'Now we can look East End in the face'
How the Queen won the heart of war-torn Britain

To many it is remembered as her finest hour. During the dark days of the second world war, the Queen Mother served as an inspiration to a country battered and bloodied by the Blitz.

Together with Winston Churchill, she has come to personify the fighting spirit which saw Britain through those troubled times to emerge victorious in 1945. But the Queen Mother was also a strong supporter of Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, who battled in vain to avert the war by pursuing a policy of appeasement with Adolf Hitler.

When the then Prime Minister returned from Munich in September, 1938, after signing the agreement which handed over much of Czechoslovakia to the Nazi regime, he was immediately invited to Buckingham Palace.

The Queen Mother joined him on the balcony with her husband to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd rejoicing at the declaration that this was “peace for our time”.

In December, 1938, the Times newspaper produced Christmas cards bearing a souvenir photograph of the balcony scene. But, within months, the agreement had been proved to be worthless as Hitler’s true expansionist ambitions were graphically revealed.

The hopeful mood of the cheering crowds outside the palace was replaced with one of foreboding, and the country prepared for war. As the conflict raged, the Queen Mother might well have been expected to take her daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, to the safety of North America.

But the family chose to stay in Britain and face the destructive power of the Luftwaffe with the rest of the country’s inhabitants. The king and queen both toured London’s east end during the Blitz as it bore the brunt of the German bombing campaign.

Then, in September 1940, they tasted first-hand the dangers faced on a nightly basis by the capital’s inhabitants, as six bombs fell on Buckingham Palace. The bombs destroyed some smaller buildings within the grounds, but missed the main part and left the couple unscathed. Later, the war brought enormous personal tragedy to the royal family when the king’s youngest brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent, was killed on active service in 1942.

It was such experiences which enabled the king and queen to be identified as powerful symbols of the country’s resistance and determination to overthrow Nazi Germany.

While the king endlessly inspected lines of military forces in his own naval uniform, his wife was pictured carefully treading her way through the rubble of Buckingham Palace and other bomb-hit sites in the capital.

“Now we can look the East End in the face,” she famously said.

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