09/07/2025
RIP to someone who understood the power of music education. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1KS7sQCpVW/
The Duchess and Duke of Kent had three children, but another son was stillborn.
That loss in 1977 saw a period of intense emotional turmoil. The duchess emerged after a seven-week stay in hospital for what palace officials described at the time as “nervous exhaustion”.
It was an era with much less openness about mental health and wellbeing - but she later revealed how much she had suffered from “acute depression”.
Music was a big part of the life of the duchess, having spoken of how emotional it made her feel, as a listener and as a musician, including singing in the Bach Choir.
Her tastes were eclectic - picking Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus as her favourite piece on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs - but also later speaking of her liking for gangsta rap.
In later years, she stepped back from using her royal HRH title and spent more time working to improve music education for young people.
As Katharine Kent, or Mrs Kent, she lived something of a double life, working from the mid-1990s as a part-time music teacher at Wansbeck Primary School in Kingston upon Hull, without parents or pupils knowing about her royal background.
She spoke of talented children trapped by deprivation - describing “estates with Berlin Walls around them” - and subsequently set up a charity to help young people get access to learning instruments.
The duchess espoused the “power of music to give confidence and self-belief” and said of her time as a teacher: “My connection will always be there. I love those children, I love East Hull, I wouldn’t have stayed there for 13 years if I hadn’t.”
She is survived by her husband, the Duke of Kent, aged 89, and their two sons and a daughter.
