Saturday, February 26, 2011
10:49 AM
By Katie Nicholl
So in love: They had spent the summer apart but look closer than ever at this university gala dinner in October 2004
The body language speaks of intimacy and desire. These exclusive and previously unseen photographs show two young lovers, comfortable in their own skins and with each other.
They hold each other close, before laughingly pulling apart. Then the man twirls his partner, his left hand resting on her slender waist with practised ease. Her little black dress may be conservative but there is no hiding her allure: she is toned and lithe, and there is an unmistakable sparkle in her eye.
He is classically handsome. He wears his dark suit well, looks relaxed, and is clearly as besotted by his consort as she by him. The spark between them is tangible.
Whatever ups and downs they may have had, or may still lie ahead, at this dance at St Andrews University in 2004, they are a couple of whom envious onlookers will say: ‘They look great together. They are great together.’
The Prettiest Girl At 'Sally's'
By the end of freshers’ week, Kate Middleton had been crowned the prettiest girl at Sally’s, the nickname for St Salvator’s Hall, her hall of residence at St Andrews.
And she had already caught the eye of fellow student Prince William. He had noticed her as soon as he arrived – it was hard not to. It was September 2001 and William was beginning a four-year history of art course.
He settled in quickly at Sally’s and although the town’s 16,000 residents were initially inquisitive following his arrival, they soon left him alone. William wanted to be treated the same as everyone else, and at St Andrews he was.
The media had agreed with Buckingham Palace to leave the Prince in peace after he gave a brief interview and attended a photocall on the day of his arrival. He could walk down the street without being bothered and shop at the local Tesco.
William soon set about making friends. Sally’s, one of the university’s 11 halls of residence, has both male and female living quarters. As he bounded down the stairs carrying his various books and folders, William would often bump into the same brunette, who happened to be on the same course.
Kate was shy and quieter than the other girls, which William liked, and he looked forward to their meetings. Often Kate would go for a run before breakfast and arrive at the dining hall just before staff stopped serving.
Within weeks William was bold enough to invite her to join him. Every morning he and his friends sat in the same place, next to the head table, where a crimson throne and 18 seats were reserved for wardens and deans.
The impressive ground-floor dining hall contained beautiful stained-glass windows and was decorated with oil paintings of philosophers from the Scottish Enlightenment. A cooked breakfast was always available for the students to eat but, health-conscious like his father, William would choose muesli and fruit – as did Kate.
The pair quickly discovered they had plenty in common: Kate was a country girl who loved playing sports and was a keen swimmer, like William. She was also a good skier and, just like William, had enjoyed a gap-year travelling around the world before going to St Andrews.
Kate had spent several months in Florence, and she chatted with William about the Renaissance artists they would soon be studying and the courses they planned to take. She also got along well with William’s friends Fergus Boyd, a former classmate of the Prince at Eton, and Olli Chadwick-Healey.
They were part of a group known as the Sally’s boys, which also included Ali Coutts-Wood, Graham Booth, Charlie Nelson and Oli Baker, who would later share a house with William and Kate.
If William was ever forced to miss a lecture, Kate would take notes for him, and at the end of the day they would catch up over a drink in the Common Room, with its floor-to-ceiling Georgian windows. When it came to socialising, William kept a low profile. He joined the water-polo team and would swim most mornings with Kate at the luxury Old Course Hotel in St Andrews. He also cycled along the seafront and, in the evening, occasionally dropped into the student union for a game of pool.
The truth was that William was developing a reputation for being aloof and even a touch boring. The glamorous undergraduates who spent thousands on new wardrobes and drinking in the town’s fashionable bars hoping to happen upon the Prince were disappointed.
The student with a heavenly derriere
During his first term, William started dating Carley Massy-Birch, an English language and creative-writing student. William was often invited to supper at Carley’s home, where he would step over her muddy Hunter Wellington boots in the hallway.
Carley was also a country girl, which appealed to William – he had, of course, been brought up at Highgrove in the Gloucestershire countryside. ‘I’m a real country bumpkin,’ Carley told me. ‘I think that was why we had a connection. William was in the year below me, and we just happened to meet through the general St Andrews melee.
‘It’s such a small place that it was impossible not to bump into William, and after a while there was nothing weird about seeing him around. We got on well, but I think we would have got on well even if nothing had been going on romantically. It was very much a university thing, just a regular university romance.’
They discussed literature, and Carley told William all about her home life in Devon. Sometimes they would enjoy pints of cider at The Castle pub in North Street, and play board games.
‘There wasn’t really a club at St Andrews so we tended to go to pubs and bars, and there was always a good dinner party going on,’ recalled Carley. Although Kate had been voted the prettiest girl at St Salvator’s, Carley’s derriere was voted the best at St Andrews. ‘We would joke that Carley’s bottom had been sculpted by the gods,’ recalled one of her friends. William was very taken with her, which was completely understandable.
Unlike the hordes of made-up, pashmina-clad undergraduates who devoted their time to stalking William, Carley was happy to stay in and cook for him, and their romance was so beneath the radar that it was reported only years after they both graduated.
Their affair was to be short-lived, however, and ended somewhat stickily when Carley told William he had to make a decision between her and Arabella Musgrave, a young woman hundreds of miles away who seemed to be proving something of a distraction.
It was during the summer of 2001, before William started at St Andrews, that Arabella caught his eye. She was the 18-year-old daughter of Major Nicholas Musgrave, who managed the Cirencester Park Polo Club, and the pair had known each other since childhood.
That summer they met again at a house party hosted by the van Cutsem family, long-standing friends of the Prince of Wales. As she walked in, William did a double-take. They danced and drank into the early hours, and when Arabella said goodnight to the guests, the Prince quietly slipped out of the room to follow her. It was the beginning of a passionate romance, and the two spent as much time together that summer as possible.
But by September, when William left for his first year at St Andrews, he and Arabella had already made the mutual decision to put their relationship on hold.
William would be meeting new people at the university, and Arabella could not expect him to wait for her. However, it wasn’t long before William became bored in Scotland. He missed his friends and going to his favourite London nightclubs.
The advantage of St Andrews being so small was that he was well protected, but the town could be claustrophobic. He also missed Arabella. Despite his decision to cool things with her, he took comfort from the fact that she was back at home, and when he returned to Highgrove for weekends, they would meet.
The ‘wobble’ in his first term
Prince Charles knew he had a crisis on his hands when William returned home at Christmas and announced he did not want to go back to university for his second term. He complained that he was not enjoying the courses and that St Andrews was too far away.
