1. Elizabeth’s birth in 1926 was attended by the Secretary of the Interior. She became heiress to the throne at the age of 10. He never went to school.
2. Elizabeth received her first corgi, Susan, on her 18th birthday in 1944. Susan once bit the ankle of a royal clock, Leonard Hubbard, and has her own Wikipedia page, with sections which include “royal life” and “death and legacy.” ”.
3. Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten in 1947. The four-tiered, 2.74-foot-tall cake was baked by McVitie’s, of Hobnob’s later fame.
4. The tradition of a great politician attending royal births ended in 1948 with the birth of Prince Charles. Buckingham Palace said Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, considered it “unnecessary to continue a practice for which there is no legal requirement”.
5. A biographer said Elizabeth endured a 30-hour birth before giving birth by cesarean section. Philip was not present, and at one point he went to play squash.
––-
This article first appeared in our daily newsletter, First Edition. Sign up below.
––-
6. After George died of lung cancer on February 6, 1952, some 300,000 people passed in front of his coffin at Westminster Hall. Many thousands waited in line overnight.
7. Upon receiving the news that she was now queen, Elizabeth immediately returned from a visit to Kenya. He was 25 years old. Many years later, he said: “In a way, I had no learning. My father died too young. “A Guardian editorial said:” It’s a great legacy and a heavy burden that now falls on the girl who becomes queen. “
8. The New York Times marked George’s death and Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne at the age of 25 with a three-tier headline and full width in capital letters. Twelve years later, he marked the death of former President Herbert Hoover in two columns.
9. Only a woman other than the queen was present at her proclamation.
10. The Cabinet agreed that the coronation should not take place until next year due to severe constraints on the country’s finances. The then Minister of Housing, Harold Macmillan, stated in his diary: “This year the bailiffs can be there; the Crown itself can be pawned. “
Princess Elizabeth and newlywed Prince Philip greet the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on November 20, 1947. Photo: AP
11. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was initially skeptical about the wisdom of televising the event, and told parliament: “It would be inappropriate for the whole ceremony, not only in its secular but also religious and spiritual aspects, presented as if it were a theatrical performance ”.
12. A committee was established to decide which articles could be sanctioned as official memorabilia for the coronation. The panel, chaired by Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard, the 16th Duke of Norfolk, unanimously agreed to reject a request for crowned embroidered arms.
13. There was some anger in Scotland for the queen to be known as Elizabeth II, as her predecessor had not ruled north of the border. When mailboxes with E II R appeared, some removed the II. They were vandalized with tar or a hammer and, in one case, destroyed with a gelignite bomb. From then on, the boxes of Scottish pillars bore the crown of Scotland.
14. Despite Churchill’s initial reservations, the coronation was televised. Although only 2.5 million households had a TV, 40% of the country, or 20 million people, crowded into the living rooms to watch it, while 12 million listened to it on the radio. .
15. In a 1950s memoir, You’ve Never Had It So Good by Stephen F Kelly, Chris Prior — a boy at the time — recalled that the whole family was going to look at a small set at his home. tia. “The cat was so agitated by all the people there that it went up the chimney and then it fell and there was soot everywhere,” he said.
16. The ceremony cost £ 1.57 million, equivalent to £ 47 million today. There were 8,000 guests and 40,000 in attendance at the parade.
17. At least one guest, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, whose full surname was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, had attended three previous coronations. He was born in 1872.
18. When Elizabeth was crowned, the British Empire had 70 overseas territories and was fighting wars against independence movements in Egypt and Kenya. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people living under British colonial rule fell from 700 million to 5 million.
19. The average salary in 1953 was £ 9.25 a week. The maximum rate of income tax was 97.5%. The print edition of The Guardian cost 3p.
20. The rationing of sweets ended on February 6, 1953, which led the children to go to the shops in search of candy apples and nougat sticks.
Inspecting sheep at an agricultural fair in Australia in 1954. Photo: Alamy
21. During a world tour in 1954, the queen was filmed throwing a pair of tennis shoes and a racket at Philip and shouting at him as he ran out of the chalet they shared in Australia. The camera crew exhibited the film and handed it to the royal press secretary. The incident was later fictionalized in The Crown.
