and religious life of Leeds’ and that he brought ‘sunshine to the fetid slum . . .’ it was largely due to him that men, women and children can now all live in surroundings essential to health and decency.

‘We, his fellow worshippers, honour him for his simplicity, his sincerity, his integrity – for himself.’

According to Peter Middleton in The Next Generation: ‘Francis never recovered from his triple blow.

‘He never broke down. And at times he could be induced to talk about his sons and his wife, too. But the light had gone out of his life.’

The three boys were survived by two siblings, Kate’s great-grandmother Olive and her spinster sister Anne. They shared a £70,538 inheritance, the equivalent of £2.65 million today, making them very wealthy women.

Anne never married. She lived in Chelsea with the author and headmistress Enid Moberly Bell and was awarded an MBE for her work to improve housing conditions for the disadvantaged.

She was instrumental in creating the Quarry Hill estate in inner-city Leeds, the country’s largest municipal housing scheme, which opened in 1938 to replace the back-to-back housing of the Victorian era, a cause that had been close to her father’s heart. Anne died in 1967.