Tears of sadness for a Queen who brought joy to every corner of the globe
SIR – I well recall waving to Princess Elizabeth and the Royal family during the 1947 tour of South Africa. My parents shed tears of joy as they passed through my home town of Springs.
Little did I imagine that 75 years later I would be here in Britain, shedding tears of sadness at the death of our beautiful, beloved Queen Elizabeth II.
Frew Mcmillan
Bristol
SIR – I grew up in Canada and have lived in London since 1970. As a child we sang God Save the Queen in school. I have a very special memory of Queen Elizabeth. I was 12 years old, at a summer camp in Orillia, near Toronto.
One day we were taken to the train station as the Queen was travelling through Orillia. The entire camp was there to greet her, about 200 girls and the counsellors and the heads of the camp. The train stopped and she came out to the front of the train on to the platform. We said the special Jewish prayer for royalty, and she smiled and waved her familiar wave, then she went back in and the train moved on.
I thought she was beautiful, and I was close enough to her that, had I stretched my hand out, I would almost have reached her. She was my Queen then and practically throughout my life. What a sad loss.
Margaret Benmayer
London NW4
SIR – We are all of us orphans now.
Tom Stubbs
Surbiton, Surrey
SIR – When I told him the news of the sad death of Queen Elizabeth, my Zimbabwean gardener shed a tear. I don’t think the woke brigade in Britain have any concept of the love and respect felt for the late Queen across the globe.
Chris Ash
Johannesburg, South Africa
SIR – As a six-year-old child, living in bomb-damaged Coventry, I recall the sheer joy of listening to the wireless broadcast of the magical wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten on that grey day in November 1947.
Throughout her long and unique reign, Queen Elizabeth brought joy to her subjects wherever she went in this country and around the world.
We cherish her memory and are thankful for her life, which has enriched us all.
Tessa Keymer
Haywards Heath, West Sussex
SIR – In 1953 I was at a Streatham primary school. We won one of the London county council’s raffle prizes to witness the coronation procession.
By 5am I was on a rainy Embankment with a teacher and some classmates. It was a long wait but we cheered anything that moved.
I will be forever grateful for my fleeting glimpse of our late and hugely missed dear Queen.
John Taylor
Purley, Surrey
SIR – She smiled at me once.
Brian Roe
Liverpool
SIR – Not long after Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, she came to visit Lancashire. The royal chauffeurs stayed with us and parked her car in our old carriage stables.
Imagine my delight, as a seven-yearold, when I was allowed to sit where she had been sitting earlier in the day. To me, it felt like sitting on the throne.
Kevin Cottrell
Grosmont, Monmouthshire
SIR – General Lord Richard Dannatt eloquently expressed the sadness of the service community at the loss of Queen Elizabeth (“It was for her the Armed Forces risked life and limb”, Commentary, September 9).
In discussing the conflicts that took place during her reign, he could also have mentioned that, at the time of her coronation, British soldiers as part of the Commonwealth Division were fighting a vicious war in Korea.
The Chinese had vowed to take a strategic position called the Hook before the Queen would be crowned. The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment had withstood an assault of divisional strength. The Royal Fusiliers, of which I was a junior member, remained on the Hook for the next three weeks to deny the Chinese their objective.
Afterwards, and on our retirement to a reserve position, we were shown a film of the coronation.
Queen Elizabeth did indeed come to the throne and experience turbulent times.
Mike Mogridge
Henley-on-thames, Oxfordshire
SIR – I have not wept since the first night at my prep school in the year Queen Elizabeth was crowned. On Thursday, I could not control my tears. God save the King.
Mark Sutton
Southport, Lancashire
SIR – Through the tears and solemnity, let us not forget Queen Elizabeth’s sense of fun. Remember when she used a ceremonial sword to cut a cake at the Eden Project, rather than using a knife? “This is more unusual,” she said.
Linda Hepburn
Chatham, Kent
SIR – On Friday, I had a marmalade sandwich for breakfast.
Michael Davies
Tatworth, Somerset
SIR – I suspect that the best way of honouring Queen Elizabeth is to keep calm and carry on.
David Dodds
East Markham, Nottinghamshire
SIR – In 1985 I received a national award from Queen Elizabeth.
It was the highest such award in British hang gliding, and I won it for creating a competition system, the National League, which had made British hang glider pilots the highest rated in the world. The British team was also at the ceremony, but by this time I was set to coach the Americans at that year’s World Championships in Kössen, Austria.
