She is fondly recalled for her love of pastel colours, horseracing and ‘drinky-poos’, a term for the lethal concoction of gin and Dubonet she preferred.
And just over 21 years since her death at the age of 101, the late Queen Mother remains a lasting influence on her grandchild, King Charles III.
It is worth remembering, then, that for all the gracious smiles in public, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon displayed an iron will behind closed doors and such steely war-time resolve that Adolf Hitler described her as ‘the most dangerous woman in Europe’.
Here, in the first extract from Gareth Russell’s candid biography of The Queen Mother, we reveal how, for all the formal niceties of a life surrounded by liveried servants, she was at times unnervingly free-spirited – with a delightfully waspish tongue…
The Queen mother visits Hallsville school in Canning Town in 1990 – 50 years after her famous visits to the bomb-ravaged East End of London in the Blitz
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite…
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