HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN: "Above all, we must keep alive that courageous spirit of adventure that is the finest quality of youth"

DR TIMOTHY PEACOCK TAKES A HISTORICAL LOOK BACK AT THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZABETH

This article was first published in June 2022, to mark the Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. It has been slightly amended to reflect the news of the Queen's death.

A young girl sits on the floor of a neighbour’s living room, larger than her small council house one, watching a little black and white flickering TV screen, while the atmosphere buzzes with excited neighbours crowding round. It is the only place in the street they can watch it after all.

She sits enraptured like the other children, silently enjoying a chocolate. A special treat from her ration book.

The Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, as seen through the eyes of a child in the UK. A fulfilment of her accession to the throne the previous year, and the beginning of a reign that has both borne witness to, and been a part of, significant transformations of British society.

The Importance of Youth

Youth was something of particular importance to the late Queen, her first ever public broadcast, as Princess Elizabeth, a 1940 wartime radio address to the children of the Commonwealth.



Even prior to the Coronation, the importance of engaging with youth was a sentiment echoed as the late Queen in her first Christmas broadcast, 1952 telling her audience:

Queen Elizabeth Lessons to Every Business Leader: consistency, power of dress, Ukraine, Brave roots.

Elizabeth as a thoughtful-looking toddler with curly, fair hair - on the cover of Time, April 1929.

Early life

Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. 

Her father, Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, at whose London home (17 Bruton Street, Mayfair) she was delivered by Caesarean section.

She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May, and named Elizabeth after her mother; Alexandra after her paternal great-grandmother, who had died six months earlier; and Mary after her paternal grandmother. Called "Lilibet" by her close family, based on what she called herself at first, she was cherished by her grandfather, George V, whom she affectionately called "Grandpa England", and her regular visits during his serious illness in 1929 were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery.