101 glorious years

Radiant, hardworking and unflappable, to millions she remained the bedrock of the House of Windsor - something that was celebrated during the pageantry and festivities of her 100th birthday celebrations in 2000.

With her endearing manner and warming smile, the Queen Mother played a major and vital role in guaranteeing the continuance of her own brand of monarchy into the 21st century in the face of increasing problems for the royals.

And she did it all by the sheer force of her personality, as scandals and divorce and the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, saw the public perception of the House of Windsor change forever.

Serious concerns for her health started in the late 1990s. A bad fall forced her at the age of 97 to undergo a second hip replacement operation.

An accident at Sandringham resulted in her having to spend 23 days at the King Edward VII Hospital, where she was said to have made a good recovery.

In 2000, tests revealed anaemia, and she successfully recovered from a blood transfusion operation, although she was often kept out of the public spotlight due to her susceptibility to colds. In 2001 she was unable to attend many family functions due to ill health.

The emotional trauma caused by Princess Diana's death and the subsequent criticism of the Royal Family's reaction to it, as well as her own heartache from the death of her daughter, Princess Margaret, in 2002 took a great toll on the Queen Mother. Her reaction was to be ever more supportive of the Queen and Prince Charles.

In Oxford, the UK's most-loved centenarian will be remembered as a good friend of the University but also for her visits to the county's towns and villages, which continued over five decades.

One of the best-remembered visits came in 1989, when she brought Beaumont Street to a standstill as big crowds witnessed her official visit to the University. Four hundred people cheered as she was welcomed on the steps of the Ashmolean Museum by the University Chancellor, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead.

But often her trips to Oxford colleges were only witnessed by a handful of people. For she regularly paid private visits, most often to All Souls College, where she had a number of close friends. Her limousine would pull up outside the college on High Street to the astonishment of shoppers and tourists, who watched her walk a short distance to the college gates.

Other parts of the county have their own memories. Teachers still recall a visit by helicopter to Witney Grammar and Bloxham schools in 1960, while former nurses remember the warmth she showed when opening new buildings at Oxford Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre two years earlier.

And in 1973 she officially opened Oxford's new maternity hospital at the John Radcliffe site in Headington.

But the Queen Mother's visits were not limited to big institutions. She was in the county a few days before her 90th birthday when she opened a village hall in the tiny community of Ardington. More than 200 people - almost half the population of the two neighbouring villages - turned out to welcome Britain's favourite grandmother.

Oxford's award-winning amateur Royal photographer, Ian Lloyd, who photographed the Queen Mother on many of her visits, said: "I always found her to be close to the people.

"She was very popular but they never lost respect for her. They never shouted her name as they did with Princess Diana or the Duchess of York."

Mr Lloyd, of Marston, said: "In many ways, she was the most unconventional of the Royals -- if she hadn't managed to get along a crowd to accept their flowers she would wind the car window down, taking them as she moved on to her next engagement."

Elizabeth became Queen at a time when the United Kingdom still confidently believed itself to be a great imperial power.

Describing her feelings to a friend in the month before her coronation in May 1937, she talked about "the intolerable honour".

Historians will doubtless say that her greatest achievement was the stabilising of the House of Windsor after its most shattering constitutional trauma: the brief reign and abdication of King Edward VIII.

Sadly, her life came to its end with the popularity of the Royals again at a low, with many churchmen and commentators openly doubting the fitness of the Prince of Wales to succeed to the throne.

Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes Lyon was born on August 4, 1900, and became Lady Elizabeth in 1904 when her father succeeded to the Earldom of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

And it was at a children's party that five-year-old Lady Elizabeth met her future husband for the first time.

Sitting next to the agonisingly shy nine-year-old Prince Albert, second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, she removed the cherries from her cake, and, as a gesture of friendship, slipped them on his plate.

The Great War with Germany was declared on Elizabeth's fourteenth birthday. Her family's Scottish home, Glamis Castle, was quickly turned into a military hospital and she became a hospital orderly.

Seeing the results of bloody trench warfare every day for four years ensured she grew up rapidly.

It was a sober training for a life of Royal Duty.

Elizabeth came out in the summer of 1919 and was described as "the best little dancer in London".

She avoided nightclubs and parties that broke up at dawn, but it was at a ball given by Lord Farquhar, the Master of the Household to King Edward VII, she again met the second son of King George V.

Enchanted, Prince Albert (the future King George VI) resolved to woo and win her. He was invited to Glamis, twice proposed marriage and was twice turned down.

