Month: September 2022

The speech Princess Elizabeth made in Cape Town on her 21st birthday. In full. Plus: an unexpected birthday present. And historic unseen pictures.

10 September 2022 By Paul Martin

Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st Birthday during the Royal Visit of her parents and her younger sister, and delivered the famous speech broadcast around the Empire: On my twenty-first birthday I welcome the opportunity to speak to all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and […]

She is not the Queen. The BBC gets it wrong, right and wrong.

9 September 2022 By Paul Martin

As the new King, Charles III, and his wife were about to land in England on their way back from the Queen’s deathbed, the BBC blundered. Sarah Montagu, long-time presenter of BBC radio’s World at One, the main midday new programme, referred to Charles’s wife as “the Queen”. Yet Queen Elizabeth II had declared that […]

I slept in the royal bed. Well, not exactly…

9 September 2022 By Paul Martin

There was a large crown embroidered on the mattress where I slept each night. It had been made by Airflex for the visit of the Royal Family to their Dominion, South Africa in 1947. The South African government had ordered the special royal mattresses so they could be installed at the places where the princess […]

Could claims of a fake photograph of the Queen installing the new prime minister create a temporary constitutional crisis for the United Kingdom? Or is this a fake storm in a royal teacup?

8 September 2022 By Paul Martin

By Paul Martin, Exclusive. Constitutional experts are perplexed by a photo supposedly showing the Queen, two days before her death, about to shake hands with Liz Truss as the Queen appointed her the new Prime Minister. If indeed Queen Elizabeth II was too ill to have been standing up and smiling at a rendezvous in […]