Queen mother biography review
- “The Queen Mother” is a labor of love, both for the author and for anyone who tries reading it from cover to cover.
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THE QUEEN MOTHER
Former Sunday Times journalist Shawcross follows up his tribute to Queen Elizabeth II (Queen and Country, 2002) with an extremely lengthy biography of the much beloved Queen Mother.
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (1900–2002) was six months old when Queen Victoria died, which should give readers an idea of the broad sweep of years and historical events our subject experienced in full. The ninth child of Lord Glamis (the Earl of Strathmore), the Queen Mother traced her ancestry deep into Scotland, though mostly grew up in a grand country home in Hertfordshire and in London. Known as Buffy, the young woman was comely, small of stature and full of fun, and apparently had many suitors. When the Duke of York, George V’s second son, Albert (“Bertie”), proposed, she rejected him—several times; he was unprepossessing and a stutterer, nothing like his dashing older brother, Edward. However, a taste of royal life was convincing enough and they married in 1923. It seemed they had a happy, stable marriage until his death in 1952, when their first-born, Elizabeth,
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The Queen Mother: The Official Biography
William Shawcross the biographer and historian, explains how the Queen Mother and members of her immediate family made important decisions and how they then lived with the outcomes of these decisions.
Topical book because what went on with Great Britain in the 1930's through the 1970's is going on right now in America.
For example, the breakdown of traditional marriage, the emergence of a secular society, the growth of a casual society with a growing lack of civility and respect for others, government pouring money into poor schools to no avail because the underlying problem was the breakdown of the family, the growth and intrusion of government in general, inflation, an agricultural drought and how a single "Death Duty" tax bankrupted the "Landed Gentry" class, their way of life and the mass
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The girl from Glamis
Biography
by Barry Everingham•
November 2009, no. 316
Queen Elizabeth: The Queen Mother: The Official Biography by William Shawcross
Macmillan, $59.99 hb, 1,120 pp
Biography
by Barry Everingham•
November 2009, no. 316
To many Australians, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was largely an unknown quantity. The wife of George VI and mother of the present monarch, she periodically visited this country to cut ribbons, open hospitals and wave to schoolchildren who had been bussed to sporting grounds and given flags to wave. But Australia loomed large in her private life, as evinced in this well-researched ‘official biography’ by William Shawcross, who enjoyed unfettered access to previously inaccessible royal documents. As an historical document, the book has no peer and for years to come will be an absolute necessity for political and royal researchers and biographers of the period. For such a substantial tome, it is an impressively compelling read.
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