They may live in grand palaces, attend a roster of glamorous events and have their daily lives documented in the press around the world, but the English royals are, fundamentally, just a family – with all the love, fun and occasional tension that entails. Now a new documentary, airing on ITV tonight, is set to offer an intimate glimpse inside royal life, with a focus on none other than the Queen herself.
The ITV Press Centre relates that the The Queen Unseen will feature ‘interviews and personal stories from those who know HM The Queen and have worked alongside her,’ showing the monarch ‘as a wife, mother, animal lover, cook, farmer and comedian, lifting the mask royalty brings to show who she really is.’ It’s timed to debut just ahead of the Queen’s 95th birthday, a milestone that she’ll reach on 21 April.
The MailOnline reports that the documentary will utilise archive material never before seen by the public. This includes footage of the recently-crowned Queen and Prince Philip at Christmas in 1953, captured by Patricia Norrie, the wife of New Zealand’s Governor-General at the time, Sir Willoughby Norrie, with whom the couple briefly stayed during a seven-month tour of the Commonwealth.
Among the footage is a touching clip of the Duke of Edinburgh pulling the Norries’ 10-year-old daughter, Sarah Stephenson, through a pool on a lilo. Now an adult, Stephenson reveals in a preview clip that it was ‘terribly exciting to have the whole royal party staying in your home’. Opening up about her memories of the visit, she recalls: ‘There was one time actually, when my sister and I were taking our dogs for a walk and the Queen saw us and she said she wish she could come with us.
‘Father Christmas was approaching with lots of presents for Prince Charles and Princess Anne, who were very young, they were in England, so it must have been very difficult for the Queen and the Duke to leave their children behind for such a long trip. My parents gave the Queen and the Duke a Christmas stocking each, and in the Queen’s stocking there was a dog lead, and in the Duke’s stocking there was a blue and white ashtray. And my father said, the Duke will be pleased because it's got his wife’s head on it. He thought that was terribly funny.’
She goes on: ‘This was a private pool we took the royal party to on Christmas Day. There’s my father with the Queen… The Duke of Edinburgh is trying to get on this lilo, and he has to have several attempts… The royal couple knew that we were filming, and they didn’t seem to mind that we were. And the Queen also had an identical camera to my mother. She was also taking similar shots… That was the Queen’s smile, which my mum very cleverly caught. Great fun, we loved it.’
Having been travelling the globe for almost 70 years carrying out royal duties, the Queen has quite the wealth of diplomatic experience. Fascinating footage from the documentary shows the monarch during a historic meeting with Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito, who invited her to visit him in Belgrade in 1972 to mark his 80th birthday. The clip was captured by Tito’s personal cameraman, and shows the Queen chatting with the dictator with apparent ease, during what constituted her first ever visit to a communist country. The unlikely pair are even seen riding in a golf buggy and sharing an orange – a rare sight, given that the Queen is known to largely avoid eating on camera. Reflecting on the trip, Broadcaster Wesley Kerr says in the documentary: ‘Britain absolutely has been well served by the Queen in terms of her mastery of diplomacy, the absence of slip-ups.’
The Queen is also shown in her capacity as a mother, such as in one of the first colour photographs captured of the monarch – with a seven-month-old Prince Andrew at Balmoral in 1960. Her well-known love for animals is touched upon too, including the charming story of a long-running, 40-year friendship with a New Zealand dairy farmer, Don Ferguson. The pair met at an agricultural show in 1975, after which they became co-owners of a herd of Jersey cows. Ferguson kept the Queen up to date about the animals, regularly phoning to inform her if any among the herd won prizes at cattle shows.
When the Queen visited New Zealand in 1990, she made sure to take a detour to visit Ferguson and the cows. Reflecting on the event, the dairy farmer’s widow, June, recalls that her and the Queen spoke about the fact that Prince Philip ‘swears like a trooper’. The Queen is said to have noted: ‘all husbands swear, don't they?’, with June insisting that her husband actually did not.
The Queen Unseen airs on 8 April at 9pm on ITV1
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