Mixed-class marriages expose harsh truths for couples

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 her fiance 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”.

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. 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 business.

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 club 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.