Did Rosie Huntington-Whiteley get her looks from Royalty? No, a bootmaker called Stump

Posted by mija on Jan 18, 2010 in News | 0 comments

Though she may be unfamiliar with the oily interiors of car repair work shops, the image of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley currently gazes out over every grimy garage in the country. As Miss January in this year’s Pirelli calendar, the stunning model poses provocatively on a beach in Brazil.
Rosie, widely tipped to be the supermodel of this decade, is one of the world’s highest-paid models after taking part in campaigns for fashion giants such as Burberry, Agent Provocateur and Victoria’s Secret.
And as The Mail on Sunday revealed earlier this month, she has a new celebrity boyfriend – French actor Olivier Martinez, the former lover of singer Kylie Minogue.
Yet it is not just the 23-year-old’s beauty that has catapulted her to stardom but speculation about her illustrious ancestry – in particular the rumour that she is a distant relative of the Royal Family. In fact, Rosie is connected to British aristocracy, but also to a poor Jewish family who fled massacres in eastern Europe in the 19th Century.
Rosie’s great-great-grandfather was Sir Herbert Huntington-Whiteley, a former Conservative MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, who was created a baronet in 1918. He had two sons, Maurice and Eric.
Maurice, a captain in the Royal Navy, married Margaret Baldwin, the daughter of former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and had three sons: Herbert, who died during the Second World War; Hugo, who is currently the 3rd Baronet; and John, who is married to Queen Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, Victoria. This has led to the confusion that Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is related to Royalty.
However Eric – Rosie’s great-grandfather – was the black sheep of the family. An RAF pilot, he married Enid Kohn, the daughter of an illiterate tailor, in 1929. His family did not attend the wedding in Kensington, West London.
Enid was descended from Hyman Stump, a Jewish bootmaker from Poland, who arrived in Britain during the 1870s and settled in Spitalfields, East London, with his wife Rosie.
Another descendant of Hyman and Rosie, Toni Price, says: ‘They came over here because of the terrible lives they led in Poland. Jewish men had to do a 25-year stint in the army. They were often never seen again. There were also the pogroms.
‘If people could get out and come here for a better life, they did. A lot of Jews just loaded up their possessions on carts, walked to a port and got on a boat. My grandfather Aubrey – one of Hyman and Rosie’s sons – was the loveliest person in the world. He and my grandmother had two haberdashery shops and they worked hard to better themselves.
Enid was the daughter of Annie, the eldest of Hyman and Rosie’s five children. Eric and Enid’s marriage produced two sons – Nigel, Rosie’s grandfather, and Philip – but Eric later abandoned his family.
Rosie was born on January 13, 1987, at the former Freedom Fields Hospital in Plymouth. She is the eldest of three children born to Nigel’s son Charles, a chartered surveyor, and his wife Fiona, a fitness instructor.
Rosie, her brother Toby, 20, and sister Florence, 17, were brought up in a farmhouse in the hamlet of Quither, just outside Tavistock, Devon, where the family kept chickens, ducks, pigs and sheep. However, Rosie always yearned to leave the countryside.
‘I was made for the city,’ she has said. ‘I knew I was going to leave Devon and that whatever I did, it would be big.’
Rosie went to St Rumon’s Church of England Infant School and St Peter’s CoE Junior School before arriving at Tavistock College where, by her own admission, she was a ‘massive flirt’.
Former schoolfriend Samantha Neale remembers: ‘I used to catch the same bus to school as her. I had brothers who were part of the in-crowd so I was allowed to sit at the back. But Rosie was new, young and quite sensible so she always sat at the front.
‘One day my mobile phone ran out of credit and she let me borrow hers to phone my mum. From then on we became quite good mates. She was pretty cool. She was really popular but also very down-to-earth.’
Even then, her family background provoked discussion among her peers. ‘We always used to tease her about her double-barrelled surname and we asked if we could meet the servants when we visited her house,’ recalls Samantha.
During the summer of 2003, just before Rosie entered the sixth form at Tavistock College, she did work experience at Profile model agency. It was to change her life.
Laura Manktelow, a Profile booker at the time, says: ‘When she walked in I thought, “Oh my God.” She was only 16 and had bad skin but she was really, really striking. She reminded me of a young Gisele Bundchen.’
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Samantha remembers how excited Rosie was about that trip to London. ‘We just couldn’t believe how cosmopolitan it seemed. I remember once we went on a school trip to London and a lot of us were overawed, but Rosie took it in her stride. I think she had relatives in London and spent time there so was comfortable finding her away around.’
Rosie left Tavistock College in 2004, midway through the sixth form. Even then her fellow pupils knew she was destined for stardom. In her school yearbook, she was voted the ‘person most likely to become a supermodel’ as well as ‘the girl with the best legs’.
That summer she signed up to Profile’s New Faces division. ‘After I finished my GCSEs, I came back to London to do some shopping,’ recalls Rosie. ‘My mum insisted that I went back to Profile to say hello to them – she’s always strict on manners. The next thing I knew, I was running around on castings, and the day after that I had a job.’
‘We are so proud,’ says her mother Fiona. ‘It never entered our heads that she might be a model. I wanted her to take her A-levels but then it all suddenly started happening and we just didn’t feel we could tell her, “No, you can’t pursue this.”
‘I started off being panicky about her getting on the Tube alone in London. Then she was being whisked off to New York. But Rosie’s got her head screwed on. She’s very kind, not at all diva-ish.’
Rosie made her debut on the New York catwalk in September 2004 alongside Naomi Campbell. It was there that designer Nicole Miller billed her as ‘the next Kate Moss’ and the rumours about her grand heritage began to surface.
Rosie says: ‘I was at the New York shows and there were all the big names there and I’m thinking, “Oh God. It’s just little old me from Devon with pictures of all these girls on my bedroom wall.”
‘I was walking down the catwalk with the most famous models. You see all the catwalk girls as amazing, perfect creatures and I would never have said that I was pretty enough.’
Many would disagree – indeed Rosie quickly became one of the most sought-after models in the world. In April 2008, she left Profile for the Models 1 agency. Within a month she had become the new face of Burberry, appearing in its autumn/winter campaign, shot by Princess Diana’s favourite photographer, Mario Testino.
But in an echo of what happened to Kate Moss following the ‘Cocaine Kate’ scandal, Rosie was dropped after one season when a photograph of the model was published with what appeared to be drugs paraphernalia.
By then she was dating Tyrone Wood, the son of Rolling Stone guitarist Ronnie. They met in Barcelona in June 2007. Despite the couple declaring their love for one another, the relationship ended last November and now the model is dating handsome Martinez, 43.
It is now more than five years since Rosie was touted as the next Kate Moss. ‘I don’t think anyone can fill Kate’s shoes,’ she once said. ‘And I don’t want to become the new someone else. I’m Rosie.’
Her claim on the Royal throne may have evaporated, but with a drugs ‘scandal’, a famous boyfriend and a clutch of lucrative contracts behind her, she seems certain to inherit Moss’s title as queen of the catwalk.