How much Diana and Meghan’s mother have in common

How much Diana and Meghan’s mother have in common

The old maxim that 'it's not where you come from that counts, it's where you're going' could have been written for Meghan Markle.

But in a way, as she and Harry stand together before the altar today, the moment will mark the crowning work of two other lives — those of their mothers.

No two women could have been more different.

One tall, one short. One blonde, one dark-haired. One born into aristocratic comfort and privilege, the other into the workaday family of a market stallholder. One carved out a career, the other did part-time work until a teenage engagement took her into a gilded but doomed marriage.

Many people would say, however, that the two things they did have in common were more significant than their differences.

Both came from broken homes. In fact, both were under eight years old when their separated parents divorced. Yet both emerged as strong mothers described by their children as 'wonderful'.

Indeed, Princess Diana and Doria Ragland, one living in a palace in London, the other 5,500 miles away in a suburb of Los Angeles, even felt the same emotional urge to take their children to deprived areas where they could see just how difficult life was for those with virtually nothing.

Both women married men who were 12 years their senior — and both marriages foundered.

Diana, who would have been 57 on July 1 had she lived, was just 20 when she married the Prince of Wales at St Paul's Cathedral in 1981.

Doria, now 61, was 23 when she married TV lighting director Tom Markle in Sunset Boulevard's Self-Realization Fellowship Temple two days before Christmas 1979.

All the dreams, hopes and ambitions that now face their children, Harry and Meghan, faced them.

So let us go back in time to when Doria Ragland (she now uses her maiden name) was a little girl.

Her mother, Jeanette, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a bellboy and a lift operator, both of whom worked at the smart, whites-only, five-star St Regis Hotel.

Jeanette had been previously married to a professional roller-skater, by whom she had two children — Doria's half-brother and sister.

When he skated out of her life, she was left to bring them up alone. After five years struggling as a single mother, Jeanette fell for snappy-dressing, smooth-talking Alvin Ragland and married again.

Their only child, Doria, arrived in 1956 and it was soon after her birth that Alvin uprooted the family and set out to make a new life and better himself across country in California.

He had relatives on the West Coast and for a time worked for a real estate business run by his aunt Lillie. Later, by the time Doria was five and he was setting up his modest bric-a-brac and antiques business in central Los Angeles, the marriage was crumbling.

At around that time, in Norfolk, England, Diana Spencer was born — not yet Lady Diana, as her father, Viscount ('Johnnie') Spencer, had not then succeeded to the ancient earldom.

Spencer, a former officer in the Royal Scots Greys, had been equerry to both the Queen and her father, George VI, while Diana's mother, Frances, was the younger daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy.

They lived on the Queen's Sandringham estate in Park House, a lovely Victorian pile that is now a hotel for the disabled. Park House was, in fact, where Frances was born: her late father was a great friend of the King and her mother a confidante of the Queen, later the Queen Mother.

The lives of the Spencer family and the royals were entwined and the children played together.

Diana was the Spencers' third daughter but not, alas, the longed for son who would secure continuance of the title. When baby Charles arrived three years after Diana, it was an occasion for a firework display in celebration. As a result, although her mother always denied she was a 'disappointment', Diana carried doubts throughout her life.

No such doubts, though, in Los Angeles for Doria, who got on well with her two older half-siblings, Joseph and Saundra, even though it wasn't long before her father abandoned the family home.

Joseph recalls their mother, Jeanette, having to be 'both the mother and father of the family, bent on keeping them fed, clothed and together, and succeeding'.

Here was a woman whose determination is seen in the family as having been passed down to her daughter, Doria, as well as her actress granddaughter Meghan.

For Diana, growing up meant a series of nannies as, by the time she was five, her mother was no longer at home, having fallen for wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd.

Contrary to popular gossip, her mother wasn't a so-called 'bolter' but fought in court for custody of her children — only to lose, largely because of the infamous intervention of her own mother Ruth, who sided with her son-in-law.

In Los