The Queen Mother was born on August 4, 1900, at St Paul's, Waldenbury, the Hertfordshire seat of her father, the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was the ninth of a family of 10.

The wife-to-be of a future King of England, she traced her descent to King Robert II of Scotland and the family seat at Glamis was the castle of Macbeth in the 11th century. Lady Elizabeth had only two terms of normal education at a London day school; the rest of her tuition came from a governess at home.

The Queen Mother aged four with her brother the honourable David Bowes-Lyon aged three in an official family portrait taken in 1904.

She later chose an education at home for both Princess Elizabeth, born in 1926, and Princess Margaret, born in 1930. In the early 1920s her beauty and charm, and her proficiency on the dance floor, brought her the acclaim of London society, then celebrating the end of the war. She was an accomplished pianist and spoke fluent French.

Although Lady Elizabeth first met her future husband when she was five, the significant meeting was probably in February, 1922, when she was a bridesmaid at the marriage of Princess Mary. A little less than a year later her engagement to the Duke of York was announced and the marriage took place in April, 1923.

The first of her many successful overseas tours came three years later when she accompanied the Duke to Australia. During tours in the following years in Britain and overseas, both as Queen and later as Queen Mother, she brought a new image of Royalty.

It was not the strict formality of Queen Mary, her mother-in-law, but the easy and conversational approach which gave those she met the impression that they were just the people she had hoped to meet.

“She could charm the birds down from the trees,” as one case-hardened politician once said. The occasion made no difference to her ease of manner. The joy of the Queen Mother was that she was at home equally in receiving a foreign head of state at Buckingham Palace or chatting to a shepherd at a country agricultural show.

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Sweet smell
of flowers
Flowers were always a delight to the Queen Mother. She expressed genuine appreciation at every one of the dozens of posies which almost swamped her on many of her public engagements. She especially liked flowers obviously picked fresh from the garden, even if they were wrapped in foil or newspaper. While most of the flowers were ferried to her car to go home with her, the Queen Mother always kept a few fragrant blooms in her hand. "I like to smell them," she would say.

FLOWER POWER: Enjoying the scent of a bouquet.

Buy my coconut
One of the Queen Mother's first public duties was in the summer of 1923 when, as Duchess of York, she spent an afternoon at Epping Forest, Essex, with about one thousand children from the East End of London. The boys watched critically as she attempted to knock down a coconut at one of the side shows. Afterwards the coconut was sold for charity and raised £2 – a respectable sum in those days.