Kate Middleton could not join King Charles and Queen Camilla to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day at yesterday’s Portsmouth ceremony, but that didn’t stop veterans asking after the Princess of Wales’s wellbeing.
Geoffrey Weaving, 100, who took part in history’s largest seaborne invasion on this day in 1944, spoke to Prince William after Wednesday’s moving tribute. As the Prince of Wales knelt down to chat with the veteran, he gave an insight into the Kates Middleton’s health as she continues her cancer treatment.
“She is getting better, yes,” said the Prince. “She would have loved to be here today.”
The Princess of Wales has a strong family connection to Britain’s war effort, one that Prince William celebrated as he shook hands and shared stories with the D-Day heroes.
“I was reminding everyone how her grandmother served at Bletchley,” he told Weaving, “so she had quite a bit in common with some of the ladies here who were at Bletchley.”
The Prince continued, discussing the covert nature of the codebreakers’ work, which was crucial to the Allied powers’ defeat of Nazi forces.
“They never spoke about anything until the very end—it was all very secret.”
The Prince of Wales was clearly keeping both Kate Middleton and her Bletchley Circle grandmother in his thoughts throughout the event, discussing the Waleses’s codebreaking connection with a woman thought have have worked at Bletchley herself:
“My wife’s grandmother did the same sort of thing as you,” he said. “Catherine only found out at the end of her life.”
It was only in 2014 that Kate, then Duchess of Cambridge learned that her paternal grandmother, Valerie Glassborow, had played a monumental role during the Second World War. Glassborow was breaking German codes in Hut 16 at Bletchley Park when news came through that Japan had surrendered. It was, of course, an intercepted message—making The Princess of Wales’s grandmother one of the first people in the world to know that the war was over.
When Kate toured Bletchley Park a decade ago, she met one of her grandmother’s codebreaking colleagues, Lady Marion Body, who was able to give the then-Duchess this completely new insight into Glassborow’s life.
“She didn’t know about that, and she said she’d go and tell her father,” said Lady Body of the moment Kate heard the news. “I was able to tell her. Valerie never would have spoken about it—I wouldn’t have done until recently.”
Indeed, the Bletchley codebreakers remained faithful to the classified nature of their roles, refraining from telling even family members about their crucial contributions to the war effort. Speaking to a group of school children at the Milton Keynes estate where her grandmother and great-aunt worked, Kate Middleton expressed the pride she felt over Glassborow’s contributions, but also sadness that they had never been able to share stories together:
“My granny and her sister worked here. It’s very cool. When she was alive sadly she could never talk about it. She was so sworn to secrecy that she never felt able to tell us.”
The importance of remembering the service of Britain’s war heroes was a central theme in the King’s speech at the Portsmouth anniversary event on Wednesday.
“The stories of courage, resilience and solidarity, which we have heard today and throughout our lives, cannot fail to move us, to inspire us, and to remind us of what we owe to that great wartime generation, now tragically dwindling to so few,” reflected the King, who was joined on stage by Queen Camilla after speeches from veterans.
“It is our privilege to hear their testimony. But our role is not purely passive. It is our duty to ensure that we and future generations do not forget their service and their sacrifice in replacing tyranny with freedom.”
This article first appeared on Tatler.
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