King George VI, who had been ill, felt well enough to go hare hunting at his Sandringham estate. “The King, a great shot, was at the top of his form,” said his neighbor Lord Fermoy. George dined with his wife and youngest daughter Princess Margaret before retiring to his bedroom at 10.30pm. Thousands of miles away in Kenya, his eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, also had a great day, seeing and filming with her handheld movie camera rhinos, wild boars, baboons and a herd of elephants, pink from rolling in the dust. But the next day, February 6, when Elizabeth became sovereign? The Queen would always celebrate it with a day of quiet reflection. This date marks when her beloved father, King George VI, 56, was found dead in his sleep. “It is a day that, even after 70 years, I still remember as much for the death of my father, King George VI, as for the beginning of my reign,” he wrote in an anniversary statement in February. Queen Elizabeth died on Thursday aged 96. She reigned longer than any other British monarch, 70 years. The story of the day and time of Elizabeth’s accession to the throne has been told many times, but it remains a fascinating story. It is a story with echoes of Arthurian romance. On the morning of her father’s death, 25-year-old Elizabeth was perched in a tree house in Kenya from which he had watched a herd of elephants led by matriarchs come to a hole. The epic, unlikely love story between Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip “There has been much speculation, mostly due to historical parallels, about exactly when Elizabeth became queen,” Sally Bedell Smith wrote in her biography of the monarch. “No doubt it happened when he was on top of the African fig tree, which draws a romantic line at the moment in 1558 when Elizabeth I, sitting by an oak tree at Hatfield House, heard that the death of her sister, Queen Mary, meant that he was the monarch, also at the age of twenty-five.” For many months, King George — known to today’s generations for overcoming a debilitating stutter in the 2010 Oscar-winning film “The King’s Speech” — had been in declining health. “The King, a heavy smoker, underwent a left total pneumonectomy in September 1951 for what were euphemistically called ‘structural abnormalities’ of the left lung, but were in fact carcinoma,” wrote Rolf F. Barth of Ohio State University in a ” Reevaluation of Pathologists” last year. “His doctors withheld this diagnosis from him, the public and the medical profession,” he and co-author L. Maximilian Buja wrote. The History of Royal Funerals: Rich, Touching, Busy and Sometimes Weird Too ill to travel, the 56-year-old George commissioned Elizabeth and her husband, Philip, to undertake a months-long tour of the Commonwealth in the twilight of the British Empire. George drove his daughter to London Airport on January 31, 1952. Newspapers reported that the king looked “good and happy.” One of his biographers would later suggest “haggard” as a better description. The crowd cheered as he said goodbye to Elizabeth. It would be the last time the two would see each other. The young couple traveled to Kenya, where a BBC report showed Elizabeth in a printed dress and Philip in a white navy uniform, decked out in medals, stepping out of the BOAC Argonaut plane. “When the royal couple left in the hot Nairobi sun, little did anyone know at the time that the girl who had arrived here as Princess Elizabeth would leave five days later as Queen,” the British broadcaster reported. From the Kenyan capital, Elizabeth and Philip, accompanied by a small entourage, traveled three hours to Sagana Lodge, a villa by a trout stream, given to them as a wedding gift by the Kenyan state. “It was a dangerous time in the British colony. The Mau Mau campaign had just broken out in the White Highlands,” historian Nicholas Best wrote in the Observer. “Those responsible for the Princess’ tour of Kenya, Australia and New Zealand felt unable to guarantee her safety while in Kenya. It was only the fear of ridicule that prevented them from canceling the African leg of the trip.” On February 5, the couple traveled further into the forest to the Treetops Hotel, a game-watching lodge. Their three-bed cabin was reached by a rickety staircase and built into the branches of an ancient fig tree, overlooking a water hole and salt glyph. “Treetops is old hat now, but in 1952 it was the only place of its kind in the world,” wrote Best, who was researching the lodge’s founder Eric Sherbrooke Walker, a colorful character, ex-bootlegger and friend of the royals. In an interview, Best told the Washington Post that Walker stationed local men with spears at the edge of the forest to deter reporters, out of concern for Elizabeth’s privacy and also because the smell of more people would scare off the wildlife. Naturalist and big game hunter Jim Corbett, who accompanied the pair, spent the darkest hours of the night at the entrance to the reserve with a shotgun to keep the curious leopards at bay, Best said. On February 6, due to distance and difficulty in communication, it took hours for news of the king’s death to reach rural Kenya. The message was relayed to Philip’s private secretary and by Philip to his wife on their way back to Sagana Lodge. Without ceremony or even awareness, but according to British tradition, Elizabeth had become queen. Newspaper headlines echoed, “Long live Queen Elizabeth,” while noting, “Her Majesty, pale with grief, flies home.” The new queen remained quiet, except for a moment on the flight back to London. “The queen left her seat after a while. Her face was set when she came back, but it was obvious to the other passengers that she was in the toilet, having a really big cry,” Best wrote in the Guardian. When the plane arrived, she quickly brought a black dress so she could disembark in proper mourning attire. The next day, she read a proclamation declaring her reign: “With the sudden death of my dear father, I am called upon to assume the duties and responsibilities of rulership. My heart is too full to tell you more today than that I will always labor as my father did throughout his reign, to promote the happiness and prosperity of my people, as it is throughout the world.’
