We all thought Prince Philip was the resident royal jester but in the new BBC documentary, The Coronation, we get to see the lighter funnier side to Queen Elizabeth.
The new film, which centres around the Queen’s coronation in 1953, sees the 91-year-old monarch interviewed by Sky News reporter Alastair Bruce…
And she sheds light on the historical time with a lot of humour!
Watch Queen Elizabeth talk about her coronation below. Post continues…
The Queen’s jewels were kept safe in a biscuit tin during the war
The St. Edward’s Crown can only allowed to be handled by three people in the world: the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the crown jeweler.
The film unveiled that during the Second World War, King George VI ordered that the crown jewels be buried under a sally port at Windsor Castle – a secret exit from the castle used in times of emergency.
The jewels were placed in a biscuit tin and hidden out of fears that Nazis may steal them, should England suffer and invasion.
Alistair told The Times that the Queen had no idea her father had concocted such a plan.
“What was so lovely was that the Queen had no knowledge of it. Telling her seemed strangely odd.”
Apparently the trap door that hid the gems still exists to this day!
The Queen isn’t that fussed about jewels – and she’s funny
Queen Elizabeth, pictured with the Imperial Crown, has only worn the St. Edward’s Crown once in her six-decade reign.
Alistair’s interaction with the royal monarch revealed that Queen Elizabeth doesn’t go gaga over things that sparkle.
“The Queen is entirely disinterested in jewellery as a person,” he mused in the film.
“There are plenty of people I know who are excited about what they have in a box in their bedroom.”
“The Queen is the guardian of a considerable quantity of jewellery, setting aside the Regalia, but I don’t see her as somebody who’s particularly interested in diamonds and sitting there [cooing over them] like Elizabeth Taylor.”
Speaking in The Coronation, “Jewellery is one of the elements that helped her deliver the fact that she is Queen to the people she comes in contact with. It’s the trappings, and all these elements and symbols are seen by her as part of the job.”
Her Majesty watches her big moment, wearing the St. Edward’s Crown.
For her part, Queen Elizabeth speaks with a sense of detachment and dry humour when reflecting on the jewels.
The crown is set with 2,868 diamonds including 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and hundreds of pearls.
The 91-year-old showed off four pearls on the crown, explaining, “They were meant to be Queen Elizabeth’s earrings.”
“They don’t look very happy now. Most pearls like to be sort of living creatures, so they’ve just been out, hanging out here for years. It’s rather sad,” she joked with a slight smile.
The monarch also noted that wearing the bejewelled piece was no walk in the park.
“You can’t look down to read the speech; you have to take the speech up because if you did, your neck would break; it would fall off,” she chuckled.
“So there are some disadvantages to crowns, but otherwise they’re quite important things.”
The Queen remembers her dad’s coronation better than her own
Elizabeth was 11 years old during her father’s coronation.
Queen Elizabeth was 25 years old during her 1953 crowning, yet she has a better recollection of her father’s big moment.
King George VI’s coronation took place at Westminster Abbey in May 1937.
The father-of-two made his 11-year-old daughter write down everything she remembered from the day, which Her Majesty admitted was “very valuable”.
The pre-teen Princess wrote in an exercise book, using red pencil, “To Mummy and Papa, In Memory of Their Coronation, From Lilibet. By Herself.”
The Coronation airs in Australia on ABC and ABC iview on Sunday, 4 February at 7.40pm
How cute and near is her handwriting!
Her detail accounts from the historical moment is exceptionally sweet.
“I thought it all very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did too,” she reflected.
“The arches and the beams at the top were covered in a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.”
She may have understood that one day she’d be Queen of England, the then-Princess Elizabeth still had her youthful innocence.
“At the end the service got rather boring as it was all prayers,” Elizabeth wrote.
“Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end, and we turned one more and then I pointed to the word at the bottom of the page and it said ‘Finis’. We both smiled at each other and turned back to the service.”
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