Long before she became known for handing out the trophies each year at Wimbledon, the Duchess of Kent had another defining role: musician. But her devotion to the piano almost ended abruptly, her daughter Lady Helen Taylor has disclosed, after a freak accident that left her mother’s fingertip hanging by a thread.
Speaking in a new interview for Tatler, Lady Helen recounted the moment a family friend mistakenly shut a car door on the duchess’s hand – a seemingly commonplace mishap that came perilously close to severing the tip of her finger. For anyone the injury would have been grim; for someone who practised the piano relentlessly, it was catastrophic.
“She was playing the piano a lot then, and so had to have the tip of her finger sewn back on,” Lady Helen recalled. Surgeons successfully reattached the damaged section, but the recovery demanded patience, precision and a refusal to relinquish her craft. Music, she suggested, formed such a core part of Katharine’s identity that giving it up was unthinkable.
The duchess’s love of teaching would later define her life more fully than her royal title. After stepping back from public duties and choosing to be known simply as Mrs Kent, she spent more than a decade instructing children in a Hull primary school.
Friends quoted by royal writer Hugo Vickers described her as everything a royal ought to be: modest, warm and without self-importance. The King, the Prince and Princess of Wales and other senior royals gathered in September for her funeral, the first Catholic service for a royal in contemporary times.
