The family tragedy that helped the Middletons make their millions

   Trusting: Carole and Michael Middleton were able to put their three children through private school thanks to a trust fund

It is the conundrum that has perplexed royal watchers ever since a 20-year-old Kate Middleton sashayed down the catwalk in her see-through dress and caught the eye of Prince William. 

The tale of their up-and-down romance and glittering marriage are the stuff of fairy tales.

Yet there has always been one rather mysterious missing link in the story: just where did the money come from to pay for Kate’s private education and a life surrounded by the children of the rich?

All three Middleton children, Kate, Pippa and James, attended the prestigious Marlborough College where boarding fees for a single year cost more than £32,000.

Rubbing shoulders with the privileged will have added hugely to the cost of their upbringing. 

And their parents’ careers as a pilot and airhostess, or their then fledgling business, Party Pieces, have never seemed to explain how they could afford the bills.

In fact the answer to the Middleton millions lies in a tale of heartbreak and loss during the First World War and is symbolised by a simple headstone that stands among the poignant rows of graves at the Rue-Petillon Military Cemetery in Fleurbaix in northern France.

This is the last resting place of Maurice Lupton, a 28-year-old captain in the 7th battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, who died on June 19, 1915, two months after going to war.

During the next two years he was followed to a soldier’s grave by his two brothers, Lionel and Fran.

For the Lupton clan, this was a tragedy: three sons cut down in the prime of life.

But their untimely deaths were to have much wider repercussions than the family could ever have anticipated.

The Lupton brothers were Kate Middleton’s great-great uncles and it is their fate that accounts for her family’s apparent wealth – and a trust fund, established by the surviving women of the family – worth more than £3million.

It was this trust fund that provided a springboard for Kate and a life that her forebears could hardly have imagined.

It was Kate’s great-great-great grandfather Frank Lupton, who first found commercial success. Born  in 1813, a century before the war, Frank was a keen businessman, with an eye for a bargain.

It was he who expanded the family firm, William Lupton and Co, buying an old cloth mill and letting it out to weavers who bought their cloth to his warehouse every Friday for him to inspect.

Gradually, he began making fancy tweeds, livery tweeds and police uniform fabrics and bought a finishing plant, which meant he was involved in every stage of the manufacturing process.

Frank and his wife Fanny had  five children (their eldest son Francis was Kate’s great-great grandfather) and lived in Beechwood, a sprawling Victorian mansion in the village of Roundhay, seven miles north of Leeds. Theirs was an affluent household with six servants. They socialised with the great and good of Leeds and involved themselves in the politics of the day – their son Charles was the first Lupton to go to public school, setting a tradition which would carry right down through the family to Kate, Pippa and James.

SOURCE-DAILYM