Carole Middleton at 70: How the matriarch went from council house to country manor

Carole Middleton is marking a serious landmark - her 70th birthday - and we take a look back at the impressive businesswoman's life, and how she maintains such close family bonds. Born Carole Goldsmith to parents Ron and Dorothy, the grandmother of the future King spent the first months of her life living in a council property in Ealing, West London - a far cry from the country manor house she now occupies, reportedly valued at £4.7 million.

Her parents were hard-working and ambitious - traits Carole has undoubtedly inherited - and her father, Ron, went from working at a haulage company to taking the plunge into a new career path as a builder, painter and decorator: a new challenge for which he had the full support of his wife, Dorothy. The family moved to Southall, where Carole spent most of her childhood living before the family grew with the addition of her younger brother Gary, who is 10 years her junior.

Carole's younger brother Gary appeared last year on Celebrity Big Brother - although his stint in the house was pretty brief - and has been something of a controversial figure over the years. In 2009, he was caught up in a sting by the now-defunct News of the World, where he bragged to an undercover journalist about his royal connections through niece Kate, who was dating William at the time. Gary was also allegedly filmed cutting lines of cocaine and reportedly offered the provision of sex workers to the journalist -and despite being seemingly pretty close before this scandal, the rest of the Middleton family are said to have distanced themselves from him after this incident.

Carole attended Featherstone High School until she was 16 years old, when she left and got a job at Prudential, something she admitted in a rare interview with The Telegraph she didn't enjoy at all. After realising that this kind of work wasn't for her, the ambitious teenager asked her father Ron if there was any way she could return to education and take her A-levels - but she knew her parents would struggle to afford continued studies.

She landed an impressive role at the John Lewis A-level trainee scheme - no mean feat, as the prestigious position is considered seriously competitive - and loved aspects of the role, including learning about merchandising, but wasn't as keen on sales. Carole's next professional step would take her into the path of her future husband - although she didn't know it at the time. She took on a secretarial role at what would become British Airways, but not super enthused by the type of work, she quickly transferred to ground staff, "‘It's not like it is now," Carole told The Telegraph, "You had to be able to speak another language. It was almost like being at university.".

It was in this position that Carole met her future husband, Michael, who was six years older than her and was working as a flight dispatcher. Michael was, according to royal author Katie Nicholl, something of a catch at Heathrow Airport where the pair were working, good looking, with a senior, well-paid job, the reserved Mike is said to have caught the eye of many of the air hostesses and female staff.

However, it was only Carole who captured his interest, and after taking the plunge and asking her on a date things quickly got serious between the pair. Mike was Carole's first proper boyfriend, the author claimed, and she found him "charming, thoughtful, and fun". The couple rented a flat together in Slough, before getting engaged and tying the knot in 1980. Carole and Michael came from vastly different financial backgrounds, with Mike having attended private boarding school and grown up much more comfortably than the Goldsmith family had - a discrepancy that their eldest daughter Kate later got a taste of in her own royal romance.

Kate was born in 1982, and the couple welcomed another child - Pippa - just a year later. In 1984 - with two small children in tow - Michael and Carole headed off on a new chapter and moved to Jordan. The family seemingly had a comfortable existence in their new home, where Princess Kate attended nursery school, but after three years, they called time and returned to the UK. "I wasn't convinced I wanted to be an expat mum and Mike's job there was coming to an end," Carole has said and on their return to the UK, they were expecting their third child: James.

This was also the beginning of another new chapter for Carole, who decided to put herself to work on her own business, a mail-order party supply company called Party Pieces that she built from the ground up. "I thought, 'Oooh, bills to pay.' But I also had this strong feeling that I hadn't achieved anything. I got married at 25, had Catherine at 26…". Working from home initially on the new company, business steadily grew, with the determination and motivation Carole inherited from her parents Ron and Dorothy shining through. After two years, Michael gave up his job to help take Party Pieces to the next level and Carole went from working at her kitchen table to a nearby commercial unit.