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.