Charles listened patiently. He knew William could be temperamental, and that the situation was delicate. Presumably, William could leave if he was miserable, but Charles suggested he give it another term.
The main problem appeared to be that William had no interest in his course and was finding the workload challenging. ‘It was really no different from what many first-year students go through,’ Prince Charles’s former private secretary Mark Bolland recalled. ‘We approached the whole thing as a wobble which was entirely normal.’
After frank discussions with college dons, a deal was struck. ‘It would have been a public relations disaster for St Andrews if he had left after one term, and we worked very hard to keep him,’ said Andrew Neil, the university’s former rector. ‘We gave him pastoral care, and when he suggested switching to geography we made sure there were no roadblocks.
‘By the time William came back for the second term, he had settled in. He made a lot of friends and having met him quite a few times, I think he was happy in the town. William was protected by his fellow students, who formed a circle around him and looked out for him.
‘He got the blues, which happens. We have a lot of public school boys and girls who get up here, and by November, when the weather gets grey and cold, wish they were back home. William was a long way from home.’
William later admitted: ‘I don’t think I was homesick – I was more daunted. My father was very understanding and realised I had the same problem as he probably had. We chatted a lot and in the end we both realised – I definitely realised – that I had to come back.’ Returning to Scotland, William was much happier with his switch to geography.
'Wow,’ he gasped. ‘Kate looks hot!’
It was March 27, 2002, the night of the annual Don’t Walk charity fashion show at the five-star St Andrews Bay Hotel, and William had paid £200 for a front-row ticket. As Kate shimmied down the catwalk wearing black underwear and a daring, see-through dress, William turned to his close friend Fergus Boyd and whispered: ‘Wow, Kate’s hot!’
Another of the models that night recalled: ‘Kate was great on the catwalk. She and everyone, including William, knew it.’
At a party after the show, William decided to make his move. As the music throbbed and beautiful young things sat sipping home-made cocktails, William and Kate were huddled in a quiet corner, deep in conversation.
Sanctuary: Balgove House, a cottage shared by William and Kate while at university
As they clinked their glasses to toast Kate’s success, William leaned in to kiss her. It was Kate who pulled away, momentarily stunned that he had been so bold in a room full of strangers.
At the time she was dating Rupert Finch, a fourth-year student, but William didn’t seem to care. ‘It was clear to us that William was smitten with Kate,’ remembered one of their friends who was at the party and who witnessed the moment. ‘He actually told her she was a knockout that night, which caused her to blush. There was definitely chemistry between them, and Kate had really made an impression on William.
‘She played it very cool, and at one point when William seemed to lean in to kiss her, she pulled away. She didn’t want to give off the wrong impression or make it too easy for Will.’
After her impressive debut on the catwalk, things would never be quite the same between William and Kate.
William later insisted in an interview on his 21st birthday, June 21, 2003, that he was single, but the truth was that he had fallen for his pretty friend.
One of William’s conditions for staying at St Andrews was that he would be allowed to move out of his halls of residence after his first year and share a flat with friends.
So in September 2002, at the start of his second year, William moved to 13a Hope Street in the centre of town. It was a luxury no Prince before him had enjoyed and exactly the normality he craved.
There were the necessary security issues to consider, of course: the property was fitted with bullet-proof windows, a bomb-proof front door and state-of-the-art laser security system that came with a thick instruction manual.
The floor-to-ceiling windows were protected with reinforced, full-length shutters.
William’s room was the biggest and it looked out on to an overgrown private garden and the back of the student union building in Market Street.
The Prince had decided to move in with Kate, Fergus Boyd and another student, Olivia Bleasdale. They each paid £100 a week in rent for the two-storey property and shared all the cleaning duties.
‘They did throw dinner parties and took turns to go shopping for groceries,’ one of their friends recalled.
‘William was part of the dinner-party brigade, and being seen in Tesco was all part of it. It was a bit of a meeting place for the great and the good. Fergus would get dressed to the nines and only ever wore different shades of white.
'William was always with him, so it was not uncommon for girls to stake out Tesco in the hope of seeing them.’
William and Kate were determined to keep their fledgling romance quiet, and behind the closed doors of Hope Street they could. Their bedrooms were on separate landings, but by this stage it was nothing more than pretence.
William and Kate had fallen in love and were enjoying a conventional university romance, albeit one involving elaborate cover-ups and decoys.
In an effort to keep their relationship below the radar for as long as possible, they would leave the house at different times and arrive at dinner parties separately, and made a pact never to hold hands in public.
By the end of their second year the relationship was a close one. When William attended Kate’s belated 21st birthday party in June 2003 at her family home in Bucklebury, Berkshire, the glance she threw him across the room when he walked into the Twenties-themed party was more than platonic.
But then at William’s own 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle later that month, it seemed as though Kate was barely registering with William – he seemed preoccupied with a very pretty girl named Jecca Craig.
‘Mock engagement’ that never was
William had first met Jecca, the daughter of British conservationist Ian Craig and his wife Jane, in 1998 in Kenya during a school holiday. The Prince had fallen in love with Africa and returned during his gap year to spend several weeks learning about conservation at the Craigs’ 55,000-acre game preserve, situated in the beautiful Lewa Downs in the foothills of Mount Kenya.
William had adored every minute of it and years later would get involved with the Tusk Trust, a conservation charity that finances some of Lewa’s activities. He is now a patron of the charity. Ian Craig recalled: ‘William just loves Africa, that’s clear. He did everything from rhino-spotting to anti-poaching patrols to checking fences. He’s a great boy.’
It was not long before rumours were circulating among their friends that something was going on between William and Jecca. He had apparently had a secret crush on Jecca since the first time he met her. She was beautiful, with long blonde hair, deep-blue eyes and legs like a gazelle.
But when it was reported in British newspapers that the two had staged a mock engagement ceremony to pledge their love to each other before William returned to England, the Prince instructed his aides to deny this had ever happened.
It was a rare move – usually the Palace never comments on the private lives of William or his brother Harry – but on this occasion, William wanted the story denied. ‘There’s been a lot of speculation about every single girl I’m with, and it actually does quite irritate me after a while, more so because it’s a complete pain for the girls,’ he said.
The tale had rattled him and embarrassed Jecca, who at the time was dating Edinburgh University undergraduate Henry Ropner, a former Etonian and a friend of William. The denial did little to quash the rumours of a romance, however, and as Kate raised her champagne flute to toast the birthday Prince at his aptly themed Out Of Africa celebration, it was Jecca who had pride of place next to William at the head table.
