Night the Queen slow-shoe shuffled with Elton to Rock Around the Clock – along with her purse on her arm: Delightful vignettes revealed by royal biographer IAN LLOYD on the a centesimal anniversary of Elizabeth II’s delivery

Next Tuesday is the centenary of Queen Elizabeth II’s birth. In a new book published to mark what would have been her 100th birthday, royal photographer and biographer Ian Lloyd draws on interviews with relatives, friends and courtiers to reveal the woman behind the title: a monarch who was dutiful and kind but who also had a razor wit, loved dancing to Abba and was a whiz at quizzes…

Showbusiness

Meeting Madonna in the line-up at the premiere of Die Another Day in 2002, it was clear the Queen had no idea who she was.

As the singer laughed nervously, an aide explained the Material Girl star had voiced the title track, to which the Queen replied: ‘Oh really, did you?’ before moving on.

Not that John Cleese, next in line, fared any better. He was asked the perennial royal query: ‘And what do you do?’

Tommy Cooper was a particular favourite of the Queen. During one backstage meet-and-greet he asked her: ‘Will you be going to the Cup Final next year?’

The Queen replied: ‘No, I don’t think I am.’ To which Cooper quipped: ‘Well, can I have your tickets?’

When poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis attended a lunch party at Buckingham Palace, he put his feet on what he thought was a conveniently placed footstool. It was in fact a sleeping corgi.

At another lunch at Buckingham Palace, one of the corgis misbehaved and the Queen snapped, ‘Heather!’ in its direction, much to the alarm of the opera singer Heather Harper, who was sitting next to Prince Philip.

At the 21st birthday bash the Queen hosted for Prince Andrew at Windsor Castle, Elton John was among the guests. Princess Anne asked him to dance, and they were awkwardly shuffling from one foot to the other when the Queen came over.

‘May we join you?’ she asked and joined in the slow-shoe shuffle to Rock Around The Clock. All the time she still had her black handbag over her arm.

The Queen was also known to bop to Abba’s Dancing Queen during dress fittings with her fun-loving personal assistant, Angela Kelly.

The Royal Variety Performance is an annual commitment, but the Queen didn’t always recognise the performers. The producers of the 1991 show paid £72,000 to fly Diana Ross over to headline and the diva dominated the whole of the second half.

As she walked downstairs to meet the performers, the Queen said: ‘I thought the girl singer did very well.’

At another Royal Variety Performance during a routine from The Full Monty, the plan was for the five actors to strip down until they were just about to whip off their G-strings, at which point the lights would be switched from the stage onto the auditorium and the dazzled audience would be spared any blushes.

Unfortunately, the lights failed, and five naked and embarrassed men were left floundering in the footlights. The Queen remained deadpan and, turning to her hosts, said: ‘Is that it then?’, although they were unclear what exactly she was referring to.

Frugality

The Queen’s famous frugality runs in the family. Her Great-Aunt Alice used to travel by bus and when the Queen visited her on her sickbed in October 1980, shortly before her death, she was told: ‘Turn off the heater as you go out. We only put it on because you were coming.’ The monarch duly bent down and unplugged the fire.

A royal page once found a scribbled note on the Queen’s bedside table asking him to fit one of the new energy-saving lightbulbs, adding, ‘but only when this one blows’.

House party guests at a picnic in a Balmoral bothy were amused to be ticked off by the Queen for trying to throw away half-burned candles.

The only thing she allowed them to do was blow them out, insisting they be kept for the next visit – ‘There’s plenty of light in that one’.

One royal cousin was less amused to be handed a packed lunch for her return journey home from Balmoral, only to find she was later invoiced for it.

Recycling is also in the Royal DNA. The team of dressers working for Angela Kelly had first dibs on the Queen’s cast-off clothes. ‘When she finally tires of [an item of clothing], she will hand it to one of her dressers, who can either wear it or sell it.’

