DUCHESS OF KENT

Waikato Times, Volume 123, Issue 20693, 31 December 1938, Page 9

DUCHESS OF KENT

VISIT TO CINEMA ACCOMPANIED BY “NANNY** A HOMELY NARRATIVE (Times Air Mail Service) LONDON, Dec. 4 Millions of people see pictures of the Duchess of Kent when she attends a smart film premiere or pays an official visit to a cinema. But perhaps the cinema programmes she enjoys most are those she sees quietly in the company of a little white-haired London woman whom cameramen overlook. The little woman’s name is Miss Mate Fox, who lives in a big block of flats at Hampstead, N.W., and who could, if she chose, tell the most intimate story of the Duchess ever told —for Kate Fox was Princess Marina’s “Nanny" as a little girl. But Nanny Fox —“Foxy” as little Princess Marina called her affectionately—shakes her neat silver-grey head and will not “tell tales." “I knew Princess Marina as a baby and I know her still,” she said to the Sunday Referee yesterday. "But it it is all much too sacred a thing for me to talk about. Always Been Friend* “Why should it interest anyone else if the Duchess takes ine out to the pictures now and then? We have always been friends and we shall be all my life.” But Kate Fox is more than a friend to the Duchess. When, as Princess Marina, she was at school in Paris, her schoolmistress once said. "Mara is a lovely girl, but it is undoubtedly her English nurse, Kate Fox, who had the most influence on her life.” Kate Fox has been present at every important occasion in the Duchess’s life. Standing somewhere in the background the silver-haired, rosy-cheeked woman is always there to*.see that everything is all right for her darling. She was the one that Princess Marina went to when she was. arranging for her marriage to the Duke of Kent. “Nanny" was in Westminster Abbey when the wedding ceremony was performed, and she was at the Royal couple’s house on the important occasion when little Prince Edward was bom.

Frequently the Duchess of Kent goes to tea with her old nurse at the flat in Hampstead.