But by the end of the summer, the relationship with Kate seemed back on track. It soon became an open secret at St Andrews, and William and Kate were desperate for some privacy.
While Fergus decided to stay on at Hope Street, William and Kate chose to move to Balgove House at Strathtyrum, a sprawling private estate just outside St Andrews. The estate is owned by wealthy landowner Henry Cheape, a distant cousin of the Prince and a close friend of the Royal Family.
The impressive four-bedroom cottage was far more private than Hope Street. Unmarked police cars patrolled the estate and William’s protection officers lived in the assorted outbuildings. As with all his residences, the cottage had been made secure for the Prince, complete with bomb-proof doors and windows. William and Kate intended to entertain frequently: he installed a champagne fridge as soon as they moved in, while Kate set about dressing the kitchen windows with pretty red-and-white gingham curtains.
The couple enjoyed long, romantic walks, and when it was warm enough, they would pack a picnic hamper and spend pleasant afternoons stretched out on a blanket, sharing a bottle of chilled white wine. They were blissful days, made all the more romantic by the fact that the Press was still unaware of their relationship. But the secret would soon be out . . .
Bottles of wine and a roaring log fire
Against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains in the Swiss Alps, William put his arm around Kate. Wearing dark glasses and wrapped up against the cold in their salopettes and ski jackets, they waited in line for a ski lift.
As the T-bar arrived, William helped Kate on, and they slowly made their way up the mountainside, ski poles in their hands.
The photo of William gazing lovingly at Kate that was published in The Sun on April 1, 2004, was no April Fools’ joke. The rumours, which had been around for months, were confirmed: William and Kate were definitely more than just friends.
The first picture: Skiing together at Klosters in April 2004, William looks lovingly towards Kate and proves they are definitely a couple
‘If I fancy a girl and she fancies me back, which is rare, I ask her out. But at the same time I don’t want to put them in an awkward situation, because a lot of people don’t understand what comes with knowing me, for one – and secondly, if they were my girlfriend, the excitement it would probably cause,’ William had remarked in that 21st birthday interview in June 2003.
He was right about the excitement. He had chosen to go to Klosters, where the Royal Family are photographed skiing every year, and he had made no attempt to disguise his affection for Kate.
They were with a group of friends that included Harry Legge-Bourke, the brother of his former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, Guy Pelly, William van Cutsem and his girlfriend Katie James. The Palace was furious and accused The Sun of breaching the embargo that protected Prince William during his university years. But the newspaper had decided that this was a scoop just too good to turn down, running the story under the headline Finally . . . Wills Gets A Girl.
The truth was, William had been dating Kate for many months. But now the floodgates had opened, and the world wanted to know everything about this shy, pretty and unassuming girl.
While some at the Palace had dismissed Kate as not being blue-blooded enough for the Prince (her parents Michael and Carole own an online party-equipment company), she had other qualities that were far more important to William.
She was polite to the photographers who now pursued her, and she quickly adopted the Royal rule of never speaking out.
She also insisted that her family never discuss her relationship with William. As Princess Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson noted: ‘We know very little about her and probably never will, providing they do their job right.
Historically a degree of mystery about Royalty has been an advantage – we project on to them what we want.’
According to one of her friends at St Andrews, Kate remained level-headed during the early months of their courtship. ‘She never got above her station, and even though she had secured the most sought-after boy at St Andrews, she never gloated. Kate was actually quite insecure about her looks and never considered herself pretty. She was very sweet and very shy.’
Like Diana, Kate quickly had to adapt to being in the spotlight, but her transition into Royal life was much smoother – unlike Diana, Kate enjoyed being at Highgrove, Balmoral and Sandringham, where she would later accompany William on grouse and pheasant shoots. She had practised with William on the Strathtyrum estate, where they were allowed to shoot birds for food as part of their rental agreement.
In the same way that Charles had been given the use of Wood Farm at Sandringham while he was a student at Cambridge, the Queen allowed William to use a cottage called Tam-na-Ghar at Balmoral as a getaway. Tucked away in the remote countryside, the 120-year-old cottage underwent a £150,000 renovation, complete with a bath big enough for two.
After their final lecture on Fridays, William and Kate would drive to Balmoral from St Andrews in William’s black Volkswagen Golf, followed by his protection officers. Like William, Kate loved walking across the moors and strolling by the River Dee. In the evenings they would cook a meal, share a bottle of red wine and keep warm in front of a roaring log fire.
Sometimes they were joined by friends from St Andrews, or Kate’s siblings Pippa and James – whose trophy stag heads line the walls of the Middleton family house – would be invited for a weekend’s shoot. They would all compete to bag the most birds.
A boozy swim round the moat
It was summer 2004 when William and Kate’s love affair underwent its first serious test. With one year to go before they both graduated, the 22-year-old Prince needed some space – he told several of his friends at university he was feeling ‘claustrophobic’.
Until now, both William and Kate had chosen not to discuss what would happen after they finished at St Andrews, but with their finals looming, it was an issue that needed addressing.
William decided that a holiday would provide him with some thinking time and planned a boys-only sailing trip to Greece with Guy Pelly and other friends, to take place as soon as they left college for the summer.
Kate’s relationship with Guy was turbulent – she considered him immature and potentially troublesome. It was Guy who used to buy William pornographic magazines when they were teenagers, and she had heard all about their drink-fuelled weekends at Highgrove.
There was also a rumour among their friends that after a night of heavy drinking at Club H – the basement den with a bar that William had set up with his brother Harry at Highgrove – William and Guy had covered one of their girlfriends in chocolate ice cream, which they then proceeded to lick off.
Then there was the occasion when Guy challenged William to a midnight swim at the 21st birthday party of their friend James Tollemache at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk.
Both William and Guy had been drinking heavily, but that did not stop them stripping down to their boxer shorts, diving in and swimming a lap in the murky moat.
It seemed that wherever there was trouble, Guy was not far away, and Kate was wary of him. She was annoyed, if not surprised, when she found out that Guy had arranged for an all-female crew for the yacht in Greece. So she packed her bags and headed home to Berkshire to spend the summer with her family.
The 'other' women: William flew to the US to spend time with Anna Sloan, left, in 2004 and he was a visitor to the Chelsea home of Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, although she rejected his advances
A number of things had caused her to question William’s commitment, although she had not raised them with him yet. One was his friendship with an American heiress named Anna Sloan, whom he had met through mutual friends at Edinburgh University, where Anna was studying.
