After my long two part post on Wallis, I decided to cover her mortal enemy, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons. I can't really write a long tirade on her, as I just discovered I don't own a biography of her, and I'm not going to do a long post without a book to refer to. The recent one is the official biography, but I've heard it's rather dull. Diana is only mentioned in passing a few times. Camilla is mentioned exactly once, even though the Queen Mother had let Charles and Camilla use one of her properties as a love shack during his marriage. Though she was the main person who didn't want them getting married.

Elizabeth was born in 1900, in Scotland. Her father was an Earl, and her parents had a whole bunch of kids. She liked cold weather, killing animals, and outrageous hats, so it only made sense she would marry into the royal family. Gotta say I love her tiara in that portrait.

Got some quotes:

"Wouldn’t it be terrible if you’d spent all your life doing everything you were supposed to do, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t eat things, took lots of exercise, and suddenly, one day, you were run over by a big red bus and, as the wheels were crunching into you, you’d say, "Oh my God, I could have got so drunk last night". That’s the way you should live your life, as if tomorrow you’ll be run over by a big red bus."

She did live to be 101, if you feel like taking her advice. On the other hand, her husband died at 56 of lung cancer. I think that smoking might have had something to do with that.

The Queen Mother on politics:

"I am extremely Anti-Labour. They are so far apart from fairies & owls and bluebells & Americans & all the things I like. If they agree with me, I know they are pretending--in fact I believe everything is pretence to them."

That was from a private letter, by the way, as royals aren't meant to discuss politics in public.

She was fierce in a lot of ways, but not a woman you'd want to ever piss off. She was a very good mother to Queen Elizabeth, who called her mother "Mummy" well into her seventies. Despite their mutual love of alcohol and "off colour" jokes, the Queen Mother and Prince Philip were not close. Elizabeth didn't want to move out of Buckingham Palace when her husband died. So Philip turned the heat off in her room to make her leave.