The Ladies Spencer cover the latest issue of Tatler. These are the three daughters of Charles Spencer, the Earl Spencer, who was Princess Diana’s only brother (and he inherited the family pile, Althorp). Lady Kitty Spencer is the oldest at 34, and then there are twins Lady Eliza and Lady Amelia Spencer, who are 32 years old. They have a younger brother, but obviously he’s not included on Tatler’s cover. Their mother is Victoria Lockwood, who divorced Charles Spencer when the girls were pretty young. Victoria pretty much raised the brood in her homeland, South Africa, but now the sisters all live mostly in London. Whenever people talk about the Spencer girls, they always bring up Diana and try to compare the nieces to their aunt. For what it’s worth, none of Charles’s daughters look like Diana – they all take after their mother. They’re all blonde and leggy, so close enough to Diana, I guess. Anyway, this Tatler piece made my head spin with all of the posh name-dropping and well-heeled fabulousness. At one point, Kitty does reference her cousin, the Prince of Wales.
While their mother brought them up in South Africa, they returned for holidays with their father at Althorp. Kitty read psychology, politics and English at the University of Cape Town, spent a year in Florence studying Italian and history of art, and later moved to London to study luxury brand management at Regent’s University London. While working for a charity, she met fashion tycoon Michael Lewis (chair of The Foschini Group, which owns Whistles, Hobbs, Phase Eight and White Stuff, among others – media reports say he is worth around £80 million), now 65, and married him in July 2021. Of the twins, Amelia was a wedding planner in South Africa after studying corporate communications at the University of Cape Town, where she met personal trainer Greg Mallett – they married in South Africa in March 2023. Eliza, ‘older by one minute’, graduated cum laude in psychology and criminology from Cape Town and considered going into interior design before joining her sisters in London.
Here, Kitty and her husband live in Marylebone with their nearly two-year-old daughter, Athena, and the twins 15 minutes away from each other in Fulham, Amelia with Greg and Eliza with her long-standing entrepreneur boyfriend, Channing Millerd. Kitty also spends five months of the year in France, at their house near Èze on the Riviera; as a fan of Hollywood autobiographies, she particularly enjoys that ‘David Niven lived near our house in France – we do a Niven walk twice a week when we are there’.
Kitty’s involvement in Centrepoint now dates back 10 years. She credits its visibility somewhat to her aunt Diana, Princess of Wales: ‘I think she put the name out there. Centrepoint has been a cherished charity that my family and I have supported for many years. I’m extremely proud of my cousin Prince William for all he does and continues to do to support Centrepoint and the vital work they provide to homeless young people.’
Kitty is an ambassador for the charity’s independent living programme, which provides low-cost housing, enabling young people to live where they can work and have enough left for other essential expenditures. ‘[It’s] trying to break that vicious cycle and allow people to get on their feet and work their way up the employment ladder,’ she says. ‘The thing I’ve always loved about Centrepoint is just how practical it is. It’s not simply providing a much-needed roof over someone’s head: they’ll train you, they’ll dress you for job interviews. Their goal is to get these people through their system. They’re just an amazing team and the confidence and the sense of identity that they help give to people who have been stripped of it…’
LOL, Kitty is a much more effective advocate for Centrepoint than their royal patron. William makes regular visits to Centrepoint, but those appearances are usually about “Peggington, the Savior of Homelessness” photo-ops. Anyway, there’s a lot of messiness around their father these days – Charles is getting divorced again, and it turns out he was having an affair – but the Spencer girls avoid speaking about him. I’ve always gotten the impression that they aren’t particularly close to Charles at all, and even in this piece, they reserve all of their warmth for their mom. Ah well – the Spencer family is famously as dysfunctional as the Windsor clan. It’s interesting that the Spencer ladies only name-drop William too – there’s no mention of Harry, even though I’m absolutely sure that Harry has always maintained closer relations with his Spencer relatives than William ever has.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Tatler.
