THE QUEEN’S TEARS FOR OUR FALLEN HEROES
Her Majesty’s solemn tribute
THE QUEEN could not help but shed a tear yesterday as she honoured some of the nation’s war heroes.
In a rare moment, she welled up at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
IN A rare display of public emotion, the Queen wept yesterday as she visited a memorial to fallen soldiers.
Like many of her generation inured to loss and suffering in the Second World War, the 90-year-old monarch seldom shows any signs of distress.
In her 64 years on the throne, she has cried only a handful of times in public.
But yesterday she had to wipe away a tear after joining wounded veterans and other Army personnel to lay a wreath at the new memorial to soldiers from the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire.
Praised
As a tear slipped down her right cheek, she wiped it away as discreetly as possible with her gloved hand.
Some 32 members of the infantry regiment have died in service since it was formed in 2006, following an amalgamation of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment, the King’s Regiment and the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment.
Friends and family of the fallen were among those at the service to see the unveiling of a stature of the Lion of England, featured on the regiment’s royal badge.
After the service of dedication, the Queen placed a wreath below the statue and praised the work of the memorial’s creators. The lion tribute to the regiment, which recruits in Cumbria, Lancashire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester, is seated on a plinth of Cumbrian stone featuring a carving of a glider.
The heraldic lion faces north-west in tribute to the origins of the regiment, whose Colonel-in-Chief is Her Majesty. The Queen also holds the title of Duke of Lancaster.
After the ceremony, the Queen spent several minutes chatting to stonemason Nick Johnson and sculptor Georgie Welch, who crafted the lion from clay before it was cast at a Gloucestershire foundry.
Ms Welch, who is based in Wiltshire, said: “It was five and a half months in the making in clay before it went to the foundry.
“The Queen said it was very lifelike and that it had a real look of power and looked fearless.
“I was so nervous I couldn’t stop my knees shaking, but [she] was absolutely charming.”
Mr Johnson, from Westbury in Wiltshire, said he was honoured to have worked on the tribute.
“It couldn’t get any better,” he said. “I don’t think you can get any higher honour than to meet the Queen.”
After the service, the Queen – who was making her fourth visit to the 150-acre arboretum – signed a visitors’ book before meeting injured servicemen and women, including Invictus Games gold medallist Corporal Luke Reeson.
In recent years the Queen was seen to weep at a British Legion Field of Remembrance service at Westminster Abbey after the death of her mother in 2002.
And in 2010 actor Liam Neeson said she had shed tears at a royal film premiere of The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader.
She shed tears at Aberfan in 1966, eight days after 116 children and 28 adults died in a colliery slag heap collapse.
Perhaps more famously, she cried when the royal yacht Britannia was decommissioned in 1997.