Meghan Misunderstood. Sean Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ ancestors had also made a dramatic move in search of a better life. In their case, they left their mining community in Yorkshire during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1869, in pursuit of the American Dream. His great-grandmother, Mattie Sykes, was just a baby when they crossed the Atlantic.

      News that Meghan may have had British connections caused a flurry of interest in her family tree when she was first linked to Prince Harry. It was even worked out that the couple were themselves seventeenth cousins, due to a tenuous link she had with King Edward III, who ruled England for fifty years from 1327 to 1377.

When she joined Harry on an official visit to Dublin in July 2018, it was established that she had an Irish connection as well. Highlighting the family tree of an important visitor to Ireland has become a common practice. Meghan was presented with documents showing she was descended from a Belfast girl.

      The American connection began in the mining community of Mahanoy City, which despite its grand name has a population of less than 4,000. It’s a bit in the middle of nowhere, some eighty miles from Philadelphia, and not exactly a step up from the north of England in Victorian times. It was a harsh environment and Mattie’s father, Thomas Sykes, died from heart failure at the age of 43, leaving his widow to raise five children.

      Meghan’s ancestors hadn’t moved far by the time Tom Markle was born, in July 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close. He grew up in the borough of Newport, Pennsylvania, seventy miles away from Mahanoy City, where his father Gordon worked for a time at an air force base in nearby Harrisburg before winding up in admin at the local post office. Tom’s mother Doris worked at the J. J. Newberry’s five and dime store in Newport. She would eventually be acknowledged as the matriarch of the family and someone loved and respected by Meghan.

      The royal author Andrew Morton, who wrote the groundbreaking Diana: Her True Story, described Tom’s childhood as being like something out of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The family, including his two older brothers, lived in a modest white clapboard house on Sixth Street that was conveniently near woods and a river where the three boys would fish for catfish. Doris was a superb cook, filling her sons with homemade pies and making jam from the blackberries they picked in summer.

Such an idyllic-sounding youth was not enough to persuade any of the brothers that they wanted to stay in Newport, however. They all moved away. Meghan painted a less sentimental view of her dad’s roots, who, she said, ‘came from so little in a small town in Pennsylvania, where Christmas stockings were filled with oranges and dinners were potatoes and Spam.’

      The eldest of the three brothers, Mick, joined the United States Air Force and worked for many years in communications for the government, prompting speculation that he in fact had a job with the CIA. Understandably, he’s never confirmed that rumour but he would prove helpful to his niece in the world of diplomacy some years later.

      The middle brother, Fred, moved to Florida and found religion. He became the self-proclaimed leader of a little-known order called the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church and was known as Bishop Dismas F. Markle. The unusual ‘Dismas’ comes from the Greek and is generally acknowledged to be the name of the good thief, the man who repented on the cross next to Jesus. It’s not clear how many followers his church actually had, but some reports suggest it was about forty. Bishop Dismas has seen little of Meghan over the years – apparently she was aged six the last time they met – but to his credit has had nothing to say to journalists and very little to his friends about his family connections.

      Tom, meanwhile, had grown into a strapping young man, but even he could not match his giant grandfather Isaac ‘Ike’ Markle, who stood 7 foot 2 inches tall and worked as a fireman on the railways. Tom was a popular figure at Newport High School. One of his contemporaries there, Loretta Strawser, who also lived on the same street as the Markle family, recalled that he was ‘a nice person to be around.’ Others remembered him as being laid-back and down to earth. He took an interest in the visual arts but it was only after leaving school that a hobby became a career.

First, though, he drifted from job to job, earning some going-out money. He set up the pins in a local bowling alley while he decided what to do next. He soon realised that he was never going to amount to much in Newport and needed to try his luck elsewhere. Although he didn’t go on to college, Tom spent the equivalent of his gap year in the Poconos, the mountainous resort area in the north of the state. He found work at a local theatre where he had to muck in helping with everything, including the important technical tasks backstage.

      Tom didn’t return to Newport. Instead, he tried his luck in Chicago and found a job as a lighting technician at the WTTW television studios. He had to manage one potential problem with his career; he was colour-blind. It was testament to his dedication that he succeeded in keeping that hidden.

      Instead, he thrived in his new direction in life, climbing his way up the ladder from the bottom rung. As well as his work at the TV station, he did extra shifts at the Harper Theater on Chicago’s South Side in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of the city, ten minutes down the road from where the family home of Barack Obama has become a tourist attraction.

      Tom’s particular skill was lighting, and his flair soon grabbed the attention of the Harper’s new owners, newspaper proprietor Bruce Sagan and his wife Judith, who was particularly influential in the world of dance. It was a golden age for the playhouse and as well as prestigious productions of Chekhov and Pirandello, Tom was on hand to help with the first Harper Theater Dance Festival, which swiftly became one of the highlights of the arts calendar in Chicago.

Tom worked hard, but it was the sixties and he liked to play hard as well, hanging out with college and television friends and enjoying a free and easy lifestyle. He was nineteen when he met a young clerk at the Illinois Railroad Company. Roslyn Loveless was an elegant eighteen-year-old and they clicked immediately. She thought him ‘tall and handsome’ with a ‘great sense of humour and charming smile’.

      Roslyn was soon expecting her first child and she and Tom moved into a one-bedroom apartment, got married and celebrated the birth of a daughter, Yvonne – who would later change her name to Samantha – in November 1964. Cracks in their relationship appeared soon after.

      Roslyn gave a devastating account of those days in an interview with the Daily Mirror, a version of events that Tom has strongly denied, describing her accusation as ‘not valid’. According to Roslyn, he had a bad temper: ‘He would scream, “Fuck you”, “Fuck off”, “Leave me the fuck alone”, or “Get the fuck out of here.” Everything was fuck.’

      An addition to the family, Tom Jr, in December 1965, did not improve things between the couple. For a while she moved to Newport, Pennsylvania, and lived with Tom’s mum and dad, Doris and Gordon, who were very kind but could not meet the financial demands of supporting a young mum and her two small children.

      Back in Chicago, Roslyn claims that Tom lived the life of a single man, mixing in circles where cocaine was commonplace and enjoying the company of other women. She said he did not give her the money she needed even to feed the children properly and she was reduced to shoplifting in the local store just to get enough food.

      A friend came to her rescue and said she could stay with her, so Roslyn and the children took flight from the family apartment. She refused to sign divorce papers in which it was said he had been a ‘true, kind and affectionate husband’.

They were eventually divorced in 1975, although by this time Tom had made the journey across country in pursuit of his personal dream to work in Hollywood. While he continued to work hard to make progress in his career, Roslyn and the children moved to Albuquerque in New Mexico to start a new life, encouraged by her brother Richard, who already lived in the city.

      Tom didn’t completely forget his Pennsylvanian roots, returning every year for family СКАЧАТЬ