Although Elizabeth was born in 1926, solidly in the Prohibition era, this photo from 1939, when she was 13, is the earliest I could find. She already seems to show a stoic sense of duty
RIP Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Like almost everyone else in the UK, we’ve never known anyone else on the throne and, although she had no executive power at all, she was part of the fabric of British society and represented a certain spirit we associate with Our Finest Hour. Fortunately I think Charles is a safe pair of hands for that sort of calm, undemonstrative, self-sacrificing sort of monarchy. During the 1930s Britain saw another royal death, that of George V: that time round the succession was much more of a mess, with Edward VIII lasting less than a year before abdicating to marry Wallis Simpson, leaving George VI—Elizabeth’s dad—with the gig. So it’s funny to think that, without that unexpected hiccup, she would never have been Queen at all. Following the death of Elizabeth (or Brenda, as Private Eye nicknamed her—I never worked out why) Britain went into ten days of national mourning, with a constant programme of royal and funereal activities that certain functionaries have clearly been rehearsing for years. (As I write, the Queen’s body is lying in state, viewed by a steady procession of ordinary people who have been queueing for up to 12 hours for their glimpse of the coffin, while an honour guard of police, beefeaters from the Tower of London and various military representatives conduct a rather beautifully choreographed vigil, standing around the coffin with heads bowed, occasionally manoeuvring their weapons with well-synchronised ceremony.)
We actually had an event scheduled for the 17th, the Saturday before the funeral, but we ultimately decided to cancel, partly out of a sense of appropriateness, but mainly because a large number of ticket-holders had already postponed or cancelled their bookings, so we took that as an indicator of the mood or our customers. (Moreover, getting into London for the event would have been made much more difficult by closed roads and crammed transport, on account of all the mourners traveling in to pay their respects.) Our apologies to those who were disappointed (and I know one customer was from Australia and was only in London this one weekend) but hardly anyone alive in this country has had to deal with a situation like this before, and we think we’ve done the right thing.