Anna had lost her father, businessman George Sloan, in a tragic shooting accident on the family’s 360-acre estate in Nashville, Tennessee, and she and William had bonded over the loss of one of their parents.
When William accepted an invitation from Anna to accompany her and a group of friends to Tennessee for a holiday before he went to Greece, it hurt Kate deeply. She suspected William might have feelings for the 22-year-old. However, according to her friends, Anna was not romantically interested in William.
And then there was William’s budding relationship with another stunning heiress, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. While Kate was girl-next-door pretty, Isabella had cover-girl looks, a title and a stately pile to boot. That summer William visited the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe family home in Chelsea to
see her. Isabella, daughter of banking heiress Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, was single at the time. Sadly for William, she had no aspirations to date him and, despite his amorous advances, declared that she was not interested.
Meanwhile, Kate had accepted an invitation to spend a fortnight at Fergus Boyd’s family holiday home in the Dordogne with some friends from St Andrews. Among the group were Kate’s friends Olivia Bleasdale and Ginny Fraser. From her downcast mood, Kate’s friends soon guessed that something was wrong, and one evening she confided to them that she and William were taking a break from each other.
‘She got quite drunk on white wine and really let her guard down,’ recalled one of the group. ‘She was debating whether or not she should text or call him. She said how sad she was and how much she was missing William, but she never mentioned it after that.’
I had reported the news of their separation that summer in The Mail on Sunday, and tellingly there was no denial from Clarence House. Privately, William again complained to friends that he was feeling claustrophobic and was already thinking ahead to the summer after graduation, when he was planning to return to Kenya to see Jecca Craig – another fly in the ointment as far as Kate was concerned.
‘The last thing William wants is a high-profile split in the crucial months leading up to his finals,’ I was told at the time by a source close to William. On the advice of her mother Carole, Kate gave William some breathing space.
Once back at university it was made all the harder because they were living together, but instead of spending weekends in St Andrews or at Balmoral, Kate would return home to be with her parents at their home in Berkshire.
It was obviously the break that William needed, and by the autumn they were back together – a fact confirmed at Christmas. Although Kate had a condition: word had reached her of William’s visits to Isabella, and she insisted that William was not to contact her again.
With their finals looming in May, the pair agreed to take things slowly. Kate had stayed away from Edward van Cutsem’s wedding to the Duke of Westminster’s daughter Lady Tamara Grosvenor in November 2004, but she happily accepted an invitation to Prince Charles’s 56th birthday party at Highgrove later that month.
The following March, Prince Charles invited her to Klosters for his pre-wedding holiday. Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were to be married on April 9, 2005, and the Prince wanted one last skiing holiday with his sons first. It had really been intended as a boys-only trip, but Kate was not left out.
She was photographed taking a gondola up the slopes with Charles and enjoying lunch with the Princes and some of their friends.
At Charles’s wedding, a civil ceremony in Windsor, William was a witness together with Camilla’s son Tom, and had the added responsibility of looking after the wedding rings. But since she and William were not yet engaged, Kate was not invited to the intimate family wedding itself.
Camilla was now part of the Royal Family, and when William graduated on June 23, 2005, she was there with Charles, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. William and Kate had dreaded and looked forward to the day in equal measure.
They had enjoyed one last party before their finals and, in keeping with tradition, attended the annual May Ball. Uncharacteristically, Kate drank so much that Fergus Boyd had to carry her out before the night ended. Now, as William and Kate walked into Younger Hall for the graduation ceremony, they exchanged a smile and took their seats.
The Queen smiled broadly as William knelt before the university Chancellor’s wooden pulpit to collect his parchment. Minutes later Kate was called to the stage as Catherine Middleton.
When it came to the end of the ceremony, the words of Vice-Chancellor Dr Brian Lang must have seemed particularly poignant. ‘You will have made lifelong friends,’ he told graduates. ‘You may have met your husband or wife. Our title as the top matchmaking university in Britain signifies so much that is good about St Andrews, so we rely on you to go forth and multiply.’
Following graduation, William travelled to New Zealand, where he represented the Queen at events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and spent time with the touring British and Irish Lions rugby team. Then he visited Jecca Craig in Kenya, but this time he took Kate with him. He wanted her to experience the wild beauty of the country and reassure her that she had no cause to worry about Jecca.
William whisked Kate off for a romantic holiday during which they stayed at the £1,500-a-night Masai-owned Il Ngwesi Lodge in the Mukogodo Hills of central Kenya. During the day William worked on the Craig family’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. In the evenings he and Kate would sip cocktails and dine alfresco. The post-graduation holiday had been a blissful fortnight.
In the New Year, which William and Kate had seen in together at a cottage on the Sandringham estate, it was William’s turn to prove he could rise to the challenge of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where his brother Harry was already in his seventh month.
Knowing he would not see Kate for more than a month, William had taken Harry’s advice and whisked her off on yet another holiday to Klosters following the New Year celebrations.
Just two years earlier the couple’s romance had been revealed on these slopes as William put his arm around Kate in an unthinking show of intimacy. This time, in spite of the cameras, there was no holding back. Standing together in the deep powder snow, William pulled Kate towards him and kissed her.
William had yet to pop the question, but as far as Royal insiders and his inner circle were concerned, it was only a matter of time. In Kate Middleton, Prince William had found a potential bride.
Before he headed to Sandhurst, Kate had arranged a farewell drinks party for William at Clarence House and had been dreading the moment they would have to say goodbye.
She wanted to make sure they could at least celebrate before he left for Sandhurst.
The Prince arrived to begin his Army officer training on January 8, 2006, accompanied by his father and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, his private secretary. After being introduced to Major-General Andrew Ritchie, William became a member of Blenheim Company, bade farewell to his father and was shown to his room overlooking Old College, his home for the next 44 weeks.
PSST... Kate was given a security pass to Clarence House in summer 2007 - but did not meet the Queen until Peter Phillips’s wedding in May 2008
PSST... Kate and sister Pippa were once dubbed the Wisteria Sisters, because they were ‘decorative and fragrant with a ferocious ability to climb’
PSST... Files of suitable brides for William – compiled as protocol by Palace aides - will now be archived. As a commoner, Kate Middleton was never included
PSST... Kate reportedly turned down £1million to appear on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! when she and William briefly separated in 2007
Source:Dailymail
So in love: They had spent the summer apart but look closer than ever at this university gala dinner in October 2004
The body language speaks of intimacy and desire. These exclusive and previously unseen photographs show two young lovers, comfortable in their own skins and with each other.
