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Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother. 1900 - 2002.

© Stuart Buchanan MacWatt

Travelsleuth Stuart Buchanan MacWatt pays a grateful tribute to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother on her death at Windsor, and traces her remarkable life of dedication to Britain.

Rock of the Nation

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, The Queen Mum to her millions of adoring British fans, is dead. The grand old lady, who lived through the reigns of six monarchs, died peacefully in her sleep at Windsor on 30 March. Queen Elizabeth was at her bedside. She had become increasingly frail during this her 102nd year and Golden Jubilee Year of her daughter's reign. Her remarkable staying powers and dogged determination to soldier on were finally defeated by old age and a chest infection gained in December at Sandringham where she had celebrated the traditional Royal Family Christmas with her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was perhaps also weakened by facing the supreme emotional and physical effort of attending the funeral of her daughter, The Princess Margaret, six weeks ago.

Most Royals have their downs as well as ups in the volatile popularity stakes of British public opinion. Even Queen Victoria, whose sovereign reign of "60 Glorious Years" saw the emergence of a British Empire upon which the sun never set, had her bad patches and detractors. But The Queen Mum remained everybody's favorite, her popularity undimmed and good name inviolate from the day she married the then Duke of York in April, 1923. When Edward VIII turned his back on his royal duty and destiny in 1936 and abdicated, it was she who provided a backbone of mental and emotional steel for her shy husband who was totally unprepared, untrained and ill-equiped for the awesome task and responsibility of kingship. Few doubt that she was behind his unexpected ability to rise to greatness in adversity.

Her Palace leadership was to provide intense comfort and crucial inspiration to both King and Country in the years of war that shortly followed. Britain, and London in particular, took the then inexperienced Queen to their hearts during the Blitz which devastated the city and much of England in 1940/41. It was Elizabeth who defiantly insisted that the Royal Family stay in Buckingham Palace, a plum target for the German Luftwaffe which bombed the it nine times, and stick it out with her subjects, even when the stuker divebombers were striking the palace itself.

During the darkest days of World War II, when those who could, fled London for the greater safety of the North of England and Scotland, her childhood home, the shy Scots lady from Glamis Castle who had unexpectedly become Queen, became the symbol of London Pride.

Remembrance Sunday

Photo: BBC

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