Only a foolhardy woman would organise a hen night that sweeps in her mum, sisters, and her mum’s best friend and assistant, but glaringly omit to ask her future mother-in-law. So, why did Holly Ramsay (daughter of chef Gordon) apparently open the door to a lifetime of conflict and pain by not asking fiancé Adam Peaty’s mum Caroline, who helped steer her son to Olympic gold? The answer, as so often in the UK, could well be class.
The Ramsays have shot up in the world and now belong to that weird upper echelon of society comprised of famous people, the seriously wealthy and the posh. Needless to say, Holly was privately educated from the word go, attending Montessori nursery school and hanging out with the Beckham kids.
Adam, by contrast, comes from a very modest background. Raised in Wattisham, Suffolk, his mother Caroline was a nursery manager, while his dad Mark worked as a bricklayer and then a supermarket caretaker. This meant they had to make sacrifices to fund their son’s sporting talent, including Caroline rising at 4am to take him to swimming practice.
Adam has often been photographed with his mum beaming and wearing his medals around her own neck, looking like the textbook example of a close-knit, proud, down-to-earth family. Reports suggest that some of Peaty’s working-class relatives feel alienated by the celebrity lifestyle he now leads and perceive that he has “forgotten where he came from”.
Never underestimate the emotional havoc that can be wreaked within families when someone “marries up”, or “down”. Especially if one side proves snooty, another is chippy and other relatives start pitching into the dispute. Class warfare is Britain’s favourite leisure activity, with no sin greater than the family member who’s “changed”.
Adam Peaty’s mum Caroline expressed her distress through social media posts featuring quotes about heartbreak. One recent post stated: “When you love someone, you protect them from the pain, you don’t become the cause of it,” which she captioned: “The ones I love are the people who hurt me the most.”
And then aunt Lousie weighed in, writing in a now-private Instagram post: “@hollyramsayy I’m so glad that you had a great hen do. As a bride, you deserve that. However, as a person, you were divisive and hurtful towards a woman who I have loved and continue to love deeply.
“A woman who opened her home and heart to you. You decided, for whatever reason, not to invite her, your prospective mother-in-law, to your hen night, yet Adam invited his father-in-law, your dad, to his stag night,” the message continued.
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Adam Peaty’s mother Caroline is said to have been upset at not being invited to her future daughter-in-law’s hen do (Getty)
The slighted family is where I place my natural allegiance, as a publican’s daughter who was looked down on by my own father-in-law, although his disdain took a while to emerge. I knew I was marrying into what you could call the Scottish Borders’ squirearchy, but I hoped I could charm them around. My in-laws spent most of their spare time hunting, shooting and fishing, and their circle encompassed local landowners, including a couple of dukes. My husband went to a leading public school and used to joke that his father had intended him for the daughter of a laird, preferably someone who owned a distillery.
Staying at my in-laws’ freezing manse, with its stable yard and small ruin in the grounds, involved dinner parties with decanters and my husband acting as unofficial butler. It was a million miles away from the tiny cottage adjacent to the pub where I grew up, where my four siblings and I shared bedrooms and crammed rowdily around a small wooden table for meals, licking plates to annoy my mum and swapping unflattering stories.
Not that any of this mattered, or so I thought. My future father-in-law made it clear I was preferable to the “dreadful socialist” girlfriend he’d once dated and the “very common” one, who didn’t know how to use a soup spoon. He was reassured by my RP voice and treated me rather like an amusing showgirl – until, that is, I became editor of The Erotic Review and he decided “your sort of people and our sort of people are very different”.
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Classy: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (Getty)
It didn’t end there. There was an unkind letter in spidery writing informing me I was vulgar, my husband was told I didn’t know how to behave, and it was an indictment of my character that I hadn’t joined the WI and didn’t arrange flowers or play golf.
Increasingly, my family got sucked in. He hadn’t approved of our wedding party, which was an uproarious celebration at my family’s pub, or even the lovely suite of rooms my aunt had generously provided for them as accommodation. I tried for years to heal the rupture, writing emollient letters and sending presents which he never acknowledged. He carried his feud to the grave and, for my part, I hugely resented his efforts to put a wedge between me and my spouse.
We have also seen this kind of family infighting before over mixed-class weddings in the Royal Family. The media circus involving Prince Harry, the then Meghan Markle, and her estranged father Thomas and tell-all sister Samantha, was the epitome of “she thinks she’s too good for us”. Although Thomas Markle went full declassé by staging a paid photoshoot for a tabloid pre-wedding, resulting in him being “banned” from his own daughter’s wedding.
Far more painful (to this viewer at least) was the intense snobbery faced by the Princess of Wales’ family before her marriage to Prince William. It was leaked that Kate and Pippa Middleton were called the “Wisteria sisters” for being social climbers and Carole Middleton was criticised for chewing gum in public (apparently it was a Nicorette as she’d given up smoking).
Cruel people muttered “doors to manual” behind Kate’s back on the grounds that Carol had once been an air stewardess. Within the royal family, it was rumoured that several of the most self-aggrandising members of the family looked down their noses at the upstart commoner. Even now, 14 years after the wedding, it’s clear that while there’s mutual respect between King Charles, Queen Camilla, and Michael and Carole Middleton, they aren’t what you’d call natural chums.
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The uproar within the Beckham family following Brooklyn’s marriage to Nicola Peltz should have been a cautionary tale to the Peaty clan (Getty)
My own gentle, kind mother’s mantra, that you should treat everyone exactly the same way, no matter their background, struck me as being far more classy than the behaviour of my own father-in-law. I got a lot of consolation from friends with similar stories. One friend from a working-class background had been drunkenly insulted by her upper-middle-class mother-in-law at her wedding and had promptly slapped her (I actually witnessed this moment). Another pal from a small northern semi said she was only really accepted into her aristocratic husband’s family after 20 years of wedded bliss and three children.
Mind you, it’s not always the posher or more successful family’s fault, by any means. Some possessive, boundary-enforcing clans want to keep their kids away from interfering, upwardly mobile types. I once attended a wedding where the night before the nuptials, the proudly working-class mother-of-the-bride phoned the groom’s well-heeled parents to say the bride was sleeping with another man – a lie designed to derail the ceremony. But it gave everyone collywobbles when the vicar reached the line, “if anyone knows just cause or impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in marriage…”.
But what makes the Holly Ramsay and Adam Peaty debacle truly astonishing is the fact they must have observed the implosion of the Beckham family following Brooklyn’s marriage to billionaire’s daughter Nicola Peltz, since the two families are thick as thieves. Having seen the carnage of that rupture, you’d think the Ramsays would bend over backwards to not upset Caroline Peaty, whatever the underlying reasons for the rift. Let’s just hope good sense is restored, olive branches are extended, and that Holly and Adam realise no marriage is entirely about the happy duo. It takes two tribes and a peace pipe to make a wedding.