They hold each other close, before laughingly pulling apart. Then the man twirls his partner, his left hand resting on her slender waist with practised ease. Her little black dress may be conservative but there is no hiding her allure: she is toned and lithe, and there is an unmistakable sparkle in her eye.
He is classically handsome. He wears his dark suit well, looks relaxed, and is clearly as besotted by his consort as she by him. The spark between them is tangible.
Whatever ups and downs they may have had, or may still lie ahead, at this dance at St Andrews University in 2004, they are a couple of whom envious onlookers will say: ‘They look great together. They are great together.’
The Prettiest Girl At 'Sally's'
By the end of freshers’ week, Kate Middleton had been crowned the prettiest girl at Sally’s, the nickname for St Salvator’s Hall, her hall of residence at St Andrews.
And she had already caught the eye of fellow student Prince William. He had noticed her as soon as he arrived – it was hard not to. It was September 2001 and William was beginning a four-year history of art course.
He settled in quickly at Sally’s and although the town’s 16,000 residents were initially inquisitive following his arrival, they soon left him alone. William wanted to be treated the same as everyone else, and at St Andrews he was.
The media had agreed with Buckingham Palace to leave the Prince in peace after he gave a brief interview and attended a photocall on the day of his arrival. He could walk down the street without being bothered and shop at the local Tesco.
William soon set about making friends. Sally’s, one of the university’s 11 halls of residence, has both male and female living quarters. As he bounded down the stairs carrying his various books and folders, William would often bump into the same brunette, who happened to be on the same course.
Kate was shy and quieter than the other girls, which William liked, and he looked forward to their meetings. Often Kate would go for a run before breakfast and arrive at the dining hall just before staff stopped serving.
Within weeks William was bold enough to invite her to join him. Every morning he and his friends sat in the same place, next to the head table, where a crimson throne and 18 seats were reserved for wardens and deans.
The impressive ground-floor dining hall contained beautiful stained-glass windows and was decorated with oil paintings of philosophers from the Scottish Enlightenment. A cooked breakfast was always available for the students to eat but, health-conscious like his father, William would choose muesli and fruit – as did Kate.
The pair quickly discovered they had plenty in common: Kate was a country girl who loved playing sports and was a keen swimmer, like William. She was also a good skier and, just like William, had enjoyed a gap-year travelling around the world before going to St Andrews.
Kate had spent several months in Florence, and she chatted with William about the Renaissance artists they would soon be studying and the courses they planned to take. She also got along well with William’s friends Fergus Boyd, a former classmate of the Prince at Eton, and Olli Chadwick-Healey.
They were part of a group known as the Sally’s boys, which also included Ali Coutts-Wood, Graham Booth, Charlie Nelson and Oli Baker, who would later share a house with William and Kate.
If William was ever forced to miss a lecture, Kate would take notes for him, and at the end of the day they would catch up over a drink in the Common Room, with its floor-to-ceiling Georgian windows. When it came to socialising, William kept a low profile. He joined the water-polo team and would swim most mornings with Kate at the luxury Old Course Hotel in St Andrews. He also cycled along the seafront and, in the evening, occasionally dropped into the student union for a game of pool.
The truth was that William was developing a reputation for being aloof and even a touch boring. The glamorous undergraduates who spent thousands on new wardrobes and drinking in the town’s fashionable bars hoping to happen upon the Prince were disappointed.
The student with a heavenly derriere
During his first term, William started dating Carley Massy-Birch, an English language and creative-writing student. William was often invited to supper at Carley’s home, where he would step over her muddy Hunter Wellington boots in the hallway.
Carley was also a country girl, which appealed to William – he had, of course, been brought up at Highgrove in the Gloucestershire countryside. ‘I’m a real country bumpkin,’ Carley told me. ‘I think that was why we had a connection. William was in the year below me, and we just happened to meet through the general St Andrews melee.
‘It’s such a small place that it was impossible not to bump into William, and after a while there was nothing weird about seeing him around. We got on well, but I think we would have got on well even if nothing had been going on romantically. It was very much a university thing, just a regular university romance.’
They discussed literature, and Carley told William all about her home life in Devon. Sometimes they would enjoy pints of cider at The Castle pub in North Street, and play board games.
‘There wasn’t really a club at St Andrews so we tended to go to pubs and bars, and there was always a good dinner party going on,’ recalled Carley. Although Kate had been voted the prettiest girl at St Salvator’s, Carley’s derriere was voted the best at St Andrews. ‘We would joke that Carley’s bottom had been sculpted by the gods,’ recalled one of her friends. William was very taken with her, which was completely understandable.
Unlike the hordes of made-up, pashmina-clad undergraduates who devoted their time to stalking William, Carley was happy to stay in and cook for him, and their romance was so beneath the radar that it was reported only years after they both graduated.
Their affair was to be short-lived, however, and ended somewhat stickily when Carley told William he had to make a decision between her and Arabella Musgrave, a young woman hundreds of miles away who seemed to be proving something of a distraction.
It was during the summer of 2001, before William started at St Andrews, that Arabella caught his eye. She was the 18-year-old daughter of Major Nicholas Musgrave, who managed the Cirencester Park Polo Club, and the pair had known each other since childhood.
That summer they met again at a house party hosted by the van Cutsem family, long-standing friends of the Prince of Wales. As she walked in, William did a double-take. They danced and drank into the early hours, and when Arabella said goodnight to the guests, the Prince quietly slipped out of the room to follow her. It was the beginning of a passionate romance, and the two spent as much time together that summer as possible.
But by September, when William left for his first year at St Andrews, he and Arabella had already made the mutual decision to put their relationship on hold.
William would be meeting new people at the university, and Arabella could not expect him to wait for her. However, it wasn’t long before William became bored in Scotland. He missed his friends and going to his favourite London nightclubs.
The advantage of St Andrews being so small was that he was well protected, but the town could be claustrophobic. He also missed Arabella. Despite his decision to cool things with her, he took comfort from the fact that she was back at home, and when he returned to Highgrove for weekends, they would meet.
The ‘wobble’ in his first term
Prince Charles knew he had a crisis on his hands when William returned home at Christmas and announced he did not want to go back to university for his second term. He complained that he was not enjoying the courses and that St Andrews was too far away.