Any labels or anything that might suggest it belonged to the Queen must be removed first. ‘One frock found its way to a jumble sale near Sandringham,’ says author Brian Hoey, ‘but in spite of its obvious quality, it failed to sell.’

And it continues down the generations: Prince George has been photographed at Trooping the Colour wearing shorts worn by his father in 1984. Charlotte once wore Prince Harry’s ‘Mary Jane’ shoes, while Louis wore blue shorts at the 2019 Trooping that were made for Uncle Harry in 1986.

Queen of the quiz 

On a midweek afternoon in January, the Queen could be found sitting around a card table in a village hall pouring tea for three other women of a certain age. She was there as the President of the Sandringham branch of the Women’s Institute (WI) and the first meeting of the year was one of the annual fixtures on her calendar.

In 2019, Alexander Armstrong, presenter of the TV quiz Pointless, visited the Sandringham branch and hosted a game based on his show. Her Majesty captained one of the teams, which won three out of five games.

Armstrong later said the Queen had ‘some deft, silky Pointless skills’. She was, he claimed, ‘our most distinguished viewer’.

Another guest speaker at the Sandringham WI was celebrity gardener Alan Titchmarsh. A few months later the Queen presented him with his MBE, and commented: ‘You’ve given a lot of ladies a lot of pleasure,’ which he’s often said he’d like on his gravestone.

For over six decades, the Queen’s right-hand member of staff Bobo brought her morning tea in her room. The one exception was on Bobo’s birthday, when the monarch brought a cup of tea to her much-loved friend.

Becoming Queen

While at Treetops in Kenya on Princess Elizabeth’s 1952 official visit, Prince Philip’s private secretary Mike Parker invited the princess to climb a ladder to a look-out point from where they could see over the forest to the horizon.

As they climbed, an eagle appeared and hovered above them. ‘I never thought about it until later,’ Parker recalled, ‘but that was roughly the time when the King died’ – and the precise moment Elizabeth became Queen, although the news didn’t percolate to Kenya for several hours.

As Elizabeth left Treetops for a swiftly arranged flight home, her private secretary Martin Charteris asked the assembled press not to photograph or film Elizabeth as she departed for the airport.

Dutifully, they placed their cameras on the ground and stood silently by the roadside as the royal convoy moved off. It meant, of course, that no photos or newsreel footage was taken of Elizabeth on the day she became Queen.

On the flight home from Africa, a message from the Queen Mother was received by the captain, entered into the log book, then copied out by hand on to a signal form, before being shown to Elizabeth.

Thought to be the first time she was addressed as Her Majesty in writing, it read: ‘To: Her Majesty The Queen. All my thoughts and prayers are with you. Mummie. Buckingham Palace.’

Margaret

After her split from Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret spent the rest of the 1950s at Clarence House, increasingly frustrated as her friends married.

She took out her frustration on her mother, once throwing a book at her head. PM Harold Macmillan was once in a private audience with the Queen when Margaret stormed in wearing a dressing gown and said: ‘No one would talk to you if you were not the Queen!’

Diana

During her marriage to Prince Charles, Princess Diana took to calling on the Queen unannounced to pour out her heart to her. Sometimes, the Queen’s schedule meant the Princess had to wait.

One footman later reported to the Queen: ‘The Princess cried three times in a half hour while waiting to see you.’

The Queen replied, ‘I had her for half an hour and she cried non-stop.’

Mrs Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher was scrupulously deferential to the Queen. ‘Her curtsey almost reached Australia,’ recalled her policy adviser, Charles Powell.

She did try to bond with the monarch, once sending her a pair of rubber gloves upon seeing her wash the dishes after a Balmoral picnic without using any.

Childhood and teens

Elizabeth II is the only British monarch to have been born in a private house belonging to her maternal grandparents. Number 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, is today the home of Hakkasan, a Cantonese restaurant.

King George was very hands-on with his children, taking part in bath time with the girls and in pillow fights in their bedrooms.

