Age, Biography and Wiki
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was born on August 4, 1900, in London, England. She was the daughter of Claude Bowes-Lyon, the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and his wife, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentham. She married King George VI in 1923 and became Queen Consort when her husband ascended to the throne in 1936 following the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII. She was known for her strong sense of duty and her role in boosting British morale during World War II.
| Occupation | Duchess |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 4 August 1900 |
| Age | 124 Years |
| Birth Place | Hitchin or London, England |
| Horoscope | Leo |
| Country | England |
| Date of death | 30 March, 2002 |
| Died Place | Royal Lodge, Windsor, Berkshire, England |
Height, Weight & Measurements
While specific details about her height and weight are not widely documented, she was often seen as a tall and statuesque figure in public appearances.
Elizabeth visited troops, hospitals, factories, and parts of Britain that were targeted by the German Luftwaffe, in particular the East End near London's docks. Her visits initially provoked hostility; rubbish was thrown at her and the crowds jeered, in part because she wore expensive clothes that served to alienate her from people suffering the deprivations of war. She explained that if the public came to see her they would wear their best clothes, so she should reciprocate in kind; Norman Hartnell dressed her in gentle colours and avoided black to represent "the rainbow of hope". When Buckingham Palace itself took several hits during the height of the bombing, Elizabeth said, "I'm glad we've been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face."
In her later years, Elizabeth became known for her longevity. Her 90th birthday—4 August 1990—was celebrated by a parade on 27 June that involved many of the 300 organisations of which she was a patron. In 1995, she attended events commemorating the end of the war fifty years before and had two operations: one to remove a cataract in her left eye and one to replace her right hip. In 1998, her left hip was replaced after it was broken when she slipped and fell during a visit to Sandringham stables.
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Dating & Relationship status
She was married to King George VI from 1923 until his death in 1952. They had two daughters, Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) and Margaret.
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (4 August 1900 – 30 March 2002) was Queen of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 to 6 February 1952 as the wife of King George VI. She was also the last Empress of India from 1936 until the British Raj was dissolved on 15 August 1947. After her husband died, she was officially known as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother to avoid confusion with her daughter Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1936, Elizabeth's husband unexpectedly ascended the throne as George VI when his older brother, Edward VIII, abdicated in order to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Elizabeth then became queen consort. She accompanied her husband on diplomatic tours to France and North America before the start of the Second World War. During the war, her seemingly indomitable spirit provided moral support to the British public. After the war, her husband's health deteriorated, and she was widowed at the age of 51. Her elder daughter, aged 25, became the new monarch.
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was the youngest daughter and the ninth of ten children of Claude Bowes-Lyon, Lord Glamis (later the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne in the Peerage of Scotland), and his wife, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck. Her mother was descended from British prime minister William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, and Governor-General of India Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, who was the elder brother of another prime minister, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.
After a successful royal visit to Northern Ireland in July 1924, the Labour government agreed that Albert and Elizabeth could tour East Africa from December 1924 to April 1925. The Labour government was defeated by the Conservatives in a general election in November (which Elizabeth described as "marvellous" to her mother) and the Governor-General of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, was assassinated three weeks later. Despite this, the tour went ahead, and they visited Aden, Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan, but Egypt was avoided because of political tensions.
On 20 January 1936, George V died and his eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, became King Edward VIII. Elizabeth's husband, Albert, became heir presumptive. Just months into Edward's reign, the King's decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson caused a constitutional crisis that resulted in his abdication. Albert reluctantly became king of the United Kingdom and emperor of India on 11 December 1936 under the regnal name of George VI. Elizabeth became queen and empress. Their coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937, the date previously scheduled for Edward VIII's coronation. Elizabeth's crown was made of platinum and was set with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
In summer 1938, a state visit to France by the King and Queen was postponed for three weeks because of the death of Elizabeth's mother. In two weeks, Norman Hartnell created an all-white trousseau for Elizabeth, who could not wear colours as she was still in mourning. The visit was designed to bolster Anglo-French solidarity in the face of aggression from Nazi Germany. The French press praised the demeanour and charm of the royal couple during the delayed but successful visit, augmented by Hartnell's wardrobe.
