Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was concurrently the last empress of India until the British Raj was dissolved in August 1947.
58 Facts About Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother
2.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother accompanied her husband on diplomatic tours to France and North America before the start of the Second World War.
3.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother continued an active public life until just a few months before her death at the age of 101, seven weeks after the death of her younger daughter, Princess Margaret.
4.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's mother was descended from British prime minister William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, and Governor-General of India Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, who was the elder brother of another prime minister, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.
5.
The location of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's birth remains uncertain, but reputedly she was born either in her parents' Westminster home at Belgrave Mansions, Grosvenor Gardens, or in a horse-drawn ambulance on the way to a hospital.
6.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's birth was registered at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, near the Strathmores' English country house, St Paul's Walden Bury, which was given as her birthplace in the 1901 and 1911 censuses.
7.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was christened there on 23 September 1900, in the local parish church, All Saints.
8.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother spent much of her childhood at St Paul's Walden and at Glamis Castle, the Earl's ancestral home in Scotland.
9.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was educated at home by a governess until the age of eight, and was fond of field sports, ponies and dogs.
10.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother remained in a prisoner of war camp for the rest of the war.
11.
Glamis was turned into a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, which Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother helped to run.
12.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was particularly instrumental in organising the rescue of the castle's contents during a serious fire on 16 September 1916.
13.
When he declared he would marry no other, his mother, Queen Mary, visited Glamis to see for herself the girl who had stolen her son's heart.
14.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother became convinced that Elizabeth was "the one girl who could make Bertie happy", but nevertheless refused to interfere.
15.
In February 1922, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Albert's sister, Princess Mary, to Viscount Lascelles.
16.
Unexpectedly, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother laid her bouquet at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior on her way into the abbey, in memory of her brother Fergus.
17.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother became styled Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York.
18.
Albert had a stammer, which affected his ability to deliver speeches, and after October 1925, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother assisted in helping him through the therapy devised by Lionel Logue, an episode portrayed in the 2010 film The King's Speech.
19.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was, in her own words, "very miserable at leaving the baby".
20.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's crown was made of platinum and was set with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
21.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was later quoted as referring to Wallis as "that woman", and Wallis referred to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother as "Cookie", because of her supposed resemblance to a fat Scots cook.
22.
Claims that Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother remained embittered towards Wallis were denied by her close friends; the Duke of Grafton wrote that she "never said anything nasty about the Duchess of Windsor, except to say she really hadn't got a clue what she was dealing with".
23.
In summer 1938, a state visit to France by the King and Queen was postponed for three weeks because of the death of Elizabeth's mother, Lady Strathmore.
24.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother told Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, "that tour made us", and she returned to Canada frequently both on official tours and privately.
25.
Fifty authors and artists contributed to the book, which was fronted by Cecil Beaton's portrait of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and was sold in aid of the Red Cross.
26.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother publicly refused to leave London or send the children to Canada, even during the Blitz, when the British Cabinet advised her to do so.
27.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother visited troops, hospitals, factories, and parts of Britain that were targeted by the German Luftwaffe, in particular the East End near London's docks.
28.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother explained that if the public came to see her they would wear their best clothes, so she should reciprocate in kind; Norman Hartnell dressed her in gentle colours and avoided black to represent "the rainbow of hope".
29.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was devastated by her husband's death and retired to Scotland.
30.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother developed her interest in horse racing, particularly steeplechasing, which had been inspired by the amateur jockey Lord Mildmay in 1949.
31.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother owned the winners of approximately 500 races.
32.
In February 1964, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother had an emergency appendectomy, which led to the postponement of a planned tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji until 1966.
33.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother recuperated during a Caribbean cruise aboard the royal yacht, Britannia.
34.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1984 and a lump was removed from her breast.
35.
In 1982, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was rushed to hospital when a fish bone became stuck in her throat, and had an operation to remove it.
36.
In 1987, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was criticised when it emerged that two of her nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Redhill, Surrey, in 1941 because they had severe learning disabilities.
37.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother said that the news of their institutionalisation came as a surprise to her.
38.
On 1 August 2001, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother had a blood transfusion for anaemia after suffering from mild heat exhaustion, though she was well enough to make her traditional appearance outside Clarence House three days later to celebrate her 101st birthday.
39.
On 13 February 2002, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother fell and cut her arm in her sitting room at Sandringham House; an ambulance and doctor were called, and the wound was dressed.
40.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was still determined to attend Margaret's funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, two days later on the Friday of that week, even though the Queen and the rest of the royal family were concerned about the journey the Queen Mother would face to get from Norfolk to Windsor; she was rumoured to be hardly eating.
41.
On 5 March 2002, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was present at the luncheon of the annual lawn party of the Eton Beagles, and watched the Cheltenham Races on television; however, her health began to deteriorate precipitously during her last weeks, after retreating to Royal Lodge for the final time.
42.
On 30 March 2002, at 15:15 GMT, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother died at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, at the age of 101.
43.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's surviving daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was by her side.
44.
The Queen Mother had been suffering from a chest cold since Christmas 2001.
45.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was the longest-living member of the British royal family at the time of her death.
46.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's surviving sister-in-law, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, exceeded that, dying at the age of 102 on 29 October 2004.
47.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was one of the longest-lived members of any royal family.
48.
In London, more than a million people filled the area outside Westminster Abbey and along the 23-mile route from central London to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's final resting place in the King George VI Memorial Chapel beside her husband and younger daughter in St George's Chapel.
49.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's critics included Kitty Kelley, who falsely alleged that she did not abide by the rationing regulations during the Second World War.
50.
Claims that Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother used racist slurs to refer to black people were strongly denied by Major Colin Burgess, the husband of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Burgess, a mixed-race secretary who accused members of Prince Charles's Household of racial abuse.
51.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother made no public comments on race, but according to Robert Rhodes James in private she "abhorred racial discrimination" and decried apartheid as "dreadful".
52.
The Queen Mother stopped and picked these up as though somebody had misplaced them.
53.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother knows instinctively what to do on those occasions.
54.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother doesn't rise to being heckled at all; she just pretends it must be an oversight on the part of the people doing it.
55.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's habits were parodied by the satirical 1980s television programme Spitting Image.
56.
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother launched the ship on 27 September 1938 in Clydebank, Scotland.
57.
In 1954, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother sailed to New York on her namesake.
58.
Eight years before her death, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother had reportedly placed two-thirds of her money into trusts, for the benefit of her great-grandchildren.