As The Duchess of Cambridge takes a whistle-stop tour of the United Kingdom on the Royal Train with The Duke of Cambridge, new details have emerged about volunteer efforts during the pandemic.
As revealed exclusively in The Sun, Kate was paired with an 85-year-old full-time carer named Len Gardner through the NHS Volunteer Responder Check In And Chat scheme aimed at making sure elderly people were not lonely and made two phone calls with him during the first lockdown earlier this year.
All this month, as part of their Christmas Together campaign, The Sun is appealing to you to offer your time to contact people who might be feeling lonely or cut off this winter, just as Kate has been doing.
Gardner, who spent his life working in the textile industry, said of the phone calls, in which the Duchess urged him to call her Catherine, that he was flabbergasted when he found out who he’d been paired with, and that “never in my wildest imagination did I think I would be talking on the phone to the future Queen of England.
“I will treasure our conversations for the rest of my life. Those calls helped me because they gave me something to look forward to.”
Gardner, who has been taking care of his 84-year-old wife who is living with Alzheimer’s, is also battling bladder cancer and has been having radio-therapy and last week had an operation. The first call with Kate came on 13 May, and Gardner said: “I was flabbergasted when I found out who would be calling. The first question I asked was, ‘How do I address you?’ She said, ‘Call me Catherine’.
“After the first two sentences, I didn’t feel like I was talking to someone so important.”
Kate, who was isolating with William and the children at Anmer Hall, told Gardner that she was watching Prince George and Princess Charlotte play outside while they chatted.
Len exclaimed: “For 30 minutes, Len and Catherine had a wonderful conversation. She told me Prince George and Princess Charlotte were playing in the garden and she was keeping an eye on them through the window.”
Gardner told her all about his love of Italian food and cooking, and the Duchess asked if he made his own pasta.
Grandad Len, who has two grown-up sons, Ian, 57, and Andrew, 54, told the royal that he didn’t have a pasta maker or the special flour needed to make the dough, and revealed to The Sun: “I said I don’t, because I haven’t got a pasta machine and in any case, you have to use a special flour.
“About three days after our conversation, a brand-new pasta machine arrived from the Duchess. Two days later I got two kilos of ‘00’ (the Italian grading system) flour from Buckingham Palace.
“I can tell you, this lady you see on television that goes into the crowds and talks to people—what you see is what you get. She is a very, very nice person.”
Gardner wrote to Kate thanking her for the gift, which he now uses once a week, and enclosed a couple of articles he had written for a local magazine, as well as a photo of himself and Shirley on holiday.
The reply from Kate and William is now framed on Len’s “Royal Wall” in his living room, above a letter from the Queen from 2018 congratulating him and Shirley on their 60th wedding anniversary.
The letter says:
“Dear Len,
It was so lovely to talk to you last week and I very much enjoyed on chat! Thank you for sharing your memories of marking in the card industry and your time with the scouts. It is fantastic that you are now passing as your knowledge to a new generation.
“I do hope you and Shirley are well and still managing during this difficult time. It is wonderful to hear that your community has recognized that it’s sometimes the simple things which make the biggest difference at times like this.”
He didn’t expect to get another call from her when she called again about a month later.
“We spoke for about 40 minutes and I learned more about the Duchess’s children,” Gardner said.
“Apparently they have thousands of sheep down at Sandringham and her eldest children couldn’t understand how we get wool without killing the animal. So she took them down to the sheds to watch the sheep being sheared.
“It was the sort of conversation I might have with anyone about their family. She didn’t mention William much. But I gabble on a lot.”
The pair also talked about the Scouts, which both Len and Shirley have been very involved with throughout their lives.
Kate, a former Brownie who was this year named joint President of the Scout Association, also reassured Len she had been abiding by all the Covid rules.
Embed from Getty ImagesHe also revealed his hopes of meeting the royal in person, saying, “The Duke and Duchess are a brilliant couple for doing this kind of thing. They really seem to want to reach out to people.
“I think the Duchess felt she wanted to speak to other people outside the Palace and in the north.”
With the Together Campaign, a coalition of community groups and organisations including the Royal Voluntary Service, which is working to combat the epidemic of loneliness, The Sun is asking YOU to give your time to run errands or make a “check-in-and-chat” call to someone who needs it.
The Royal Voluntary Service runs the NHS Volunteer Responder programme with the GoodSAM app, which recruited more than 500,000 volunteers during the first lockdown but is now in desperate need of more to get through winter.
Catherine Johnstone CBE, the Royal Voluntary Service CEO, said: “We are incredibly grateful to The Duchess of Cambridge for kindly supporting the NHS Volunteer Responders programme.
“Her ‘check-in-and-chat’ call to Len has meant the world to him. It’s so important to highlight the power of conversation . . . you really can make someone’s day.”
And today, The Duchess of Cambridge has finally met Len Gardner, and was introduced to his delighted wife Shirley, as she and the Duke of Cambridge stopped off in Batley on their three-day tour around the country by royal train.
Children and pensioners must have wondered what was going on when dozens of police officers turned up at their cul-de-sac in the West Yorkshire town.
All was revealed when a car pulled up with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge inside.
Accompanied by the brass band, William and Kate walked to Mr Gardner’s house, where he helped his wife to come outside.
Embed from Getty ImagesBoth couples stood chatting and even had a little dance as the band played.
After the couple had left, and before heading in for a celebratory cup of tea, Mr Gardner told Sky News about his lockdown chats with Kate.
“It was like talking to you,” he said. “Just ordinary talk after the first sentence, which was ‘how do I address you?’, because I like to do things right. She said ‘just call me Catherine’.”
He said the couple seemed “very interested in people and that’s a very good thing, especially with the virus at the moment”.
“To come out to a place like this and talk to people like us, it’s wonderful.”
And it seems that Mr Gardner and Kate will keep in touch.
Embed from Getty ImagesHe said: “They are such busy people but I just said ‘would it be alright if I write to you again, if I drop you a line every now and again?’ and she said ‘I’d be thrilled to bits because I’m delighted to read your letters’.”
William and Kate’s train tour is intended to shine a light on all those little acts of kindness that have taken place up and down the country during the coronavirus pandemic.
The couple set off from London Euston on Sunday evening for the 1,250-mile UK tour.
It is a series of visits to celebrate some of the good that has come out of a terrible year for many, with surprises that they hope will make people smile, just like Mr Gardner.
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