Life

The Duchess of Kent consoling Jana Novotná after the 1993 Wimbledon final. Chris Cole/Getty

The duchess who swept the floors at Lourdes

The Duchess of Kent, who died last week aged 92, was the most musical member of the royal family, says The Daily Telegraph: she played the piano, organ and violin, and sang soprano with the Bach Choir. But her tastes were wide-ranging – in 2022 she spoke of her love for beatboxing and gangster rap, especially Eminem. In 2002 Queen Elizabeth II granted her permission to step back from royal duties to teach music at a state school in Hull. For the next 13 years she travelled to Wansbeck primary school by train from London, unrecognised and unnoticed. "I was just known as Mrs Kent," she said. "Only the head knew who I was."

Born in Yorkshire in 1933, Katharine Worsley met her future husband – Elizabeth II's first cousin – at the Heythrop Hunt ball at Blenheim Palace. She was an unlikely duchess: no untitled woman had married a Windsor in a century, and the Duke of Kent's mother initially forbade their romance. When the relationship got serious, the Duke was posted to Germany for a year, and Katharine was sent to work in a Canadian department store. But Princess Marina eventually caved, and the pair married in 1961. The Duchess went on to pioneer the art of royal empathy, working at Westminster Cathedral's shelter for the homeless, taking calls anonymously for the Samaritans and scrubbing the floors at Lourdes each year after converting to Catholicism. In 1979, she pulled strings to ensure Martina Navratilova's mother could get a visa to leave communist Czechoslovakia and watch her daughter win Wimbledon. And she famously comforted a distraught Jana Novotná, who sobbed on to her pristine white jacket after losing to Steffi Graf in the 1993 final. "That's what you do when people are crying," she explained in 2016. "It's a natural reaction."

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Property

THE ROCKSTAR'S RENTAL This 17th-century home near Stroud, Gloucestershire was rented by Oasis star Liam Gallagher last year for £17,000 a month, says Country Life. On the lower-ground floor are a kitchen, a cinema, a gym, a sauna and a 4,000-bottle wine cellar, while the ground floor has a library, a sitting room, a billiards room and a ballroom with views over the Black Mountains in Wales. The property's 11 bedrooms are spread across the top two floors. Gloucester is a 30-minute drive. £5.9m. Click on the image to see the listing.

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