Charles listened patiently. He knew William could be temperamental, and that the situation was delicate. Presumably, William could leave if he was miserable, but Charles suggested he give it another term.
The main problem appeared to be that William had no interest in his course and was finding the workload challenging. ‘It was really no different from what many first-year students go through,’ Prince Charles’s former private secretary Mark Bolland recalled. ‘We approached the whole thing as a wobble which was entirely normal.’
After frank discussions with college dons, a deal was struck. ‘It would have been a public relations disaster for St Andrews if he had left after one term, and we worked very hard to keep him,’ said Andrew Neil, the university’s former rector. ‘We gave him pastoral care, and when he suggested switching to geography we made sure there were no roadblocks.
‘By the time William came back for the second term, he had settled in. He made a lot of friends and having met him quite a few times, I think he was happy in the town. William was protected by his fellow students, who formed a circle around him and looked out for him.
‘He got the blues, which happens. We have a lot of public school boys and girls who get up here, and by November, when the weather gets grey and cold, wish they were back home. William was a long way from home.’
William later admitted: ‘I don’t think I was homesick – I was more daunted. My father was very understanding and realised I had the same problem as he probably had. We chatted a lot and in the end we both realised – I definitely realised – that I had to come back.’ Returning to Scotland, William was much happier with his switch to geography.
'Wow,’ he gasped. ‘Kate looks hot!’
It was March 27, 2002, the night of the annual Don’t Walk charity fashion show at the five-star St Andrews Bay Hotel, and William had paid £200 for a front-row ticket. As Kate shimmied down the catwalk wearing black underwear and a daring, see-through dress, William turned to his close friend Fergus Boyd and whispered: ‘Wow, Kate’s hot!’
Another of the models that night recalled: ‘Kate was great on the catwalk. She and everyone, including William, knew it.’
At a party after the show, William decided to make his move. As the music throbbed and beautiful young things sat sipping home-made cocktails, William and Kate were huddled in a quiet corner, deep in conversation.
Sanctuary: Balgove House, a cottage shared by William and Kate while at university
As they clinked their glasses to toast Kate’s success, William leaned in to kiss her. It was Kate who pulled away, momentarily stunned that he had been so bold in a room full of strangers.
At the time she was dating Rupert Finch, a fourth-year student, but William didn’t seem to care. ‘It was clear to us that William was smitten with Kate,’ remembered one of their friends who was at the party and who witnessed the moment. ‘He actually told her she was a knockout that night, which caused her to blush. There was definitely chemistry between them, and Kate had really made an impression on William.
‘She played it very cool, and at one point when William seemed to lean in to kiss her, she pulled away. She didn’t want to give off the wrong impression or make it too easy for Will.’
After her impressive debut on the catwalk, things would never be quite the same between William and Kate.
William later insisted in an interview on his 21st birthday, June 21, 2003, that he was single, but the truth was that he had fallen for his pretty friend.
One of William’s conditions for staying at St Andrews was that he would be allowed to move out of his halls of residence after his first year and share a flat with friends.
So in September 2002, at the start of his second year, William moved to 13a Hope Street in the centre of town. It was a luxury no Prince before him had enjoyed and exactly the normality he craved.
There were the necessary security issues to consider, of course: the property was fitted with bullet-proof windows, a bomb-proof front door and state-of-the-art laser security system that came with a thick instruction manual.
The floor-to-ceiling windows were protected with reinforced, full-length shutters.
William’s room was the biggest and it looked out on to an overgrown private garden and the back of the student union building in Market Street.
The Prince had decided to move in with Kate, Fergus Boyd and another student, Olivia Bleasdale. They each paid £100 a week in rent for the two-storey property and shared all the cleaning duties.
‘They did throw dinner parties and took turns to go shopping for groceries,’ one of their friends recalled.
‘William was part of the dinner-party brigade, and being seen in Tesco was all part of it. It was a bit of a meeting place for the great and the good. Fergus would get dressed to the nines and only ever wore different shades of white.
'William was always with him, so it was not uncommon for girls to stake out Tesco in the hope of seeing them.’
William and Kate were determined to keep their fledgling romance quiet, and behind the closed doors of Hope Street they could. Their bedrooms were on separate landings, but by this stage it was nothing more than pretence.
William and Kate had fallen in love and were enjoying a conventional university romance, albeit one involving elaborate cover-ups and decoys.
In an effort to keep their relationship below the radar for as long as possible, they would leave the house at different times and arrive at dinner parties separately, and made a pact never to hold hands in public.
By the end of their second year the relationship was a close one. When William attended Kate’s belated 21st birthday party in June 2003 at her family home in Bucklebury, Berkshire, the glance she threw him across the room when he walked into the Twenties-themed party was more than platonic.
But then at William’s own 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle later that month, it seemed as though Kate was barely registering with William – he seemed preoccupied with a very pretty girl named Jecca Craig.
‘Mock engagement’ that never was
William had first met Jecca, the daughter of British conservationist Ian Craig and his wife Jane, in 1998 in Kenya during a school holiday. The Prince had fallen in love with Africa and returned during his gap year to spend several weeks learning about conservation at the Craigs’ 55,000-acre game preserve, situated in the beautiful Lewa Downs in the foothills of Mount Kenya.
William had adored every minute of it and years later would get involved with the Tusk Trust, a conservation charity that finances some of Lewa’s activities. He is now a patron of the charity. Ian Craig recalled: ‘William just loves Africa, that’s clear. He did everything from rhino-spotting to anti-poaching patrols to checking fences. He’s a great boy.’
It was not long before rumours were circulating among their friends that something was going on between William and Jecca. He had apparently had a secret crush on Jecca since the first time he met her. She was beautiful, with long blonde hair, deep-blue eyes and legs like a gazelle.
But when it was reported in British newspapers that the two had staged a mock engagement ceremony to pledge their love to each other before William returned to England, the Prince instructed his aides to deny this had ever happened.
It was a rare move – usually the Palace never comments on the private lives of William or his brother Harry – but on this occasion, William wanted the story denied. ‘There’s been a lot of speculation about every single girl I’m with, and it actually does quite irritate me after a while, more so because it’s a complete pain for the girls,’ he said.
The tale had rattled him and embarrassed Jecca, who at the time was dating Edinburgh University undergraduate Henry Ropner, a former Etonian and a friend of William. The denial did little to quash the rumours of a romance, however, and as Kate raised her champagne flute to toast the birthday Prince at his aptly themed Out Of Africa celebration, it was Jecca who had pride of place next to William at the head table.
