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On a bright, sunny day in August 1953, Dorothy Harrison, daughter of Thomas Harrison, a joiner, married lorry driver Ron Goldsmith at Holy Trinity Church in Southall, west London. The bride, who was just 18 and still carried traces in her accent of her early childhood in rural County Durham, wore an Elizabethan-style lace gown with taffeta underskirt, the Middlesex County Times noted, and an embroidered veil pinned to her hair with orange blossom. For her bouquet, she chose dark red roses and carnations. The hymns included Lead Us Heavenly Father, Lead Us, and O Perfect Love.
After the service, the couple's 70 guests repaired to the Hambrough Tavern on Uxbridge Road, just metres from the tiny brick terraced house on Bankside where Dorothy had lived until that morning with her parents and older sister, scratching out a modest livelihood with the help of the chickens they kept in a smallholding at the end of the road.
The Hambrough Tavern was burned to the ground in 1981 during a race riot. It was rebuilt on the same site in a blunt slab of red brick, outside which a small semicircle of picnic tables now stand on concrete paving under Stella Artois umbrellas. The pub's landlady Mary McGann is from Roscommon in Ireland and no royalist but, some weeks ago, she bought some bunting to string assertively across the bar and stuck a flag in the centre of every window. On each is a picture of Dorothy Harrison's granddaughter, smiling beatifically beside the prince whom she married on Friday.
Much has been made, in the many weeks leading to the royal wedding, and the many years since the press began speculating about the possibility of one, of the fact that, in marrying Kate Middleton, Prince William would make a "commoner" his queen. But it is only when one revisits the places that made some of her immediate family that one appreciates quite how common is common.
Lady Diana Spencer, lest we forget, the daughter of a viscount who was Queen Mary's godson, was technically a commoner. Anne Hyde, who married the future James II in 1660 and whose daughters, Mary and Anne, both became queen, was the daughter of a barrister and MP, but was raised in royal circles as her father was a close confidant of Charles I and was maid of honour to the king's sister when she married. Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort of Edward IV, also fell outside the European royal line, qualifying her as another commoner; her father, however, was an earl.
The likely great-grandmother of Britain's next monarch but two, in contrast, was raised in a row of houses that elsewhere might have been demolished in a slum clearance. Bankside was poor after the war and it is poor now, a scruffy cul-de-sac next to the Grand Union Canal, where the swans fight with pigeons over slices of white bread floating on the green water and an anonymous industrial estate stares blankly across the canal while planes from Heathrow wheel low at the end of the street.
Locals who have lived here for a while wrestle to find the language to describe how things have changed since the 1950s; what they mean is that the street, like much of the borough, is mostly non-white now, home not to poor northerners but to poor southern Asians. A group of three elderly Sikh men squatting by the riverbank shrug, indicating incomprehension, when asked about the upcoming royal wedding 15 miles or so to the east. The Punjab probably feels closer.
Dorothy had been born in Hetton-le-hole, a Durham pit village where her grandfather had been a miner, like his own father and grandfather before him. Her mother, Elizabeth Temple, was a farm girl who already had an illegitimate daughter when Thomas Harrison married her and raised Dorothy's older sister Ruth as his own. Their flight to Southall, after the second world war and the nationalisation of the pits, prefigured that of the tens of thousands of Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Somalis and others who would follow them in the next few decades. All hoped the capital might offer a brighter economic future.
It is almost comically superfluous to note that the life of Prince William's grandmother, in 1953, was somewhat different to that of Dorothy Harrison. Two months earlier, the new Elizabeth II had stepped out of Westminster Abbey wearing in her crown a sapphire that Edward the Confessor had worn at his own coronation in 1042. She can trace her own family and direct royal line to William I, who killed Edward's shortlived successor Harold at Hastings 24 years later. Her coronation gown bested Dorothy's "Elizabethan" bridal design just a little, encrusted as it was with seed pearls, diamante and gold and silver bullion.
Her oldest son, Charles, was four at the time, born in Buckingham Palace and into such fabulous privilege and weird dislocation that he would be revealed, later in life, to employ a man to squeeze toothpaste on to his toothbrush.
It goes without saying that such privilege does not secure contentment. Late in 1953, the new queen and her husband embarked on a tour of the Commonwealth for six months, leaving Charles and his toddler sister Anne in the care of nannies and marking the start of a childhood and schooling which, from what we know of it, was distinguished principally by the prince's caustic loneliness.
Dorothy Goldsmith, on the other hand, may have been regarded with some resentment by her close family – at least those who have chosen to speak sniffily to media in recent weeks of her supposedly superior air, earning her the family nickname "Lady Dorothy" – but the main charge against her appears to be an industrious ambition to raise her children above the circumstances in which she and her husband were raised.
Ron Goldsmith, had been born in Clarence Street, another cramped terrace on the far side of the gasworks and across the railway line. Its narrow houses now sell for close to a quarter of a million pounds, but it remains a home to busy working families, though almost all here, too, are now non-white. As an appropriately nostalgic red-bricked terrace row, Clarence Street was chosen to host Southall's highest profile street party, even if, last week, it seemed nobody but the councillors were getting terribly excited.
Jay, an Asian youth in a lowslung tracksuit removed one earphone bud to grunt at his lack of interest in the proceedings; Vikas and Amadee, a young married couple who arrived only a week ago from Jalandhar in India, did not really understand the question, but beamed and nodded to stress how friendly they found the neighbourhood. "It's a nice street," said a woman called Nina who has lived here for 18 years, straining against the leash of an enormous fluffy dog. "Nice people here. My children grew up here, I've been very lucky. A good street."
Number 57 has recently been let; in its tiny front yard, an enterprising estate agent erected a board congratulating the royal couple. After the death of Ron's father, Charlie Goldsmith,, however, even this modest two-up two-down was beyond the reach of his mother Edith, who moved her youngest son and daughter to a condemned flat in an even less salubrious street nearby. It was to this tiny apartment, where his mother still lived, where Ron took his new bride, and where she brought home their first child in 1955, a daughter whom they named, with appropriately aspirational final "e", Carole.
Dorothy was a good mother, her niece Ann has said. "She was proud of both [her children]. She played with them a lot and was into their education. She wasn't well educated herself, but she wanted them to do better than she had done." Gary arrived a decade after his sister. A year later, the family moved to a new-build semi a mile or so away in Norwood Green.
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