The Queen – an archivist remembers

            I must be the only person on the West Buckland campus who remembers the Queen becoming Queen.

            I was at school, one morning in early February, 1952.   I was engaged in compiling a giant family tree of all the kings and queens of England, back to Alfred the Great and before.   I had got right down to the twentieth century, to the House of Windsor.  King George VI, in fact, was on the throne on the day I was printing the names of him and his family.

            I had carefully pencilled in the names of his two daughters – Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.  (Oddly, in those days, she was always referred to by everybody with both her names – Margaret Rose.)

            Suddenly the news broke that the King had died. When I heard it, I clearly remember putting down my pencil, picking up a rubber, erasing ‘Princess Elizabeth’, and putting in ‘ELIZABETH II’.

            How`s that for coincidence?

            And as for irony, I could never have imagined that I would still be working at a school seventy years later.

Berwick Coates