In May and June 1939, Elizabeth and her husband toured Canada from coast to coast and back, the first time a reigning monarch had toured Canada. They also visited the United States, spending time with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House and his Hudson Valley estate. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said that Elizabeth was "perfect as a Queen, gracious, informed, saying the right thing & kind but a little self-consciously regal". The tour was designed to bolster trans-Atlantic support in the event of war, and to affirm Canada's status as an independent kingdom sharing with Britain the same person as monarch.
French prime minister Édouard Daladier characterised Elizabeth as "an excessively ambitious young woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world so that she may remain Queen." Adolf Hitler is said to have called her "the most dangerous woman in Europe" because he viewed her popularity as a threat to German interests. However, before the war both she and her husband, like most of Parliament and the British public, had supported appeasement and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, believing after the experience of the First World War that war had to be avoided at all costs. After the resignation of Chamberlain, the King asked Winston Churchill to form a government. Although the King was initially suspicious of Churchill's character and motives, in due course the royal couple came to respect and admire him.
During the 1947 royal tour of South Africa, Elizabeth's serene public behaviour was broken, exceptionally, when she rose from the royal car to strike an admirer with her umbrella because she had mistaken his enthusiasm for hostility. The 1948 royal tour of Australia and New Zealand was postponed because of the King's declining health. In March 1949, he had a successful operation to improve the circulation in his right leg. In summer 1951, Elizabeth and her daughters fulfilled the King's public engagements in his place. In September, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. After a lung resection, he appeared to recover, but the delayed trip to Australia and New Zealand was altered so that Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, went in the King and Queen's place in January 1952. George VI died in his sleep on 6 February 1952 while Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were in Kenya on a Commonwealth tour, and with George's death his daughter immediately became Queen Elizabeth II.
Shortly after George VI's death, Elizabeth began to be styled as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother because the normal style for the widow of a king, "Queen Elizabeth", would have been too similar to the style of her elder daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Popularly, she became the "Queen Mother" or the "Queen Mum". She was devastated by her husband's death and retired to Scotland. However, after a meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, she broke her retirement and resumed her public duties. Eventually, she became just as busy as queen mother as she had been as queen consort. In July 1953, she undertook her first overseas visit since the funeral when she visited the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with Princess Margaret. She laid the foundation stone of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland—the current University of Zimbabwe. Upon her return to the region in 1957, Elizabeth was inaugurated as the college's president, and attended other events that were deliberately designed to be multi-racial. During her daughter's extensive tour of the Commonwealth over 1953–54, Elizabeth acted as a counsellor of state and looked after her grandchildren, Charles and Anne. In February 1959, she visited Kenya and Uganda.
During her widowhood, Elizabeth continued to travel extensively, including on over forty official visits overseas. In 1975, she visited Iran at the invitation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The British ambassador and his wife, Anthony and Sheila Parsons, noted how the Iranians were bemused by her habit of speaking to everyone regardless of status or importance, and hoped the Shah's entourage would learn from the visit to pay more attention to ordinary people. Between 1976 and 1984, she made annual summer visits to France, which were among 22 private trips to continental Europe between 1963 and 1992.
In 1987, Elizabeth was criticised when it emerged that two of her nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Redhill, Surrey, in 1941 because they had severe learning disabilities. However, Burke's Peerage had listed the sisters as dead, apparently because their mother, Fenella (Elizabeth's sister-in-law), "was 'extremely vague' when it came to filling in forms and might not have completed the paperwork for the family entry correctly". When Nerissa died in 1986, her grave was originally marked with a plastic tag and a serial number. Elizabeth said that the news of their institutionalisation came as a surprise to her.