22. According to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, in May 1954, after a six-month absence from the tour, the Queen and Philip greeted five-year-old Charles and three-year-old Anne with a handshake.
23. Philip once gave the queen a washing machine.
24. Andrew and Edward, born in 1960 and 1964, were the first children born to a monarch in service in a century, and are likely to be the only ones for at least the next century.
25. In her book on Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage, My Husband and I, Majesty’s editor-in-chief Ingrid Seward wrote that when Andrew was five, two boyfriends threw him into a pile of we do after trying to hit the legs of the royal horses with a big stick.
26. Seward also reports that Andrew once received a black eye for a footman, who later offered his resignation. The queen rejected it because she assumed Andrew deserved it.
27. In 1965, Tony Benn, then the postmaster general, tried to get the Queen’s approval for his plan to remove her image from the stamps. He received a letter saying, “The queen was not as enthusiastic about these designs as she is sometimes.”
28. The Queen’s private secretary, Lord Charteris, said that his greatest regret was the eight days it took him to visit Aberfan after the 1966 coal landslide that killed 144 people.
29. The Queen has addressed the nation every Christmas, except in 1969, when a documentary, Royal Family, was aired. About two-thirds of the country saw it, but it was never shown in its entirety again, although for a brief period last year, it appeared on YouTube.
30. In 1971, a Gallup opinion poll quoted in parliament found that 57% of the public thought that the queen should get a “salary increase” to double her civilian subsidy to $ 1 million. pounds sterling.
Making his first Christmas Day television show in the nation, in 1957. Photo: PA
31. The following year, the Treasury reached an agreement with the palace that states that deputies could only vote to increase the civil list, not to reduce it.
32. A prominent Conservative said in a letter to the Chancellor, published many years later, that it was essential to reach an agreement to avoid the risk that a Labor government could reduce the civil list. John Boyd-Carpenter wrote, “Let’s get things organized so the queen doesn’t have to re-expose herself to that.”
33. The 25th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne, the Silver Jubilee, was marked in 1977 by a tour of 36 counties in the United Kingdom. He also visited abroad in nine countries.
34. Covering the Guardian’s holidays, Martin Wainwright wrote that the celebrations “continue to spread to all walks of life.” He reported that 100 “jubilee coconuts” had been sent from the Bahamas as a gesture of goodwill to save a Sussex village party that had “a shy but no nuts.”
35. The Royal Collection Trust maintains a list of animals donated to the Queen. They include four swans, many horses, two pygmy hippos, a Nile crocodile, a lazy one in 1968, another lazy one in 1976, and in 1977 a big-tailed dunnart.
36. In an eight-page supplement the day before Charles’s wedding to Diana in 1981, The Guardian published pictures of 12 of his alleged ex-girlfriends.
37. In 1990, the government of John Major agreed on a financing list for the next decade that would allow for 7.5% inflation each year. In contrast, annual inflation was around 3.7%. As a result, the palace amassed a surplus of £ 35 million, including £ 12 million in interest.
38. Two hundred and twenty-five firefighters used 6,750 tons of water to put out the fire that destroyed Windsor Castle in 1992. An estimate of repairs of up to £ 60 million caused public outrage. to pay the bill and the Queen’s agreement to start paying income tax the following year.
39. One of the few times the queen has cried in public was the closure of the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1997.
40. Immediately after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when the Queen was widely criticized for appearing insensitive in her response, polls found that 72% of people described her as out of touch. and only 38% said they expected the monarchy to survive. .
Celebrations in Portsmouth for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Photo: PA
41. The hems of the queen’s skirts are heavy to prevent them from being lifted unintentionally. Meanwhile, the legs of his coats are said to be generously cut to make it easier to shake.
42. In 2000 it was reported that the Queen kept a Big Mouth Billy Bass (a novelty animatronic singing fish that briefly had a degree of popularity that now seems inexplicable) on a piano in Balmoral.
43. The Queen has sent 300,000 congratulatory messages to the centenarians. There were about 300 centenarians in 1952. By 2020 there were 15,120. When the Queen Mother had a …