I received the trophy from the Queen, and the British team pilots and I indulged in some cheerfully aggressive badinage. I was standing at the end of a line along with other dinner-jacketed pilots when the Queen started walking around the room.
I believe she had a collection of stories to put everyone she met at ease, and sure enough she had a hang gliding story. It concerned her Scottish home in Balmoral, and had to do with having a quiet time one day when a hang glider pilot whistled past the castle window and landed in the royal grounds. Apparently, the gardener removed him.
I had taken three or four glasses of wine by then, but it still was not enough for me to step forward and point a trembling finger at Robert Bailey, four to the left of me, whom I had once made captain of the British hang gliding team, and roar: “There, Your Majesty, is the offender!” Bailey had indeed landed on the grounds of Balmoral in 1978, on a cross-country competition flight.
Brian Milton
London E2
SIR – I was the Member of Parliament for Scarborough and Whitby in the early 1990s. I was also Betty Boothroyd’s parliamentary private secretary, which was a great privilege.
After PMQS one afternoon she beckoned me to her and asked me if I’d like to meet the Queen – an offer I quickly took up. She explained that she was hosting a dinner in her state apartments for MPS and peers at which the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would be guests of honour.
The only condition was that I play the piano in the drawing room afterwards.
On the night in question, as the dinner plates were being taken away, she tapped a spoon on her glass and asked everybody to retire to where her PPS would play the piano. I started with Mozart, then a little Beethoven, followed by Chopin, drifting effortlessly into Danny Boy and then a singalong medley. Everybody was soon singing at the tops of their voices.
As I was furiously banging out It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, I looked over my shoulder to see if Her Majesty was singing, too. The Duke was roaring with laughter and song but the Queen was not. Instead, she had that wonderful grin and her foot was tapping away to the beat of my song.
As I draw my last breath, I shall treasure that special memory.
John Sykes
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
SIR – Queen Elizabeth II was the first British monarch to be wholly above politics. Her father, George VI, sought occasionally to influence Cabinet appointments, and vetoed one or two nominations to the Privy Council.
When all political parties began to elect their leaders in the 1960s, the Queen ceased to select the prime minister.
The disappearance of the last vestiges of political power strengthened the Queen’s position as the transcendent symbol of national unity at a time of domestic strife, and she remained, as Churchill put it on her coronation day, “enthroned for ever in our hearts”.
Lord Lexden (Con)
London SW1
SIR – The anachronism that is the monarchy in a modern democracy such as ours is completely nullified by the glorious example set by the late Queen.
The people need a non-political, ethical, steadfast figurehead they can believe in and trust. Queen Elizabeth provided this in spades.
I feel a little part of me died on Thursday.
Martin Smith
Wolverhampton
SIR – The country has not only lost a monarch but also a moral compass.
Simon Wragg
Hatton, Shropshire
SIR – Following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the United Kingdom will now demonstrate to the world how a change of head of state and prime minister should be done: without violence or acrimony.
Harry L Barker
North Berwick, East Lothian
SIR – Queen Elizabeth was the enduring symbol of 1,000 years and more of the history of these islands.
At the age of 25, on the death of her father, George VI, she committed herself to a lifetime of service to all her peoples here in Britain, and to the millions in Commonwealth countries around the world.
Through decades of political and social turmoil, she gave us hope.
Now she is gone, and we look to a dangerous and unpredictable world where her wise counsel, sense of stability, and optimism will continue to inspire and guide her son, King Charles, in bringing the nation together in the dark days ahead.
John Barker
Prestbury, Cheshire
SIR – I feel our new Prime Minister should be congratulated for her outstanding address to the nation outside Number 10 on Thursday.
It was dignified, carefully crafted, perfectly delivered and reflected the mood of the nation.
Having voted for her, I feel totally vindicated.
Roger Laing
Iver, Buckinghamshire
SIR – I believe many will share my consternation that the BBC has elected to cancel the Last Night of the Proms as a consequence of the sad death of Queen Elizabeth.
Clearly, the programme would have required total recasting but there is plenty of music, both from Britain and elsewhere, that could have expressed solemnity and consolation. Vaughan Williams and Elgar provided plenty of it, Brahms and Beethoven plenty more.
Music has great power to console and provide space for reflection; to lose the opportunity to demonstrate this on a national stage seems to me to suggest that those in charge have no grasp of that power.
Let us hope that BBC Radio 3, at least, selects its material very carefully for that evening, and draws upon the huge well of repertoire that can express the national mood better than words.
Hilary Davan Wetton
Principal conductor
City of London Choir
Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire