QUEEN Elizabeth the Queen Mother is expected to be given an honours list
of her own by the Queen to mark her 100th birthday, The Telegraph can
reveal.
According to Buckingham Palace officials, the
proposal is a "one-off" gesture to mark the
enormous contribution that she has made to the
nation over the last century. Last night, it was not
clear how many honours the Queen Mother
would be able to bestow in her daughter's name
but the list is expected to be announced either on
or close to her birthday on August 4.
The Queen is the only member of the Royal
Family normally entitled to award honours, which
she does on her official birthday and New Year's Day. Senior Palace officials
say that those from the Queen Mother's private office and the 320 charities of
which she is patron, president or a senior member are likely to figure among
the awards.
One senior member of the Royal Household said: "The idea for a small private
list of honours for the Queen Mother is one of a number of proposals being
considered by the Queen to mark her 100th birthday."
On Wednesday more than 30 members of the Royal Family, including the
Prince of Wales, will attend the Queen Mother's 100th birthday pageant at
Horse Guards Parade, central London. There will be more than 12,500
guests at the pageant, including 1,000 readers of The Telegraph who won free
tickets in a draw.
Among the contenders for an honour from the Queen Mother will be Sir
Alastair Aird, who has been the comptroller of her household since 1974 and
her private secretary and equerry since 1993. Dr David Starkey, the
constitutional historian and a fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said
there was no precedent for the nomination of honours in this way.
He said: "Honours nominations are made by all sorts of people, but
traditionally politicians. But this is a charming idea as a birthday tribute to the
Queen Mother. Traditionally, only two orders can be assigned without
political consultation: the garter and the Royal Victorian Order, which is for
services within the Royal Household. It is much more likely these nominations
would be made under the Royal Victorian Order."
Lord St John of Fawsley, the constitutional expert, said: "How exciting. It is a
wonderful idea, typical of the generosity of the Queen. I think it is a mark of
the Queen's great affection for her mother."
Last week The Telegraph revealed that the Queen Mother - who will also
receive a 100th birthday telegram from the Queen - is to avoid anti-monarchy
protesters by parading through central London in an open top carriage on
August 4. There were fears that she would have to spend the day at Clarence
House, her London home, after the Movement Against the Monarchy
(MAM) revealed its plans for a large demonstration against the Royal Family.
~*~
Royal pageant given wings by boy
soprano(Electronic Telegraph)
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
A 12-YEAR-OLD boy will sing for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at
her 100th birthday pageant on Wednesday a week after performing for the
Queen at the Royal Military Tattoo.
Dominic Kraemer, from Muswell Hill, north London, will release 100 white
doves - including the final bird from his hands - after giving a rendition of Oh
for the Wings of a Dove before more than 12,500 guests.
The boy soprano from the Purcell school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, is a
member of the Finchley Children's Music Group, which is performing at the
pageant. The event will be attended by 1,000 readers of The Telegraph.
Dominic said yesterday: "It's very exciting and a great honour to have been
chosen to sing at such an important event. But it's also rather daunting. I have
never sung at an outdoor venue in front of so many people."
The doves have been crossed with white racing pigeons to give them a
homing instinct. Within 20 minutes of being set free, they will have regrouped
in the skies above Horse Guards and be flying back to their roost in Essex.
Dominic's father, Nicholas, who is a conductor, said: "It's a great thrill for
Dominic and we are very proud of him." Mr Kraemer will attend the pageant
with his wife, Liz, while another of their four children, Daniel, nine, will also be
performing.
On Wednesday, Dominic, a computer enthusiast who loves Harry Potter
books, sang Where Have All the Flowers Gone? in front of the Queen: one of
his six performances at the Royal Military Tattoo.
Other members of the Royal Family to have seen him perform over the past
week include Prince Philip, the Prince of Wales, the Earl and Countess of
Wessex, the Princess Royal, Princess Margaret, Princess Alexandra, the
Duke and Duchess of Kent, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.
Major Michael Parker, the producer of the pageant who has staged more
than 70 national celebrations, said: "Dominic has a lovely voice and, just as
importantly, is brave enough to sing in front of 12,500 people."