But by the end of the summer, the relationship with Kate seemed back on track. It soon became an open secret at St Andrews, and William and Kate were desperate for some privacy.
While Fergus decided to stay on at Hope Street, William and Kate chose to move to Balgove House at Strathtyrum, a sprawling private estate just outside St Andrews. The estate is owned by wealthy landowner Henry Cheape, a distant cousin of the Prince and a close friend of the Royal Family.
The impressive four-bedroom cottage was far more private than Hope Street. Unmarked police cars patrolled the estate and William’s protection officers lived in the assorted outbuildings. As with all his residences, the cottage had been made secure for the Prince, complete with bomb-proof doors and windows. William and Kate intended to entertain frequently: he installed a champagne fridge as soon as they moved in, while Kate set about dressing the kitchen windows with pretty red-and-white gingham curtains.
The couple enjoyed long, romantic walks, and when it was warm enough, they would pack a picnic hamper and spend pleasant afternoons stretched out on a blanket, sharing a bottle of chilled white wine. They were blissful days, made all the more romantic by the fact that the Press was still unaware of their relationship. But the secret would soon be out . . .
Bottles of wine and a roaring log fire
Against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains in the Swiss Alps, William put his arm around Kate. Wearing dark glasses and wrapped up against the cold in their salopettes and ski jackets, they waited in line for a ski lift.
As the T-bar arrived, William helped Kate on, and they slowly made their way up the mountainside, ski poles in their hands.
The photo of William gazing lovingly at Kate that was published in The Sun on April 1, 2004, was no April Fools’ joke. The rumours, which had been around for months, were confirmed: William and Kate were definitely more than just friends.
The first picture: Skiing together at Klosters in April 2004, William looks lovingly towards Kate and proves they are definitely a couple
‘If I fancy a girl and she fancies me back, which is rare, I ask her out. But at the same time I don’t want to put them in an awkward situation, because a lot of people don’t understand what comes with knowing me, for one – and secondly, if they were my girlfriend, the excitement it would probably cause,’ William had remarked in that 21st birthday interview in June 2003.
He was right about the excitement. He had chosen to go to Klosters, where the Royal Family are photographed skiing every year, and he had made no attempt to disguise his affection for Kate.
They were with a group of friends that included Harry Legge-Bourke, the brother of his former nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, Guy Pelly, William van Cutsem and his girlfriend Katie James. The Palace was furious and accused The Sun of breaching the embargo that protected Prince William during his university years. But the newspaper had decided that this was a scoop just too good to turn down, running the story under the headline Finally . . . Wills Gets A Girl.
The truth was, William had been dating Kate for many months. But now the floodgates had opened, and the world wanted to know everything about this shy, pretty and unassuming girl.
While some at the Palace had dismissed Kate as not being blue-blooded enough for the Prince (her parents Michael and Carole own an online party-equipment company), she had other qualities that were far more important to William.
She was polite to the photographers who now pursued her, and she quickly adopted the Royal rule of never speaking out.
She also insisted that her family never discuss her relationship with William. As Princess Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson noted: ‘We know very little about her and probably never will, providing they do their job right.
Historically a degree of mystery about Royalty has been an advantage – we project on to them what we want.’
According to one of her friends at St Andrews, Kate remained level-headed during the early months of their courtship. ‘She never got above her station, and even though she had secured the most sought-after boy at St Andrews, she never gloated. Kate was actually quite insecure about her looks and never considered herself pretty. She was very sweet and very shy.’
Like Diana, Kate quickly had to adapt to being in the spotlight, but her transition into Royal life was much smoother – unlike Diana, Kate enjoyed being at Highgrove, Balmoral and Sandringham, where she would later accompany William on grouse and pheasant shoots. She had practised with William on the Strathtyrum estate, where they were allowed to shoot birds for food as part of their rental agreement.
In the same way that Charles had been given the use of Wood Farm at Sandringham while he was a student at Cambridge, the Queen allowed William to use a cottage called Tam-na-Ghar at Balmoral as a getaway. Tucked away in the remote countryside, the 120-year-old cottage underwent a £150,000 renovation, complete with a bath big enough for two.
After their final lecture on Fridays, William and Kate would drive to Balmoral from St Andrews in William’s black Volkswagen Golf, followed by his protection officers. Like William, Kate loved walking across the moors and strolling by the River Dee. In the evenings they would cook a meal, share a bottle of red wine and keep warm in front of a roaring log fire.
Sometimes they were joined by friends from St Andrews, or Kate’s siblings Pippa and James – whose trophy stag heads line the walls of the Middleton family house – would be invited for a weekend’s shoot. They would all compete to bag the most birds.
A boozy swim round the moat
It was summer 2004 when William and Kate’s love affair underwent its first serious test. With one year to go before they both graduated, the 22-year-old Prince needed some space – he told several of his friends at university he was feeling ‘claustrophobic’.
Until now, both William and Kate had chosen not to discuss what would happen after they finished at St Andrews, but with their finals looming, it was an issue that needed addressing.
William decided that a holiday would provide him with some thinking time and planned a boys-only sailing trip to Greece with Guy Pelly and other friends, to take place as soon as they left college for the summer.
Kate’s relationship with Guy was turbulent – she considered him immature and potentially troublesome. It was Guy who used to buy William pornographic magazines when they were teenagers, and she had heard all about their drink-fuelled weekends at Highgrove.
There was also a rumour among their friends that after a night of heavy drinking at Club H – the basement den with a bar that William had set up with his brother Harry at Highgrove – William and Guy had covered one of their girlfriends in chocolate ice cream, which they then proceeded to lick off.
Then there was the occasion when Guy challenged William to a midnight swim at the 21st birthday party of their friend James Tollemache at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk.
Both William and Guy had been drinking heavily, but that did not stop them stripping down to their boxer shorts, diving in and swimming a lap in the murky moat.
It seemed that wherever there was trouble, Guy was not far away, and Kate was wary of him. She was annoyed, if not surprised, when she found out that Guy had arranged for an all-female crew for the yacht in Greece. So she packed her bags and headed home to Berkshire to spend the summer with her family.
The 'other' women: William flew to the US to spend time with Anna Sloan, left, in 2004 and he was a visitor to the Chelsea home of Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, although she rejected his advances
A number of things had caused her to question William’s commitment, although she had not raised them with him yet. One was his friendship with an American heiress named Anna Sloan, whom he had met through mutual friends at Edinburgh University, where Anna was studying.
