Princess Elizabeth was 25 when her father died. She was on the first leg of a Commonwealth tour and she spent the night of 5 February 1952 at Treetops Hotel, set in the branches of a large fig tree in Aberdare National Park in Kenya. ‘For the first time in the history of the world,’ wrote the British naturalist Jim Corbett, who was a guest at the hotel at the same time, ‘a young girl climbed into a tree one day a princess and, after having what she described as her most thrilling experience, she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen.’
As interest in Queen Elizabeth II redoubles in the months leading up to the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June, it is worth reflecting upon the formative years which prepared her for the moment of her accession, 70 years ago this week.
There is a telling vignette from early 1937 recorded by a governor-general’s lady at Sandringham.
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