'Why my mum walked me down the aisle'

Meghan’s mother Doria is set to take a leading role in Saturday’s ceremony — and hurrah for that, says Johanna Thomas-Corr, as she recalls her own non-traditional wedding
Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

You'd need a stony heart not to feel for Meghan Markle’s pre-wedding predicament. Even The Crown’s majordomo Tommy Lascelles might twitch his moustache in sympathy. After a humiliating paparazzi episode, it seems Thomas Markle will not be walking his daughter down the aisle of the Windsor chapel on Saturday. With his health in question and celebrity news site TMZ seemingly reporting from his loo, he has unintentionally cast a shadow over his daughter’s wedding.

But I think Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine put it best: “Can somebody tell Meghan Markle’s father that he’s not even going to be in the top 30 most embarrassing people at that reception.”

Markle’s parents divorced when she was six. Her father lives an obscure life in Mexico and has never met Prince Harry. Her mother, Doria Ragland, is a social worker and yoga teacher, a relaxed, unflappable African-American with braids and a nose ring who Prince Harry thinks is “amazing”.

She may be, in her daughter’s words, “a free spirit” but she’s clearly the more dependable of the two parents, the one most qualified to give her daughter away this weekend. Leaving aside the fact that a “giving away” ritual feels a little feudal, why wasn’t Ragland the first to be asked? Tradition?

There are few phrases I find more depressing than “Because it’s tradition, isn’t it?” So often what they mean is: “I refuse to question sexist wedding customs because then I’ll have to start questioning everything, and frankly that sounds exhausting.” But I did just this and no one died. In fact, everyone found it quite refreshing.

When I got married 10 years ago, I insisted that my mother walk me down the aisle: two sets of heels clicking and scraping down the stone floor, fingers tightly entwined, doing our best not to topple down the two flights of stairs we had to descend in front of 120 guests.

Johanna Thomas-Corr with her mum

Four hours later — still standing in her glorious blue-silk stilettoes — she delivered a kick-ass speech that spanned the full repertoire of teenage-crush anecdotes and crowd-pleasing football jokes. “Johanna grew up in what some would think of as an unconventional family,” she said. “I always thought we were very normal.”

My parents divorced when I was three and my father’s presence in my life was patchy thereafter. It would have been farcical for him to give me away. Mum took sincere joy in the occasion. A teacher and local politician, she had addressed rallies and carried the coffin at her mother’s funeral.

You could say she doesn’t stand on ceremony but that’s precisely what she does — she gets up and speaks out when she’s not supposed to. She also quietly shouldered the responsibility of parenting two children alone: staying up late to iron our school uniforms and waking early to make our packed lunches, ferrying us to and from school and scraping money for holidays, birthdays and school trips. Instead of feeling hard done by, she treated her burden as a privilege. She was the one who had walked through my life with me and she was there to report back.

I also had stuff I wanted to say. Pages and pages — all of it in “defiance of protocol”. We made up the script for our ceremony (my husband promised to try and make me “laugh every day”; everyone thought he said “make love” to me every day) and it was officiated by two friends — one is a gay druid.

Some guests were left scratching their heads that the wedding was hosted by my beloved stepmother who had divorced my father a few years previously. But her house is the most magical place I know.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Royal Wedding Preparations

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Some, I’m sure, viewed this arrangement — as well as the uniquely warm relationship between his ex-wives — as a double defenestration of my dad. But you’d have to be insane to use your own wedding for reprisals. He was happy to read a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, which made sense as he was the one who’d given me a love of music and verse.

It ended in praise of: “Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever”. My husband’s family thought all this made for the most bonkersly wayward wedding ever staged. My own family thought it was hilariously quaint. I sense a similar dynamic at play in the Windsor-Markle camps.

Never do you hear the “it’s tradition, isn’t it?” remark deployed more indiscriminately by otherwise intelligent people than when it comes to weddings: it has to be the man who proposes, he has to place himself in debt to buy a ring, it must take place in church despite the fact the groom posts Richard Dawkins memes on Facebook. You should change your name. All because “it’s tradition, isn’t it?”

No. You don’t have to do any of this. But people do for some reason. I’ve known situations where the Awol father-of-the-bride is yanked back into the picture like Seth Lord in The Philadelphia Story. Or if the dad is indisposed there’s a desperate hunt for another half-sentient male to confer some kind of respectability on the nuptials.

Heaven forbid the woman who gave birth to her should be given the honour. And we’ve all been to weddings where the father says “charge your glasses” (a phrase never uttered in any other context) before mumbling out his daughter’s LinkedIn page.

Meanwhile, the mother hides red-faced under some outsized millinery operation. Because, well, that’s tradition, isn’t it? And despite the fact a mother’s imprint is often all over her daughter’s wedding, it’s the tradition that renders her passive, mute. I don’t want to have to sit through another wedding where no woman’s voice is heard. It’s too chilling, too much The Handmaid’s Tale.

I can hear Tommy Lascelles harrumphing that this is how the rot sets in. That such displays of individualism will lead to the collapse of everything. But I’ve witnessed the same happen in reverse. Once you accept the prescribed way of doing things you quickly find yourself trapped under the dead arm of convention, wondering why you’ve spent £500 on sugared almonds when sugared almonds are disgusting.

At Saturday’s ceremony the stakes are higher. The symbolic power of a black woman with braids walking her daughter down the aisle of St George’s Chapel before the Queen has the potential to transform the way we think about culture, history, families — and, at the very least, sexist weddings.

Overnight, Ragland could become the patron saint of single mums. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a year or two, a whole generation of young women are asking their mothers to do the honours.

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