Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died at Royal Lodge, her house in Windsor Great Park, on March 30, 2002. The Queen was at her side, as were her niece Margaret Rhodes and her chaplain. I was in Edinburgh with my family for the Easter school holidays when the television suddenly dimmed and my father looked up to say, “I think this might be the Queen Mother.”
I remember every channel diverting to BBC One for Peter Sissons to announce, “The Queen Mother has died, peacefully, at the age of one hundred and one.” Within minutes, crowds “young and old had gathered” outside Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. There was scandal among royal watchers at the BBC’s failure to provide Sissons with a black tie for the broadcast. Given the years of rehearsal, with newsreaders trained to race upstairs to the cupboard housing black ties and back to the cameras with minimal panting, this was a curious oversight. Sissons, who had to defend himself from unfair insinuations that any oversights were in consequence of “a decision made by the presenter,” later revealed that there had been a quick meeting, in which the conclusion was reached that black ties should only be donned to announce the death of a monarch.1 Shortly before he went live, a producer whispered in his ear, “Don’t go overboard. She was a very old woman who had to go sometime.”
There were others who felt that pressing Margaret Rhodes on air for details of the moment her aunt had died was in questionable taste. She subsequently told a journalist that she thought there had been too many questions under the circumstances, before adding that she nonetheless felt the criticism was unwarranted and that “Poor Mr. Sissons no doubt had a horrible day.” In the interview itself, Mrs. Rhodes said of her late aunt, “She was a wonderful, wonderful person… One can hardly believe that somebody who grew up in the horse age has seen people landing on the Moon and all the things that happen now.” In 2002 in the Queen Mother’s bedroom at Clarence House, there still hung a Madonna and Child by Raffaelino del Garbo, left to her by her grandmother Caroline, while on either side of her bedhead were two little angels that she had bought in a marketplace in Bordighera, when she was eight years old, Italy still had a king, oceans were crossed by ships, aeroplanes were funny things that looked like cigars, and nobody knew what a tank or a gas mask was, much less televisions or rockets or the internet.
Just over two hundred thousand mourners filed past her coffin as it lay in state at Westminster Hall. They included Coryne Hall, who queued for six hours to pay her respects and curtseyed to the coffin. She had just found out from Billy Tallon that hers had been the Queen Mother’s last private audience. The Queen and the Prince of Wales both gave televised tributes, Prince Charles’s emphasising how much “she meant to my whole family, particularly The Queen, to whom she was such a stalwart and sensitive support when my grandfather died, when he was only two and a half years older than I am now. For me, she meant everything and I had dreaded, dreaded this moment along with, I know, countless others. Somehow, I never thought it would come. She seemed gloriously unstoppable and, since I was a child, I adored her… She wrote such sparklingly wonderful letters and her turn of phrase could be utterly memorable. Above all, she saw the funny side of life and we laughed until we cried—oh, how I shall miss her laugh and wonderful wisdom born of so much experience and an innate sensitivity to life. She was quite simply the most magical grandmother you could possibly have, and I was utterly devoted to her.” As per the Queen Mother’s stipulation, her death was not allowed to alter any plans for her daughter’s Golden Jubilee celebrations later that year.
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was buried next to her husband and the ashes of their youngest daughter at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.