Anna had lost her father, businessman George Sloan, in a tragic shooting accident on the family’s 360-acre estate in Nashville, Tennessee, and she and William had bonded over the loss of one of their parents.
When William accepted an invitation from Anna to accompany her and a group of friends to Tennessee for a holiday before he went to Greece, it hurt Kate deeply. She suspected William might have feelings for the 22-year-old. However, according to her friends, Anna was not romantically interested in William.
And then there was William’s budding relationship with another stunning heiress, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. While Kate was girl-next-door pretty, Isabella had cover-girl looks, a title and a stately pile to boot. That summer William visited the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe family home in Chelsea to
see her. Isabella, daughter of banking heiress Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, was single at the time. Sadly for William, she had no aspirations to date him and, despite his amorous advances, declared that she was not interested.
Meanwhile, Kate had accepted an invitation to spend a fortnight at Fergus Boyd’s family holiday home in the Dordogne with some friends from St Andrews. Among the group were Kate’s friends Olivia Bleasdale and Ginny Fraser. From her downcast mood, Kate’s friends soon guessed that something was wrong, and one evening she confided to them that she and William were taking a break from each other.
‘She got quite drunk on white wine and really let her guard down,’ recalled one of the group. ‘She was debating whether or not she should text or call him. She said how sad she was and how much she was missing William, but she never mentioned it after that.’
I had reported the news of their separation that summer in The Mail on Sunday, and tellingly there was no denial from Clarence House. Privately, William again complained to friends that he was feeling claustrophobic and was already thinking ahead to the summer after graduation, when he was planning to return to Kenya to see Jecca Craig – another fly in the ointment as far as Kate was concerned.
‘The last thing William wants is a high-profile split in the crucial months leading up to his finals,’ I was told at the time by a source close to William. On the advice of her mother Carole, Kate gave William some breathing space.
Once back at university it was made all the harder because they were living together, but instead of spending weekends in St Andrews or at Balmoral, Kate would return home to be with her parents at their home in Berkshire.
It was obviously the break that William needed, and by the autumn they were back together – a fact confirmed at Christmas. Although Kate had a condition: word had reached her of William’s visits to Isabella, and she insisted that William was not to contact her again.
With their finals looming in May, the pair agreed to take things slowly. Kate had stayed away from Edward van Cutsem’s wedding to the Duke of Westminster’s daughter Lady Tamara Grosvenor in November 2004, but she happily accepted an invitation to Prince Charles’s 56th birthday party at Highgrove later that month.
The following March, Prince Charles invited her to Klosters for his pre-wedding holiday. Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were to be married on April 9, 2005, and the Prince wanted one last skiing holiday with his sons first. It had really been intended as a boys-only trip, but Kate was not left out.
She was photographed taking a gondola up the slopes with Charles and enjoying lunch with the Princes and some of their friends.
At Charles’s wedding, a civil ceremony in Windsor, William was a witness together with Camilla’s son Tom, and had the added responsibility of looking after the wedding rings. But since she and William were not yet engaged, Kate was not invited to the intimate family wedding itself.
Camilla was now part of the Royal Family, and when William graduated on June 23, 2005, she was there with Charles, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. William and Kate had dreaded and looked forward to the day in equal measure.
They had enjoyed one last party before their finals and, in keeping with tradition, attended the annual May Ball. Uncharacteristically, Kate drank so much that Fergus Boyd had to carry her out before the night ended. Now, as William and Kate walked into Younger Hall for the graduation ceremony, they exchanged a smile and took their seats.
The Queen smiled broadly as William knelt before the university Chancellor’s wooden pulpit to collect his parchment. Minutes later Kate was called to the stage as Catherine Middleton.
When it came to the end of the ceremony, the words of Vice-Chancellor Dr Brian Lang must have seemed particularly poignant. ‘You will have made lifelong friends,’ he told graduates. ‘You may have met your husband or wife. Our title as the top matchmaking university in Britain signifies so much that is good about St Andrews, so we rely on you to go forth and multiply.’
Following graduation, William travelled to New Zealand, where he represented the Queen at events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and spent time with the touring British and Irish Lions rugby team. Then he visited Jecca Craig in Kenya, but this time he took Kate with him. He wanted her to experience the wild beauty of the country and reassure her that she had no cause to worry about Jecca.
William whisked Kate off for a romantic holiday during which they stayed at the £1,500-a-night Masai-owned Il Ngwesi Lodge in the Mukogodo Hills of central Kenya. During the day William worked on the Craig family’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. In the evenings he and Kate would sip cocktails and dine alfresco. The post-graduation holiday had been a blissful fortnight.
In the New Year, which William and Kate had seen in together at a cottage on the Sandringham estate, it was William’s turn to prove he could rise to the challenge of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where his brother Harry was already in his seventh month.
Knowing he would not see Kate for more than a month, William had taken Harry’s advice and whisked her off on yet another holiday to Klosters following the New Year celebrations.
Just two years earlier the couple’s romance had been revealed on these slopes as William put his arm around Kate in an unthinking show of intimacy. This time, in spite of the cameras, there was no holding back. Standing together in the deep powder snow, William pulled Kate towards him and kissed her.
William had yet to pop the question, but as far as Royal insiders and his inner circle were concerned, it was only a matter of time. In Kate Middleton, Prince William had found a potential bride.
Before he headed to Sandhurst, Kate had arranged a farewell drinks party for William at Clarence House and had been dreading the moment they would have to say goodbye.
She wanted to make sure they could at least celebrate before he left for Sandhurst.
The Prince arrived to begin his Army officer training on January 8, 2006, accompanied by his father and Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, his private secretary. After being introduced to Major-General Andrew Ritchie, William became a member of Blenheim Company, bade farewell to his father and was shown to his room overlooking Old College, his home for the next 44 weeks.
PSST... Kate was given a security pass to Clarence House in summer 2007 - but did not meet the Queen until Peter Phillips’s wedding in May 2008
PSST... Kate and sister Pippa were once dubbed the Wisteria Sisters, because they were ‘decorative and fragrant with a ferocious ability to climb’
PSST... Files of suitable brides for William – compiled as protocol by Palace aides - will now be archived. As a commoner, Kate Middleton was never included
PSST... Kate reportedly turned down £1million to appear on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! when she and William briefly separated in 2007
Source:Dailymail
