Queen Elizabeth must be the only person on earth whose daily life was chronicled from the day of her birth until her death in 2023. And as the monarch of Britain, it’s mind boggling to imagine the number of personalities she’s rubbed shoulders with. Craig Brown’s ‘Q: A Voyage Around the Queen’ was a quirky read which I skimmed through. While Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ was an immersive experience in imagining the inner life and turmoil of the Queen, and ‘The Palace Papers‘ was a more gripping read, Brown’s work had some juicy facts.
On Gandhi’s wedding gift to the couple:
Mahatma Gandhi contributed a small tablecloth. He asked the last Viceroy of India, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, to carry it to London, along with this message: ‘Dear Lord Mountbatten, This little thing is made out of doubled yarn of my own spinning. The knitting done by a Punjabi girl who was trained by Abha’s husband, my grandson. Lady Mountbatten knows Abha. Please give the bride and the bridegroom this with my blessings, with the wish that they would have a long and happy life of service of men. Yours sincerely, M. K. Gandhi.’ As luck would have it, Queen Mary mistook the tablecloth for one of Gandhi’s celebrated loincloths. ‘Such an indelicate object – what a horrible thing!’ she protested.
Paul Theroux imagined burying his face in her breasts in one of his fictional works:
It is said that everyone in Britain dreams of the Queen—another standard one, like being naked in a public place or flying over treetops by flapping your arms. In my Queen dream, which I had used in a novel, the Queen and I were alone in a palace room, on a royal sofa. She was the young thin-faced Queen whose profile appears on British stamps. “You seem dreadfully unhappy,” Her Majesty said. Her face was pale (as it is on the stamp). I was in fact miserable but too shy to admit it. She was wearing a stiff dress of green brocade, revealing a deep cleavage. Her rings sparkled. Then, using both her hands, she pulled apart the bodice of her gown, and her breasts tumbled out and I put my head between them, her nipples cool against my ears.
“Isn’t that better?” said the Queen in my dream.
I was sobbing between her breasts and could not reply.
Kingsley Amis regularly dreamt of kissing the Queen, but whenever he suggested (in his dreams) they take it further, she ‘refused’
‘Kingsley, I can’t’ or ‘No, Kingsley, we mustn’t.’ She never lets him go all the way, though the same cannot be said of Margaret Thatcher.
Boris Johnson once dreamt he was late for a meeting with the Queen and shared this dreadful nightmare with her.
‘Oh yes,’ she replies, in a tone that suggests she has heard it all before, probably from other prime ministers. ‘Were you naked?’
The Beatles’ tryst with their teenage crush:
In 1965, the four Beatles went to the Palace to receive their MBEs. As teenagers, they had entertained lustful thoughts about the young Princess Elizabeth. ‘They were very formative teenage years, and the queen was, sort of, 24, or something, so, to us, she was a babe,’ recalled Paul, half a century later. ‘We were like, “Phwoar!” There was a certain lustfulness in us teenagers. That’s what we used to say in Liverpool: “just look at the heat on her!” So we grew up loving the Queen.’ Perhaps their teenage infatuations clouded their brains, or might it have been the marijuana that John Lennon later claimed they had smoked in the Palace loo before the ceremony? Either way, their conversation with the Queen proved awkward. ‘Have you been working hard recently?’ the Queen asked. John’s mind went blank. He couldn’t think what on earth they had been doing.
I had also written earlier on her encounter with our own Jim Corbett.
The answer to who was the most famous woman personality she encountered is a tossup between Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and Mother Teresa. One more person who could be added to this list is a child who died young and never met the Queen in person – Anne Frank.
When Anne Frank was in hiding, among the paper cutouts she pasted on her wall was a photograph of the Queen with her sister Margaret. Thirty years after she died in a concentration camp, the Queen writes to her father expressing the hope that ‘perhaps this photograph gave your daughter a moment’s pleasure during that dreadful time’. And during the fag end of her life:
On 26 June 2015, at the age of 89, the Queen visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of its liberation by British soldiers. First, she met a small group of survivors and their liberators. Then she walked to the memorial gravestone to Margot Frank, 1926–45, and Anne Frank, 1929–45, and bowed her head in homage.
Anne Frank was three years younger than her and was just 15 when she died.
I also learned that the one and only thing I shared with her was her fascination with jigsaw puzzles.
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