In December 2001, aged 101, Elizabeth fractured her pelvis in a fall. Even so, she insisted on standing for the national anthem during the memorial service for her husband on 6 February the following year. Just three days later, their second daughter, Princess Margaret, died. On 13 February 2002, Elizabeth fell and cut her arm in her sitting room at Sandringham House; an ambulance and doctor were called, and the wound was dressed. She was still determined to attend Margaret's funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, two days later on the Friday of that week, even though the Queen and the rest of the royal family were concerned about the journey the Queen Mother would face to get from Norfolk to Windsor; she was also rumoured to be hardly eating. Nevertheless, she flew to Windsor by helicopter, and so that no photographs of her in a wheelchair (which she hated being seen in) could be taken—she insisted that she be shielded from the press —she travelled to the service in a people carrier with blacked-out windows, which had been previously used by Margaret.
On 30 March 2002, at 15:15 GMT, Elizabeth died at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, at the age of 101. Her surviving daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was by her side. The Queen Mother had been suffering from a chest cold since Christmas 2001. At 101 years and 238 days old she was the longest-living member of the British royal family at the time of her death, and the first member of the family to live past the age of 100. Her surviving sister-in-law, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, exceeded that, dying at the age of 102 on 29 October 2004. She was one of the longest-lived members of any royal family.
In London, more than a million people filled the area outside Westminster Abbey and along the 23 mi route from central London to Elizabeth's final resting place in the King George VI Memorial Chapel beside her husband and younger daughter in St George's Chapel. At her request, after her funeral the wreath that had lain atop her coffin was placed on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, in a gesture that echoed her wedding-day tribute 79 years before.
Elizabeth's critics included Kitty Kelley, who falsely alleged that she did not abide by the rationing regulations during the Second World War. This, however, was contradicted by the official records, and Eleanor Roosevelt during her wartime stay at Buckingham Palace reported expressly on the rationed food served in the Palace and the limited bathwater that was permitted. Claims that Elizabeth used racist slurs to refer to black people were strongly denied by Major Colin Burgess, the husband of Elizabeth Burgess, a mixed-race secretary who accused members of Prince Charles's household of racial abuse. Elizabeth made no public comments on race, but according to Robert Rhodes James, in private she "abhorred racial discrimination" and decried apartheid as "dreadful". Woodrow Wyatt records in his diary that when he expressed the view that non-white countries have nothing in common with "us", she told him, "I am very keen on the Commonwealth. They're all like us." However, she did distrust Germans; she told Wyatt, "Never trust them, never trust them." While she may have held such views, it has been argued that they were normal for British people of her generation and upbringing, who had experienced two vicious wars with Germany.
In his official biography, William Shawcross portrays Elizabeth as a person whose indomitable optimism, zest for life, good manners, mischievous sense of humour, and interest in people and subjects of all kinds contributed to her exceptional popularity and to her longevity. Sir Hugh Casson said Elizabeth was like "a wave breaking on a rock, because although she is sweet and pretty and charming, she also has a basic streak of toughness and tenacity. ... when a wave breaks on a rock, it showers and sparkles with a brilliant play of foam and droplets in the sun, yet beneath is really hard, tough rock, fused, in her case, from strong principles, physical courage and a sense of duty." Sir Peter Ustinov described her during a student demonstration at the University of Dundee in 1968:"As we arrived in a solemn procession the students pelted us with toilet rolls. They kept hold of one end, like streamers at a ball, and threw the other end. The Queen Mother stopped and picked these up as though somebody had misplaced them. [Returning them to the students she said,] 'Was this yours? Oh, could you take it?' And it was her sang-froid and her absolute refusal to be shocked by this, which immediately silenced all the students. She knows instinctively what to do on those occasions. She doesn't rise to being heckled at all; she just pretends it must be an oversight on the part of the people doing it. The way she reacted not only showed her presence of mind, but was so charming and so disarming, even to the most rabid element, that she brought peace to troubled waters."
Eight years before her death, Elizabeth had reportedly placed two-thirds of her money (an estimated £19 million) into trusts, for the benefit of her great-grandchildren. In her lifetime, she received £643,000 a year from the Civil List, and spent an estimated £1–2 million annually to run her household. By the end of the 1990s, her overdraft was said to be around £4 million. She left the bulk of her estate, estimated to be worth between £50 and £70 million, including paintings, Fabergé eggs, jewellery, and horses, to her surviving daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Under an agreement reached in 1993, property passing from monarch to monarch is exempt from inheritance tax, as is property passing from the consort of a former monarch to the current monarch, so a tax liability estimated at £28 million (40 percent of the value of the estate) was not incurred. The most important pieces of art were transferred to the Royal Collection by Elizabeth II. Following her death, the Queen successfully applied to the High Court so that details of her mother's will would be kept secret. This brought criticism from Labour politicians and segments of the public, and the Queen eventually released the outlines of her mother's will.
