Our Little Princess Lilibet

Fond of dogs, ponies and a tortoise called Madame Butterfly, The Queen has described her childhood as a ‘happy atmosphere of love and fairness’, although, as Matthew Dennison observes, she and her sister were afforded little privacy

- Matthew Dennison

ON the platform at Ballater station, on September 17, 1934, reporters seized gratefully on the unaffected liveliness of one of the royal party gathered to greet the newest recruit to George V’s family. Princess Marina of Greece, engaged to the King’s youngest son, George, Duke of Kent, was making her first visit to Balmoral; her welcoming party included her fiancé’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, and the Duchess’s eight-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth. ‘Obviously excited’, the little princess danced round and round on the red carpet until, noted the Gloucester Citizen: ‘Princess Marina… stooped down to kiss her future niece.’

Almost a century ago, excitement and liveliness lay at the heart of the public image of the girl who, for some seven decades, has reigned as Elizabeth II: a writer close to her mother described her as a toddler as ‘a curiously vivid little figure, full of life and character’ and, later, ‘bright as an atom of radium’. For a generation of readers of newspapers and illustrated papers adjusting to the altered reality of the First World War’s aftermath, the princess who was born in the rain-drenched early hours of April 21, 1926, in the London home of her maternal grandparents, the 14th Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, provided what one lady-in-waiting called a symbol of ‘continuity and of hope in the future’.