Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon

August 4, 1900 – March 30, 2002

Queen consort of the United Kingdom from 1936 to 1952 as the wife of George VI, and afterwards known as the Queen Mother during the reign of her daughter Elizabeth II.

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Biography

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born in 1900, the ninth child of Lord Glamis, later Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and grew up at St Paul's Walden Bury in Hertfordshire and Glamis Castle in Scotland. Educated mostly at home, she saw Glamis turned into a convalescent home for wounded soldiers during the First World War, in which one of her brothers was killed.

After twice refusing him, she married Prince Albert, Duke of York, the second son of George V, at Westminster Abbey in April 1923. The couple had two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, and as Duchess of York she carried out a wide range of public engagements.

When Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936 her husband became King George VI and she became queen consort and empress of India; they were crowned together in May 1937. In 1939 they toured Canada and visited the United States, and during the Second World War she refused to leave London or send her daughters abroad, visiting bombed areas and becoming a symbol of national resistance.

Widowed in 1952, she took the style Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother when her elder daughter became queen. She remained a popular and active member of the royal family for another fifty years and died at Royal Lodge, Windsor, in March 2002, aged 101, seven weeks after Princess Margaret.