The Spectator’s Notes | 4 February 2012

The present Queen succeeded to the throne 60 years ago this coming Tuesday. Her father, King George VI, had died at Sandringham in the night. Pursuing a ‘Where were you when…?’ line of inquiry, I asked my father what he remembered. An undergraduate at Trinity, he was walking down Sydney Street, Cambridge, when he saw the news hoarding ‘the king is dead’. Oddly enough, he told me, his own father (also at Trinity) walked down Sydney Street on 23 January 1901, and into the Cambridge Union. There he found that a telegram — then the fastest means of news — had just been posted, announcing the death of Queen Victoria the previous evening. As he emerged from the Union, he found a silent crowd of townspeople gathered, waiting for news. They looked at him interrogatively, and he gave them a nod to indicate that the Queen was dead.

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My father also recalled passages of Churchill’s broadcast to the nation on the night of the death of George VI, including the phrase that the King had died ‘after a day of sunshine and sport’. The sport was shooting. As Churchill told his doctor Lord Moran, though not the nation: ‘It was the perfect ending. He had shot nine hares and a pigeon a hundred feet up, and then he dined with five friends and went out in the night. What more could any of us ask?’

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The other phrase my father quoted from the broadcast was the last: ‘I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian Era, may well feel a thrill in invoking, once more, the prayer and the Anthem GOD SAVE THE QUEEN’.