1. Elizabeth’s birth was attended by the Minister of the Interior in 1926. She became heir to the throne at the age of 10. She never went to school.
2. Elizabeth received her first corgi, Susan, on her 18th birthday in 1944. Susan once bit the ankle of King Leonard Hubbard’s royal watch and has her own Wikipedia page, with sections including “royal life” and “death and heritage. “
3. Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten in 1947. The cake, four levels and 9 feet (2.74 meters) high, was baked by McVitie’s, with the subsequent glory of Hobnob.
4. The tradition of a high-ranking politician attending royal births ended in 1948 with the birth of Prince Charles. Buckingham Palace said Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, said it was “unnecessary to continue a practice for which there is no legal requirement”.
5. One biographer said that Elizabeth suffered a 30-hour birth before giving birth by caesarean section. Philip was not present and at one point went to play squash.
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6. After George died of lung cancer on February 6, 1952, about 300,000 people passed by his coffin in Westminster Hall. Many thousands waited in line at night.
7. Upon receiving the news that she was now queen, Elizabeth immediately flew away from a visit to Kenya. She was 25 years old. Many years later, she said, “In a way, I haven’t had an apprenticeship. My father died too young. ” An editorial in the Guardian reads: “A great legacy – and a heavy burden – now falls on the girl who becomes queen.”
8. The New York Times marked the death of George and Elizabeth’s accession to the throne at the age of 25 with a three-tiered full-width title in capital letters. Twelve years later, he commemorated the death of former President Herbert Hoover in two columns.
9. Only one woman, other than the queen herself, attends 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 noted in his diary: “This year the bailiffs may be inside; the crown itself may be at stake. “
Newlywed Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip wave to the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on November 20, 1947. Photo: AP
11. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was initially skeptical about the wisdom of the event’s television broadcast, telling parliament: “It would be inappropriate for the whole ceremony, not only in its secular but also religious and spiritual aspects, to be presented as if it were a theatrical performance. . “
12. A commission has been set up to decide which items can be sanctioned as official souvenirs for the coronation. The panel, chaired by Bernard Marmaduke Fitzlan-Howard, the 16th Duke of Norfolk, unanimously agreed to reject an application for crown-embroidered trousers.
13. There was some anger in Scotland that the Queen would be known as Elizabeth II, given that her predecessor did not rule north of the border. When mailboxes with E II R appeared on them, some were removed II. They were vandalized with tar or a hammer, and in one case – detonated with a helignite bomb. From then on, Scottish column boxes 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, flocked to the living rooms to watch it, while 12 million listened to the radio.
15. In a book of memoirs from the 1950s, You’ve Never Had It So Good by Stephen F. Kelly, Chris Pryor, a child at the time, recalls that the whole family went to see a small décor in his aunt’s house. “The cat was so excited by everyone there that he ran up the chimney, then fell and there was soot everywhere,” he said.
16. The ceremony cost £ 1.57 million, which is about £ 47 million today. There were 8,000 guests and 40,000 soldiers in the parade.
17. At least one guest, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Maria Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, whose full name is Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustinburg, has attended three previous coronations. She was born in 1872.
18. When Elizabeth was crowned, the British Empire had 70 overseas territories and waged wars against the 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 highest income tax rate is 97.5%. The Guardian print edition cost 3 p.
20. The giving of sweets ended on February 6, 1953, which caused children to run to the shops in search of caramel apples and nougat sticks.
Inspection of 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 yelling at him as he ran out of the hut they share in Australia. The operative team uncovered the film and gave it to the royal press secretary. The incident was later fabricated in The Crown.
22. According to biographer Sally Bedel Smith, in May 1954, after a six-month absence from the tour, the Queen and Philip greeted Charles, five, and Anne, three, 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 serving monarch in a century and will probably remain the only ones for at least the next century.
25. In my book on Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage, my husband and I, the editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, Ingrid Seward, write that when Andrew was five, he was thrown into a pile of manure by two newlyweds after trying to hit the legs of the royal horses with a large staff.
26. Seward also reports that Andrew was once blackmailed by a footman who later offered to resign. The queen refused because she thought Andrew deserved it.
27. In 1965, Tony Ben, then head of the post office, tried to win the Queen’s approval for his plan to remove her image from stamps. He received a letter stating: “The Queen was not as enthusiastic about these projects as she sometimes is.”
28. The Queen’s private secretary, Lord Charteris, said her greatest regret was the eight days it had taken her to visit Aberfan after the 1966 coal landslide, which killed 144 people.
29. The Queen addressed the nation every Christmas except in 1969, when the Royal Family documentary was broadcast instead. About two-thirds of the country watched it, but it was never shown in full again – although it briefly appeared on YouTube last year.
30. In 1971, a Gallup poll cited in parliament found that 57% of the public believed that the Queen should receive a “salary increase” to double her civil allowance allowance to £ 1 million.
Making his first Christmas television broadcast for the nation in 1957. Photo: PA
31. The following year, the Ministry of Finance concluded a deal with the palace, according to which deputies could vote only to increase the civil list and not to reduce it.
32. A leading conservative said in a letter to the Chancellor published many years later that a deal was needed to avoid the Labor government’s risk of reducing the civilian list. John Boyd-Carpenter writes: “Let’s arrange things so that the Queen does not have to expose herself to this again.”
33. The 25th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne, the Silver Jubilee, was celebrated in 1977 with a tour of 36 counties in the United Kingdom. She also made overseas visits to nine countries.
34. Covering the celebrations for the Guardian, Martin Wainwright wrote that the festivities “continue to expand in all areas of human life.” He said 100 “jubilee coconuts” had been sent from the Bahamas as a gesture of goodwill to save a Sussex village holiday that is “shy but nut-free”.
35. The Royal Collection Trust maintains a list of animals given to the Queen. These include four swans, many horses, two small hippos, a Nile crocodile, a sloth in 1968, another sloth in 1976, and in 1977 a fat-tailed dunaart.
36. In addition to eight pages the day before Charles’ wedding to Diana in 1981, the Guardian published photos of 12 of his alleged ex-girlfriends.
37. In 1990, the government of John Major agreed to an agreement on the financing of civilian lists for the next decade, which allowed inflation of 7.5% each year. Instead, annual inflation was around 3.7%. As a result, the palace created a surplus of £ 35 million, including £ 12 million in interest.
38. Two hundred and twenty-five firefighters used 6,750 tonnes of water to put out the fire that eroded Windsor Castle in 1992. An estimate of £ 60 million for repairs led to public outrage over the payment of the bill and the Queen’s agreement to start paying income tax the following year.
39. One of the few cases in which the Queen wept in public was the decommissioning of Royal Yacht Britannia in 1997.
40. Immediately after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when the Queen was heavily criticized for looking insensitive in her response, polls found that 72% of people described her as unrelated 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 hem of the queen’s heels is weighted to avoid inadvertent take-off. Meanwhile, it is said that the holes in her coats have been generously cut to make it easier to flutter.
42. In 2000, it was reported that the Queen was holding a Big Mouth Billy Bass (a new animatronic singing fish that briefly had a degree of popularity that now seems inexplicable) on top of a piano in Balmoral.
43. The Queen sent 300,000 congratulatory messages to the centenarians. The centenarians in 1952 were about 300. In 2020 there were 15,120. When the Queen Mother received …
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