Everyone's favourite grandmother

Professor OWEN CHADWICK
former Chancellor, University of East Anglia

When she came to her beloved Sandringham, she was away from public duty; she could relax. Yet “relax” seems the wrong word, somehow, because she never needed to. No-one ever showed less sense of strain.

People finding themselves in the company of the Queen Mother were naturally nervous if they were meeting her for the first time. Their nerves soon vanished, however. She was the easiest person to talk to, partly because she was always interested in you, even more because she had so many interesting things to say.

From Sandringham she liked to go out and visit the houses of old friends for meals, and her host or hostess would take pains to include other guests from a wide range of British society: from poets to serving officers, from experts in gardening to experts in literature, from farmers to restorers of churches.

On such occasions, she would talk on any subject which she thought would interest her companions. Sometimes, she could also be persuaded to talk of her long experience of British history: especially of the time when she was at the centre of affairs, during the second world war when she helped her husband to sustain Winston Churchill, and visited the people of London to raise their morale in the blitz which she herself experienced.

She loved the TV programme Dad’s Army because it reminded her so amusingly of the Home Guard, which she treasured. For her, it represented the indomitable spirit of the British people under the threat of invasion.

She was most fascinating when she talked of famous people whom she had known – Churchill especially, to whom she got very close, but also de Gaulle and Roosevelt, and some of the chief Allied commanders in the field. Some of these memories would have been important to historians if they could have been written down but, like many a grandmother before her, she probably never considered her own experiences worthy.

She always had an extraordinary memory for faces and not only the face but also aspects of the person. Once she met a Sri Lankan official in Canada at a Royal party for people from the Commonwealth. He told her that his father was a fisherman and he had been told that fish were good for the brains. More than 10 years later, he appeared again before her to receive an honour in this country, and she said at once: “It must have been those fish.”

Throughout her life, the Queen Mother hated suffering. Sometimes it was hard for her to watch the news on television. When a Czech student burnt himself in a public protest and the cameras caught it, she picked up her chair instantly, turned it round, and sat with her back to the television for the rest of the news.

I once had the privilege of sitting by her side when she attended an Oxford-Cambridge rugby match at Twickenham. The young men behaved very badly, punching each other instead of getting on with the game and I was ashamed that her opinion of British students might be lowered. I needn’t have worried. At the end she said simply: “What a splendid game!” And she would not leave the ground until she had found out that the injured were not too badly hurt.

Her interest were wide. She understood when an art gallery was good and could make informed comments.

And she always liked to visit a hospital - on her very first visit to Cambridge in 1932 she opened a new wing at Addenbrookes’ Hospital.

She was, meanwhile, the first woman ever to take a full degree at Cambridge University - a doctor of laws, for Cambridge was backward in its admission of women to full rights.

All in all, this was, without a doubt, an exceptional person - one who became a symbol of most of what is best in British life, without the slightest self-seeking on her own part.

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