He also arranged for Elizabeth to have lessons in constitutional history from the vice provost of Eton, Henry Marten, a bashful and eccentric figure who nervously addressed the Princess as ‘gentlemen’, the usual way he addressed a classroom of boys.

Philip

Elizabeth and Philip first met on a royal visit to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in July 1939. While the parents attended chapel, the 18-year-old cadet Philip was sent to entertain the Princesses, aged 13 and 9.

He played trains with them, sipped lemonade and ate ginger crackers, then suggested to nanny Miss Crawford that they all go to the tennis courts ‘and have some real fun jumping the nets’.

Crawfie felt ‘he showed off a good deal’, but Elizabeth enthused: ‘How good he is, Crawfie. How high he can jump!’

Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen. On the day of his funeral, the Queen’s birds took part in a fly-past in a winged tribute to Prince Philip.

Christmas broadcast

In 1957, the Queen was extremely nervous before the recording of her first televised Christmas speech, as was her family who, she said, ‘thought I was going to break down with nerves.’

To put her at ease, Philip told her to ‘Remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth’ – a reference to his chasing her along the train corridors during a trip to Canada in 1951 wearing huge false fangs.

As the cameramen were setting up at Sandringham, the BBC’s superintendent of lighting, Harold Mayhew (‘Mr Grumps’, to his team, for his less than exuberant attitude) bravely told Her Majesty that the dress she had decided to wear wouldn’t work in black and white.

Together they selected a gold lamé dress, a wise choice as its metallic gleam still shines out from the monochrome fog of a fifties recording.

The broadcast went without a hitch and afterwards the Queen laughed and joked with the crew, before joining her relieved family and resuming her Christmas.

One souvenir still exists from the day, a Christmas card signed to Harold Mayhew from a grateful monarch on her television debut, ‘To Mr Grumps from Elizabeth R’.

One liked to chat

Since the decommissioning of the Royal Yacht Britannia, if HM wanted to cruise around the isles, she had to hire the Hebridean Princess, a converted car ferry. In 2006, they moored by the Isle of Gigha off the west coast of Kintyre. The Queen wanted to see the island, so Princess Anne cycled to the newsagents to see if there was a way her mother could be transported around. The owner, Russell Town, offered to drive them in his Peugeot people carrier.

‘She was a real chatterbox,’ said the newsagent, ‘and started asking me lots of questions about my family. When I saw my daughter at the side of the road and pointed her out, the Queen waved at her.’

The Queen sat for over 130 portraits. When sitting for Italian painter Pietro Annigoni, he wished she would, in the nicest way, keep quiet.

Asked by a journalist if she talked while he worked, he answered: ‘Well yes, perhaps too much.’ Word must have got back to her, because their final four sittings were held in awkward silence.

We are amused

Walking one day with her protection officer Richard Griffin at Balmoral, the Queen was dressed in her country casuals of a headscarf and tweed coat.

When a group of American tourists asked her if she’d ever met the Queen, the monarch replied: ‘No, but he has,’ pointing at the police officer.

When the Queen met the author Hammond Innes at a literary party, the conversation turned for some reason to police helmets. Innes, taken aback, said: ‘How would you know about them, Ma’am?’ To which the Queen replied: ‘I knocked one off on VE Day.’

The Queen was a fan of the risqué humour of Sir Donald Gosling, the founder of National Car Parks (NCP). He once embarked on a naughty joke involving a horse trainer giving Viagra to a runner in the 2.30 at Newton Abbot.

The Defence Minister hurriedly interjected to stop the punchline but Her Majesty berated the minister and got Sir Don to repeat the joke, complete with the ending, which had something to do with winning against stiff competition.

Adapted from The Queen by Ian Lloyd (The History Press Ltd, £12.99) published April 9. © Ian Lloyd 2026. To order a copy for £11.69 (offer valid to 02/05/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.