The revised timetable, released exclusively to The Telegraph this weekend,
means that the pageant, to be broadcast live by ITV, will last for almost an
hour and a quarter.
The Queen Mother will leave Clarence House, her London home, by carriage
at 5pm, accompanied by a Captain's Escort from the Household Cavalry. She
will return by car at 6.13pm after watching a display involving 7,000 people
from the 320 charities and groups to which she is patron or president.
At 6.01pm, Sir John Mills, the 92-year-old actor, director and producer, will
deliver a one-minute tribute to the Queen Mother and eight minutes later she
will make a brief, unscripted address.
The Queen Mother, who will be 100 on August 4, will witness a series of
events involving 1,000 children. There will be a giant birthday card, a drop of
one million rose petals and a 25ft high birthday cake from which 70 children
will appear. Ross Malloy, six, has been chosen to help the Queen Mother
blow out the candles on the mock cake.
~*~
Rich winning streak of the racing queen (UK Times)
It all began one afternoon at Royal Ascot in 1949. The dashing
amateur rider Lord Mildmay of Flete, a guest at Windsor Castle for
the meeting, shared the royal party's delight when the King's filly,
Avila, romped home in the Coronation Stakes. But Mildmay's passion
for national hunt racing burnt brighter than his feeling for the flat and
he suggested to Queen Elizabeth that she might like to buy a jumper
or two. The trainer he recommended was his great friend Peter
Cazalet. The two men shared a dream: to establish Fairlawne, Cazalet's
beautiful William and Mary house near Sevenoaks in Kent, as one of
the best jumps stables in the land.
Queen Elizabeth listened with growing enthusiasm. She knew the
Cazalets and Fairlawne well. It seemed the ideal place to launch her
career as a jumps owner. The following month Cazalet bought her
first steeplechaser, a bay Irish gelding called Monaveen, which she
shared with her daughter, Princess Elizabeth. He proved an immediate
success, winning the first running of the Queen Elizabeth Chase at
Hurst Park: Queen Elizabeth's trip on the exhilarating switchback of
jumps ownership had begun.
More than half a century on, her enthusiasm for the sport has not
diminished. Whatever the weather, she watches her horses being
saddled before the race and welcomes them back afterwards, win or
lose. The Queen Mother herself told a television interviewer: "It's one
of the real sports that's left, isn't it? A bit of danger, a bit of
excitement and the horses - the best thing in the world."
From the start she was a lucky owner. The first horse to sport her
distinctive colours - blue, buff stripes, blue sleeves and black cap
with gold tassle - was the elegant French-bred chaser Manicou,
which had originally belonged to Mildmay. The horse passed into her
ownership after his death in a drowning accident in May 1950.
Manicou won her first big race victory, most appropriately, in the
King George VI Chase at Kempton Park on Boxing Day, 1950.
In the winter of 1973 Cazalet was dying of cancer and too ill to travel
to Liverpool to watch Inch Arran - the tough dapple grey Queen
Elizabeth bred, win the Topham trophy. She reran a film of the race at
Clarence House so they could watch it together. When Cazalet died a
few days later it was, in the words of Sir Martin Gilliat, her private
secretary, "the end of a most romantic era".
Cazalet was a brilliant and charismatic trainer, a perfectionist and
strict disciplinarian who demanded the highest standards. Yet his
son, the barrister Sir Edward Cazalet, says one of his overwhelming
memories of the Fairlawne days is of the enjoyment his father and the
Queen Mother had together.
"They got on frightfully well, laughed a lot and had a great deal of
fun. She didn't just enjoy seeing her horses run but loved all the
incidental things about going racing as well, like lunch on the course,
chatting to all the people, hearing the latest gossip. She always
appreciated characters, whether they were people or horses."
He emphasises the immense contribution the Queen Mother's
involvement has made to national hunt racing. Since Tudor times
members of the royal family have gone flat racing. Henry VIII
established the first official race course at Chester; Charles II
founded a racing centre at Newmarket; Queen Anne initiated a social
institution, Royal Ascot. The Queen Mother was the first member of
her family to become involved with the tougher and less fashionable
sport of steeplechasing. Her presence lifted the status of the sport.