Elizabeth was too sure of her own birthright to be dazzled by royalty and had misgivings about surrendering her privacy for a circumscribed life as a member of the Royal Family.

Her father voiced a different concern, expressing "grave doubts" about the Prince of Wales.

He questioned, with uncanny accuracy, whether the glamorous, pleasure-loving Prince would ever come to the throne, and predicted that, if he did, he might not last. "Then where should we be?" he asked.

But whatever doubts Elizabeth might have had, she overcame them on January 13, 1923, when she finally accepted the Prince's proposal.

The wedding was in Westminster Abbey the following April, and the bride set the tone of her future royal style by laying her bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, in memory of the dead buried in the mud of Flanders.

Princess Elizabeth was born in 1926 and Princess Margaret in 1930. The little princesses became the darlings of the Empire.

But dynastic shadows were gathering. The Prince of Wales's latest affair, with Mrs Wallis Simpson, was coming to crisis point.

The King died on January 20, 1936 and the Prince of Wales was proclaimed as Edward VIII and, with Mrs Simpson in the wings, the stage was set for the second greatest change in the life of the 36-year-old Elizabeth.

Edward reigned for less than a year, abdicating on December 10, 1936, ending weeks of uncertainty and conjecture for the heir presumptive and his family.

That night the future Duke of Windsor sailed for France and exile.

In his diary King George VI described December 11 as "that dreadful day".

The serious misgivings which caused Princess Elizabeth to hesitate before accepting her husband's proposal of marriage 13 years earlier had now become reality.

She was bitter and disillusioned by her brother-in-law's desertion.

The Queen Mother's friends have always claimed that, although she mellowed somewhat towards his widow, the Duchess of Windsor, in the latter's final years and even went so far as to exchange Christmas cards and send the duchess flowers, she never really forgave her for being the catalyst that brought about the abdication.

The coronation of the new King and Queen was the last blaze of Royal pageantry before Britain became engulfed in war.

As the storm clouds of war gathered, the King and Queen pulled off two diplomatic coups which helped lay the foundations of the Allied victory in 1945.

Royal visits to North America in 1938, and, in May 1939 to France, did much to cement the relationships that ultimately led to the defeat of the Third Reich.

Indeed, on seeing news-reel footage of the Queen laying a single red poppy on a French memorial, to First World War Australian dead, Hitler dubbed her "the most dangerous woman in Europe".

By the end of 1939 Britain was at war, and as German bombers rained death and destruction from the skies in early 1940, Elizabeth emerged with a new role -- The Queen of the Blitz.

Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times and the experience prompted her to make her most celebrated war-time response:"I'm glad we've been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face".

There was no question of retreat for the King and Queen, despite the very real threat of invasion.

To suggestions that her daughters should be sent to a haven across the Atlantic, she replied: "The children won't leave without me; I won't leave without the King, and the King will never leave".

Five years later the War was over, but it had left the King and Queen as drained as their people, who were now facing not a peace of plenty, but one of grim austerity.

The King and Queen celebrated their silver wedding in April 1948, and their domestic joy was completed with the news that Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, who had married the previous autumn, were expecting a baby.

But by the time Prince Charles was born, in November, the King was gravely ill and after the birth of Princess Anne, in August 1950, he had only 18 months to live.

He died of lung cancer at Sandringham, aged 56, on February 6 1952, after a day's shooting.

His elder daughter became Queen at twenty-five.

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, as she was now to be known, became a widow at only fifty-one and she appeared beyond consolation.

But, however deep her grief, retirement was not really her style.

Just two days after the King's funeral, the Queen Mother made a moving pledge to the nation: "My only wish now is that I may be allowed to continue the work that we sought to do together."

No-one could deny that the pledge was honourably fulfilled.

Friends and courtiers who served her devotedly for years found her absolutely authentic with little difference between her public and private image.

She was kind, compassionate, but a very strong, no-nonsense woman; a criterion she applied as strictly to herself as to others.

Her life, like most people's, had its mixture of personal joys and sorrows.

There was sorrow over the death of the King; the ill-starred romance of Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend; the breakdown of the Princess's marriage to Lord Snowdon, and the breakdown of the marriages of her three eldest grandchildren.

There was joy for all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Her greatest happiness and satisfaction was derived from the success of her elder daughter as Queen, continuing the House of Windsor's record of service, only briefly broken by the abdication of Edward VIII.

Her latter years were punctuated by superlatives: "a symbol", "an icon", "the most successful Queen Consort in history".

But to most of her army of admirers, she was simply their "dear Queen Mum".