Philippa Charlotte “Pippa” Middleton was born 6 September 1983. She is an British party planner and sister of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.

Her big breakthrough to the big public was on 29 April 2011, when she was the maid of honour at her sister’s wedding to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. Prince William is second in the line of succession to Elizabeth II’s sixteen thrones.

Pippa was born in 1983, the second of the three children of Michael Middleton, who was then a British Airways flight dispatcher, and his wife Carole, who was a former flight attendant. In the mid 1980s, when her two eldest children were at a nursery school and the family was living at Bradfield Southend, Middleton’s mother set up ‘Party Pieces’, a company which began by making party bags and went on to sell party supplies and decorations by mail order. By 1995 the firm, run by both parents, was so successful that it moved into a range of farm buildings at Ashampstead Common, and since then the Middleton parents are reported to have become millionaires.