Royal Wedding Reveals Hidden Heartbreak of Grandparental Estrangement
When Peter Phillips and his bride-to-be Harriet Sperling attended the King's Easter Sunday service at Windsor last weekend, it marked Harriet's formal debut among the high-profile royal family she will soon join. Accompanying the NHS worker and single mother on this undoubtedly daunting occasion was her thirteen-year-old daughter Georgina, for whom the very public event must have been even more overwhelming.
The Unseen Observer
What neither Harriet nor Georgina could have known was that while they were nervously meeting their new royal relatives, their every move was being closely watched—and indeed prayed over—by someone from Georgina's old family. Wishing them both to shine on their royal debut was a man neither has ever met: Georgina's paternal grandfather, Domenico Di Martino.
Mr Di Martino is one of an estimated two million older people in the UK suffering from what is known as 'grandparental estrangement,' having lost contact with his own son years before that son became Harriet's first husband and Georgina's father. In a candid and moving interview, his first ever given, the eighty-year-old retiree reveals how he came to miss out on being part of his granddaughter's life and explains why he blames himself for his family's fracture.
'It breaks my heart that she's my oldest grandchild—but I don't know her at all,' Mr Di Martino told the Daily Mail. 'She could walk past me and not even know who I am—and that makes me very sad.'
The Blended Family Dynamic
Much attention has focused on the royal family welcoming their second blended family when Peter and Harriet marry on June 6. The groom has two daughters from his first marriage—fifteen-year-old Savannah and fourteen-year-old Isla—who will become older stepsisters to Georgina. This mirrors the situation when Princess Beatrice married financier Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, who already had a young son from a previous relationship before they had daughters together.
However, the details of how Harriet's first marriage breakdown was foreshadowed—and, according to Mr Di Martino, partly caused by an earlier divorce—have never been made public until now. Mr Di Martino's son and Harriet's ex-husband is forty-four-year-old fitness instructor Antonio St John Sperling.
A Father's Regret
Mr Di Martino has neither seen nor spoken to Antonio for almost twenty-five years and believes his son was left with 'deep emotional wounds' that he may have carried into his marriage. 'I left my wife and Antonio's mother Sonia around twenty-five years ago and he took it really badly,' Mr Di Martino explained. 'When I left his mother, it was hard for him, and he never recovered from that.'
The retiree revealed he was not invited to Antonio and Harriet's marriage sixteen years ago and has never met or even spoken on the phone with his former daughter-in-law. He only learned about their wedding—and later, when Georgina was just two, their separation—from third parties.
'Antonio lost his wife and daughter and that must have left him very sad,' he said. 'I don't think he's recovered from that along with me leaving his mum. Sadly, Sonia and I splitting meant that he carried a lot of emotional baggage into his marriage, and it clearly was too much for them both. He was very damaged and probably still is.'
The Silent Epidemic
Grandparental estrangement is so prevalent that as many as one in seven grandparents are thought to experience it—a number so high it has been described as 'a silent epidemic.' Mr Di Martino admits he has closely followed every mention of Georgina in the media since the announcement of her mother's impending marriage and has found himself feeling close to the former daughter-in-law he never met.
'I wish her all the best in the world and I'm very happy that she's going to be a member of the Royal Family,' he said. 'I've never met Harriet, but I feel as if I have a connection to her and I'm sure she'll make a wonderful wife for the late Queen's grandson. I never want any harm to come to her or my granddaughter even though I'm not even sure that they know of my existence.'
Family History and Consequences
After Mr Di Martino left Sonia, Antonio stopped using his father's surname and took his mother's maiden name of Sperling instead. 'That hurt me a lot too,' Mr Di Martino admitted. 'The Di Martino name is more than one thousand years old and very well known in the part of Italy I'm from. Antonio came from a very good family, but his emotional problems got too much for him.'
The pensioner emigrated to Britain almost sixty years ago from southern Italy and worked as a hairdresser, running his own successful salon in Cambridgeshire where he still lives alone. He met Sonia in the late 1970s, they married in September 1981, and Antonio arrived soon after.
Recalling Antonio's childhood, Mr Di Martino revealed his son attended the prestigious Kings College School in Cambridge where annual fees are currently close to thirty thousand pounds, and that he tried to give his son 'the best of everything.' 'My salon was very successful, and I made a lot of money,' he said. 'I gave my son the best life I possibly could and thought I had done a good job. For the first twenty years he was my son but then he went his own way because he was more loyal to his mother than me.'
Reflections and Regrets
Antonio was a prolific rugby player who represented his county and played for professional club Northampton's under-eighteen and under-twenty-one teams. He was on the verge of breaking into the first team before a knee injury forced him to give up the game. He then qualified as a professional fitness instructor and set up his own gym in the Cambridgeshire area.
Sonia died following a short illness in 2017 at age sixty-five, with Mr Di Martino admitting he did not even attend her funeral. They also have another daughter who lives in London and is two years younger than Antonio, but Mr Di Martino revealed he only has intermittent contact with her.
As he looks back on his life, Mr Di Martino now regrets leaving Sonia because of the impact it had on Antonio and his marriage to Harriet. 'I loved my wife very much, but we split; it happened to a lot of people at the time,' he said. 'That was a mistake which I now regret. Who knows, if it hadn't happened, Antonio may still have been happily married to Harriet.'
Harriet's Journey
Harriet has previously spoken frankly about her struggles as a single mother following the breakdown of her marriage. In a first-person essay for Women Alive, she revealed how she and Georgina survived 'against the odds' as they 'journeyed ten years with only each other' while she juggled parenting with working on the NHS frontline.
She also confessed that it 'has often felt hard to imagine' anyone else coming into their lives in the piece published in March 2024. Soon after, however, Harriet met Peter when their paths crossed at a sporting event, and he is said to have quickly become besotted with her.
Harriet and Peter are set to marry at All Saints Church in Kemble, Cirencester, in a private ceremony. Peter is the eldest grandchild of the late Queen, son of Princess Anne and her first husband Mark Phillips, and is nineteenth in the line of succession to the throne.
