Duchess of Kent ‘would sell all clothes at season end to fund buying new ones’

The late Duchess of Kent used to sell all her clothes at the end of the season to finance the buying of new ones, her daughter has said.

Lady Helen Taylor told Tatler magazine that her mother Katharine, who died at the age of 92 in September, loved clothes, recalling how they gave her confidence when she carried out public engagements.

She said: “At the end of each season, she sold all her clothes to finance buying new ones.”

Lady Helen also recounted how the musically-gifted duchess, who played the piano, almost lost the tip of her finger after a friend accidently shut it in a car door.

“She was playing the piano a lot then, and so had to have the tip of her finger sewn back on,” she said.

A close friend told the magazine the duchess was “the perfect member of the royal family” and had “not an ounce of self-importance”.

The King, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the rest of the royal family gathered at the duchess’s funeral, the first Catholic one to be held for a member of the British royal family in modern history, to pay their respects in September.

The duchess, the wife of Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin the Duke of Kent, was known for consoling losing Wimbledon finalists, notably a tearful Jana Novotna in 1993, and presented trophies at the championships for many years.

She preferred to be known as Mrs Kent and dropped her HRH style, retreating from royal life to spend more than a decade teaching music in a state primary school in Hull.

Tatler’s January issue pays tribute to the duchess, with its front cover a side-on photographic portrait taken in 1980 by the late Lord Snowdon of Katharine dressed in a high-necked lace outfit and wearing large diamond and sapphire drop earrings, with her hair swept up in a stylish chignon.

A close friend of the duchess told royal writer Hugo Vickers: “She was the perfect member of the royal family. She never had any side to her.

“There was not an ounce of self-importance. She was genuinely humble. And she had a great sense of humour. She was great fun.”

The full feature appears in the January issue of Tatler available via digital download and on newsstands from December 4.