Asylum past of Kate Middleton's great-great aunt echoes Prince William's great-grandmother's fate

The asylum past of Kate Middleton’s great-aunt who died in a mental hospital echoes the fate of Prince William’s great-grandmother: a historian reveals the similarities between the two women’s ‘parallel lives’

  • The ancestors of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge led remarkably similar lives.
  • Gertrude Middleton and Princess Alice of Battenberg became nuns
  • Both were also volunteer nurses and were treated and died in sanatoriums.
  • The similarities of their relatives have been revealed by an Australian historian.

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The Duchess of Cambridge’s great-aunt died in a mental hospital, in a strange echo of the fate of Prince William’s great-grandmother.

The similarities between the two ancestors have so far gone unrecognized, with the discovery by an Australian historian that the two women led “parallel lives”.

Kate’s ancestor, Gertrude Middleton, and William’s great-grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, became nuns and volunteer nurses in World War I.

Nurse Olive Middleton, (far right) was Kate Middleton's great-grandmother, and second from right in the background is Gertrude Middleton, Kate's great-aunt.  The sisters-in-law were photographed in 1915 at Gledhow Hall, the estate of her cousin, Baroness Airedale.

Nurse Olive Middleton, (far right) was Kate Middleton’s great-grandmother, and second from right in the background is Gertrude Middleton, Kate’s great-aunt. The sisters-in-law were photographed in 1915 at Gledhow Hall, the estate of her cousin, Baroness Airedale.

The two women also had darker sides to their stories.

The Duchess’s great-great-aunt, her great-grandfather Noel Middleton’s sister, was treated at the Lawn Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases in Lincoln in the 1930s.

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He died at the facility, which treated “superior patients”, in March 1942, aged 66.

Prince William’s great-grandmother, the mother of the late Duke of Edinburgh, was also treated at a sanatorium.

Michael Reed, a historian from Ilim College in Australia, who made the discovery about Kate’s ancestor, told The Daily Telegraph: “They basically lived parallel lives, a few years apart.”

Both were volunteer nurses in connection with the Red Cross: Gertrude during the First World War and Princess Alice during the first and second.

‘Both acted as dedicated social workers for the homeless and disadvantaged and proved to be generous financial benefactors.

But most surprising of all was the revelation that Gertrude, like Princess Alice, had been a patient in a mental hospital. Her stories are both fascinating and sad.

Gertrude Middleton was a brilliant student and went to an all-girls boarding school, which was next door to the University of St Andrews, where Kate and William met as students.

Like the Duchess, Gertrude was an athlete, playing lacrosse and tennis, one of Kate’s favorite hobbies. She also played the piano, performed impressively by Kate herself during a Christmas carol concert last year.

She volunteered at the Red Cross with her sister-in-law Olive Middleton, the Duchess’s great-grandmother.

Both Gertrude and Princess Alice followed a very religious path throughout their lives, with Gertrude becoming a nun at the Anglican Epiphany Convent in Cornwall, and Princess Alice founding a Greek Orthodox order of nuns.

After receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia, Princess Alice was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1930.

He died at Buckingham Palace at the age of 84, in 1965.

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