Princess Elizabeth probably became Queen while filming wildlife in Kenya, from the observation post known as Treetops, overlooking a water hole in the Aberdare Forest game reserve, 3000 miles from frost-shrouded Sandringham House, where her much-loved father had died in his sleep on February 6. She was only 25 and had been looking forward to at least a few more years of relative freedom from the supreme responsibility.
The new Queen’s return to London was captured in one of the most poignant photographs of her reign. ‘Shall I go down alone?’ she asked her uncle the Duke of Gloucester, who had gone aboard the Argonaut aircraft to greet her. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I think you should.’ So, solitary, touchingly vulnerable, she descended, to be met at the bottom of the steps by her Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the country’s senior politicians, a line of elderly men clad in raven black, their bare heads bowed.
Her grandmother, Queen Mary, died 13 months later, aged 85, and in its way the end of her life clearly defined the change from the old to the new. The dowager Queen, and the lifestyle she personified, was fixed firmly in the precepts of the Victorian age. Elizabeth II was beginning a reign encompassing jet-engine travel and space discovery, social revolution and worldwide political upheavals, all things which seemed to some people to make monarchy increasingly irrelevant, not to say obsolete.
But that was all in the future.
Her coronation, on June 2 1953, marked a virtually unanimous affirmation in the magic of the institution. It also coincided with the day on which it was learned that Mount Everest had been conquered by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing, prompting the headline ‘All this – and Everest Too’. There was much talk of a new Elizabethan age which the Queen found faintly embarrassing.
But within weeks she was plunged into a searing family crisis, over the ill-starred romance between Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend, a trusted courtier and, to use the terminology of the time, an innocent party in a divorce. It was the first of the several outbreaks of domestic turbulence within her family which were to plague her in later years, but which in a paradoxical fashion have enhanced her own position as an unimpeachable symbol.
