<p>Middleton has already captivated the world’s imagination with her Cinderella story of going from middle-class girl-next-door to queen-in-waiting, but until recently few knew of her family’s connection to coal mining, once a prime source of Britain’s prosperity that has now fallen on hard times.<br /><br />Her great-grandfather left coal country nearly a century ago in pursuit of a safer way of life in the London area, but his siblings stayed behind and spent their working lives in the coal pits. She still has relatives in the area who expect her to bring a practical, no-nonsense approach to royal life once she and Prince William tie the knot on April 29.<br /><br />John Harrison, a cousin who still lives in Hetton-Le-Hole — once a bustling mining centre now down on its luck—doesn’t expect Middleton to act all high and mighty when she officially becomes a princess. Harrison believes she still has a bit of the coal country in her, a head-screwed-on-straight practicality more common to the grit of northeast England than the gilded parlors of Buckingham Palace, with its priceless art collection and stifling protocol.<br /><br />“I think she’s going to stamp her northeast way of life on William,” said Harrison, who has lost touch with Middleton’s side of the family but still plans to celebrate the royal wedding with his family’s own party-of-the-year. “She’s told him they’re going to be more normal, more down to earth.”<br /><br />The fact that the offspring of a coal mining family will soon be a princess is taken by some as proof that Britain’s once-rigid social system has become more malleable. “It says a lot about social mobility,” said Geoff Nicholson, a retired genealogist who lives in Hetton-Le-Hole, the town 435 km north of London. “They certainly wouldn’t have done that in the hundred years before that. They went from the bottom to the top.”<br /><br />The upward mobility began when Middleton’s great-grandfather Thomas Harrison, fed up with the grim prospects of life in a coal town, packed up and took his family to the London area, not with any grand plans, but simply to get cleaner, safer work.</p>
<p>Middleton has already captivated the world’s imagination with her Cinderella story of going from middle-class girl-next-door to queen-in-waiting, but until recently few knew of her family’s connection to coal mining, once a prime source of Britain’s prosperity that has now fallen on hard times.<br /><br />Her great-grandfather left coal country nearly a century ago in pursuit of a safer way of life in the London area, but his siblings stayed behind and spent their working lives in the coal pits. She still has relatives in the area who expect her to bring a practical, no-nonsense approach to royal life once she and Prince William tie the knot on April 29.<br /><br />John Harrison, a cousin who still lives in Hetton-Le-Hole — once a bustling mining centre now down on its luck—doesn’t expect Middleton to act all high and mighty when she officially becomes a princess. Harrison believes she still has a bit of the coal country in her, a head-screwed-on-straight practicality more common to the grit of northeast England than the gilded parlors of Buckingham Palace, with its priceless art collection and stifling protocol.<br /><br />“I think she’s going to stamp her northeast way of life on William,” said Harrison, who has lost touch with Middleton’s side of the family but still plans to celebrate the royal wedding with his family’s own party-of-the-year. “She’s told him they’re going to be more normal, more down to earth.”<br /><br />The fact that the offspring of a coal mining family will soon be a princess is taken by some as proof that Britain’s once-rigid social system has become more malleable. “It says a lot about social mobility,” said Geoff Nicholson, a retired genealogist who lives in Hetton-Le-Hole, the town 435 km north of London. “They certainly wouldn’t have done that in the hundred years before that. They went from the bottom to the top.”<br /><br />The upward mobility began when Middleton’s great-grandfather Thomas Harrison, fed up with the grim prospects of life in a coal town, packed up and took his family to the London area, not with any grand plans, but simply to get cleaner, safer work.</p>