Elizabeth held numerous titles starting with her birth, as the daughter of an earl and through her marriage to the-then Duke of York, who later became King-Emperor. She was the last person to be Empress of India, and was Queen Mother during widowhood.
Elizabeth's coat of arms was the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom (in either the English or the Scottish version) impaled with the canting arms of her father, the Earl of Strathmore; the latter being: 1st and 4th quarters, Argent, a lion rampant Azure, armed and langued Gules, within a double tressure flory-counter-flory of the second (Lyon); 2nd and 3rd quarters, Ermine, three bows stringed paleways proper (Bowes). The shield is surmounted by the imperial crown, and supported by the crowned lion of England and a lion rampant per fess Or and Gules.
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| Husband | George VI (m. 26 April 1923-6 February 1952) |
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Net Worth and Salary
As the Queen Mother, her net worth is not publicly disclosed in the same way as modern celebrities or business leaders. However, the British Royal Family's wealth is substantial, with much of it held in trusts and estates. The Queen Mother's personal assets would have been part of this larger wealth, but specific figures are not available.
Career, Business and Investments
Her career was largely defined by her role as Queen Consort and later as Queen Mother. She was involved in numerous charitable and public engagements, supporting causes such as the Red Cross and the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service. She also played a key role in promoting British culture and interests abroad.
Prince Albert, Duke of York—"Bertie" to the family—was the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. He initially proposed to Elizabeth in 1921, but she turned him down, being "afraid never, never again to be free to think, speak and act as I feel I really ought to". When he declared he would marry no other, Queen Mary visited Glamis to see for herself the girl who had stolen her son's heart. She became convinced that Elizabeth was "the one girl who could make Bertie happy", but refused to interfere. At the same time, Elizabeth was courted by James Stuart, Albert's equerry, until he left the prince's service for a better-paid job in the American oil business.
Social Network
In her lifetime, there were no social media platforms as we know them today. However, she was widely covered in the media and was a prominent public figure.
According to an often-told story, during one of the earliest of the royal couple's repeated encounters with the crowds, a Boer War veteran asked Elizabeth, "Are you Scots or are you English?" She replied, "I am a Canadian!" Their reception by the Canadian and U.S. public was extremely enthusiastic, and largely dissipated any residual feeling that they were a lesser substitute for Edward VIII. Elizabeth told Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, "that tour made us", and she returned to Canada frequently both on official tours and privately.
In the 1945 British general election, Churchill's Conservative Party was soundly defeated by the Labour Party of Clement Attlee. Elizabeth's political views were rarely disclosed, but a letter she wrote in 1947 described Attlee's "high hopes of a socialist heaven on earth" as fading and presumably describes those who voted for him as "poor people, so many half-educated and bemused. I do love them." Woodrow Wyatt thought her "much more pro-Conservative" than other members of the royal family, but she later told him, "I like the dear old Labour Party." She also told the Duchess of Grafton, "I love communists."
Education
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother received a private education typical for someone of her social standing at the time. She was educated at home and later developed a strong interest in music and the arts.
Since Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother passed away in 2002, there would not be any current net worth or earnings to report for 2025. Her legacy, however, continues to be celebrated as a symbol of British resilience and tradition.
Elizabeth spent much of her childhood at St Paul's Walden and at Glamis Castle, the Earl's ancestral home in Scotland. She was educated at home by a governess until the age of eight, and was fond of field sports, ponies and dogs. When she started school in London, she astonished her teachers by precociously beginning an essay with two Greek words from Xenophon's Anabasis. Her best subjects were literature and scripture. After returning to private education under a German Jewish governess, Käthe Kübler, she passed the Oxford Local Examination with distinction at age thirteen.
