Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge shares details of her childhood, the joys and challenges of motherhood on Giovanna Fletcher’s podcast, Happy Mum, Happy Baby.
Born to Carole and Michael Middleton at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading on 9 January 1982, moved with her family to Amman in Jordan, where her father worked for two and a half years, and from the age of three attended a nursery school there.
In September 1986, the Middletons returned to their home in West Berkshire, and Kate started at St. Andrew’s School in Pangbourne, where she remained until July 1995.
In 1990, Kate and Pippa both joined the local Brownies club, where they went on field trips, played sports, did needlework, and earned badges. During her time at St. Andrew’s prep school, Kate also started to show an interest in the theatre, taking on the role of Eliza Doolittle when she was 11 in the school’s production of My Fair Lady, and later, aged 13, starring in the Victorian melodrama, Murder in the Red Barn.
Kate enrolled at the co-ed boarding school, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, where she studied Chemistry, Biology and Art at A-level. Kate also took part in sport on behalf of the school, playing tennis, hockey and netball and participating in athletics, particularly high jump.
In July 2000, Kate left Marlborough College and embarked on a gap year in which she studied at the British Institute in Florence, undertook a Raleigh International programme in Chile, and crewed on Round the World Challenge boats in the Solent. In 2001, she enrolled at the University of St. Andrews, Fife, from where she graduated in 2005 with a 2:1 in History of Art.
That same year she met her future husband, Prince William while living at St. Salvator’s Hall in 2001, and after a brief split, they announced their engagement in November 2010, got married in Westminster Abbey on 29 April 2011, with 26million people tuning in to watch the wedding in Britain, and an estimated global audience of more than 300million.
