Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
1900 – 2002 · Generation XXXVI · Queen consort · House of Windsor
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (1900–2002). Queen consort. Married George VI in 1923. 2 of their children are recorded in this archive. Lived to a hundred and one; the century’s Queen Mother. The ninth of ten children of Lord Glamis, later Earl of Strathmore, she grew up between St Paul’s Walden Bury and Glamis Castle, which became a convalescent home in the First World War; she helped run it, and her brother Fergus was killed at Loos. She twice refused Prince Albert before accepting him, and on her wedding day laid her bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. She stood by him through Lionel Logue’s treatment for his stammer, and when the abdication of 1936 made him George VI she became queen and the last empress of India. During the Blitz she declined to leave London or send her daughters to Canada, and she visited the bombed East End. Widowed in 1952, she restored the Castle of Mey, owned the winners of some 500 races, and died seven weeks after her younger daughter, Margaret.
Place in the family
- Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was the mother of Queen Elizabeth II.
- The archive records 31 of her descendants, across 4 generations.
One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
Partners
- Married King George VI (1895 – 1952) in 1923 — 2 children together
Children
- Queen Elizabeth II (1926 – 2022)
- Margaret Windsor (1930 – 2002)
Life
- 1900 — Born
- 1923 — Married George VI
- 2002 — Died