After Cazalet's death, most of the Queen Mother's horses were
transferred to the Lambourn yard of Fulke Walwyn, the most
consistently successful jumps trainer since the second world war.
Although the number of horses she maintained in training was more
than halved, the Queen Mother's luck continued. By the start of the
1988-89 jumping season, Walwyn had trained her 108 more winners,
including a heart-stopping victory in the 1984 Whitbread Gold Cup,
her biggest win, a victory in the Schweppes Gold Trophy and four
wins in the Grand Military Gold Cup. There was a famous afternoon
in March 1986 when she won three races at Sandown Park, her
favourite racecourse: Special Cargo's third victory in the Grand
Military Gold Cup, plus wins in the Imperial Cup with Insular and in
the Dick McCreery Cup with The Argonaut.
But national hunt racing is also a perilous business. More than half a
tonne of horse and rider hurtling over obstacles at 30mph in adverse
weather conditions is, after all, asking for trouble. Her first disaster
came early on, when the brave Monaveen, trying to win the Queen
Elizabeth Chase for the second year running, fell at the water jump
and broke a leg.
Her most bitter disappointment must have been Devon Loch's
extraordinary fall in the 1956 Grand National, when he had the race
clearly won. The consensus of opinion, led by the horse's jockey,
Dick Francis, was that it was the mighty Aintree roar at the prospect
of a royal victory in the world's greatest steeplechase that caused the
horse to lose concentration.
Stunned onlookers that fateful day were amazed at the Queen
Mother's stoicism. She behaved as few owners would have been
capable of, hiding her disappointment, congratulating the owner of
the winner, ESB, with a smile and seeming to reserve all her sympathy
for her horse's closest connections, Cazalet and his lad, John Hole.
She sent Cazalet a silver cigarette box as a "memento of that terrible
yet glorious day last Saturday - glorious because of Devon Loch's
magnificent performance and terrible because of that unprecedented
disaster when victory seemed so sure".
"You couldn't wish for a better loser," Tommy Turvey, Fulke
Walwyn's head travelling lad, would say in later years, although, as
proof of the Queen Mother's humanity, Walwyn's widow Cath also
tells of the embarrassing occasion when the yard ran both the Queen
Mother's much-fancied Sun Rising and the complete outsider
Columbus in the Grand Military Gold Cup and Columbus won. The
Walwyns explained apologetically that they had not thought the
horse had a chance and would not have run him, but the owner had
insisted. "I do wish you hadn't," the Queen Mother replied wistfully.
The noted amateur rider Bob McCreery, who broke in some of the
Queen Mother's horses at his farm in Warwickshire in the 1960s,
confirms her sense of fun and liking for people who did not suck up
to her. He believes it is one of the reasons she enjoys going racing:
she can become just another owner, immersed in the intricacies of
form and professional gossip, a welcome respite from the flummery of
so many duties.
The affection with which Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is held
by the racing world in general has not been better described than by
"Jack Logan", alias the late Sir David Llewellyn, in an article he wrote
for The Sporting Life after the demise of Game Spirit in 1977.
"What is this secret of the Queen Mother's spell?" he asked.
"Primarily, I think that she treats everyone the same. Whoever her
escorts, she always has a word for stablemen, and the look she gives
her horses reflects a love which runs parallel with her love of
humanity."
~*~
Queen to open new Berlin embassy(Yahoo: Ananova)
The Queen will this week officially open the new British embassy in Berlin.
Accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, she will lunch with German President Johannes Rau at his
residence after the opening ceremony on Tuesday.
A new embassy building was needed when the German Government relocated from Bonn to the new
capital Berlin, following the reunification of East and West Germany.
It has been built on Wilhelmstrasse, on the site of the former British Embassy, which was left derelict
after the Second World War and demolished in the 1960s.
The new embassy, designed by architect Michael Wilford, will provide offices for 125 diplomats and local staff.
An oak tree planted in the courtyard is dedicated to the memory of Derek Fatchett, the Foreign Office Minister who broke the
ground on the site in June 1998, but died less than a year later.
The Queen will meet embassy staff, including the British Ambassador, Sir Paul Lever, and will later visit the Reichstag.