More of the humble family background of Kate Middleton, the woman who could one day become Queen, was revealed yesterday.

The 25-year-old arts graduate has settled with ease into the privileged world of her boyfriend, Prince William, and is even rumoured to have moved into Clarence House. It is all far from the rundown West London streets to which her roots have been traced. Her great-grandmother, Edith Goldsmith, fought a constant battle with financial hardship in Southall, where she and her husband, Stephen, a labourer, raised six children, including Ronald, Ms Middleton’s grandfather, who was born in 1931.

Stephen died in 1938 at the age of 51 from emphysema. The couple’s four eldest children had by then left home and Edith brought up Ronald and his sister Joyce alone.

She moved out of the family home to a condemned flat and worked at a jam factory. She was said to have smoked 20 Woodbine cigarettes a day and to have sent her children to the pub to buy her stout. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, her only surviving daughter, Alice, 96, said: “My mum had to work hard to bring us all up. She wasn’t a bad lady but she had a temper. She liked a drink and smoked but who could blame her with what she had to put up with. In those days everyone was hard up.”

Ronald worked for a short time for a lorry firm run by Alice’s husband, then set up his own business as a builder. He married Dorothy Harrison, a shop assistant, when he was 22 in the early 1950s. The couple moved into Dorothy’s already packed family home in Southall and they were still living there when Ms Middleton’s mother, Carole, was born in 1955.

The stories Dorothy’s father told of his childhood in a coalmining community in the North East encouraged her to improve her family’s lot.

She had a liking for fine clothes and her niece, Ann Terry, who worked with her at a jewellery shop, said: “I don’t know where Dorothy got her airs and graces from. She always thought she was one cut above everyone else. Dorothy learnt her trade from me. She was a good saleswoman but she was a bit of a snob.”

The family moved to a more affluent area of Southall after Ronald’s building business grew. Carole, who had a Saturday job at C&A while at school, married into a middle-class family after falling in love with Michael Middleton when the two worked as air stewards.

Mr Middleton, the son of a flying instructor, became a pilot and the couple sent their daughter, Catherine Elizabeth, to Marlborough public school. She went on to study history of art at St Andrews University in Scotland, where she met Prince William.

Palace aides are making arrangements for Prince William to become a working member of the Royal Family in a year’s time.

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