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The Quenn Mother (реферат)

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Міністерство освіти і науки України

Київський національний торговельно-економічний університет

Реферат

на тему:

“The Queen Mother”

Підготувала:

Храпко Ю.А.

Викладач:

Дерев’яненко Т.В.

Коломия 2002

Plan

A crucial bulwark for the House of windsor .

Elizabeth’s early years .

The end of the sunny youth ( The First World War ) .

Wedding with the Duke of York .

The early days of the wife of King George VI.

The Queen Mother searched for a role .

She was born when William McKinley was President of the United States
and Victoria still ruled the greatest empire in the history of the
world. Hitler was 11, Eisenhower 10, Winston Churchill had just been
voted into Parliament as a 25-year-old hero of the Boer War. Electrons
had just been discovered. There were no airplanes or tanks or radio
broadcasts, no antibiotics, fewer than 20,000 cars in the whole country.
The average British baby born the same day could expect to die before
50.

It has been the bloodiest, most tumultuous of centuries. But the women
born Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen
Mother as she has been known since the year after her husband King
George VI died in 1952, has accomplished the remarkable feat of
traversing these turbulent times with a fame and popularity. Her famous
wave and upturned hat brims, that tilt of the head and benign smile, her
sharp common sense and enthusiasm for people and for life, have turned
out to be a crucial bulwark for the House of Windsor and earned her a
durable place in modern British history.

Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was the first women not a princess to marry
the son of an English king in more than 200 years, but in every way that
counted she was no more a commoner that Henry VIII was uxorious. Her
family had owned their Scottish estate, Glamis, since 1372; by legend it
was the place where Macbeth killed King Duncan. She was the ninth child
of the Earl of Strathmore and his engaging, vigorous wife. “Life is for
living and working at,” read one of the needlework samplers her mother
made; and Elizabeth’s early years, spent mostly on the family estate in
Hertfordshire, combined steady doses of duty with the expansive
enjoyment of country pursuits that was the Edwardian ideal. There was a
pony called Bobs, pigs, cats, chickens, a garden with weeds to pull, a
tennis court and a piano. She would raid the kitchen with her brother to
snitch cakes and buns, retreating to the attic of an outbuilding and was
outside by 6a.m. When she was 10, a palm-reader reported she would one
day be a queen. She was affectionately teased with the nickname
“Princess Elizabeth” – and liked it.

Certainly she displayed the aplomb of a monarch. At age three, she
reportedly told a workman on the estate: “How do you do, Mr. Ralton. I
haven’t seen you look so well, not for years and years, but I am sore
you will be sorry to know that Lord Strathmore has got the toothache”. A
classmate from the two years she spent at a fashionable London school –
otherwise she was educated at home – wrote how the headmistress came for
tea and found that Lady Strathmore was not yet back from an appointment.
The nine-year-old Elizabeth stood in for her mom, “rang for tea, poured
it out, and made conversation until her mother arrived.” She was sharp,
too: that same year, already fluent in French, she started an essay on
“The Sea” with a Greek quotation. She was told she was showing off.

August 4, 1914, the day the lights went out in Europe as Britain
declared war on Germany, was coincidentally Elizabeth’s 14th birthday
and marked the end of her sunny youth. Her family turned Glamis into a
hospital for convalescing soldiers. Too young to join the nursing staff,
Elizabeth helped with tending the patients. She would walk a mile into
the village to make sure they had candy and cigarettes, write letters
for them, serve meals to the bedridden, organize songfests. Thrown in
with men of different classes having a tough time, she turned out to be
a natural. One Scottish sergeant wrote: “My three weeks at Glamis have
been the happiest I ever struck. As for Lady Elizabeth, why, she and my
fiancay are as alike as two peas.”

When the war ended, she slipped easily into the life of a London
debutante. Always a favorite with men, lively and engagingly flirty, she
danced with many but caught the eye of a shy naval veteran, Prince
Albert, the Duke of York. His father King George V was a martinet who
scared his children. His mother Queen Mary was cold and remote, and his
older brother David, the future Edward VIII, had charm and movie-star
looks that made Bertie feel even worse about his terrible stammer and
ponderousness. Elizabeth’s easy grace and warmth, and the cheerful
conviviality of her family – so unlike his own – were an immediate
magnet and he proposed in 1921. “You’ll be a lucky fellow if she accepts
you,” the King told his son.

She refused. Life in the public eye, in the frosty bosom of the
Windsor’s and with a husband who could be maladroit and had fits of rage
and agonized depression, did not appeal. But he persisted. Over time his
warmth and decency became clearer, and in January 1923 Elizabeth
accepted. Their wedding captured worldwide interest as editors began to
grasp how to package royalty for a mass market. The BBC wanted to
broadcast the glittering ceremony, but officials of Westminster Abbey
refused.

Bertie was handsome and a fine athlete but needed encouragement and
confidence. There is no doubt the new Duchess of York strengthened and
steadied him. A member of her household later said that Elizabeth “”not
only had all the courage in the world, she had the power to transmit it
to you.” She eased Bertie’s way with his father, who melted in her
presence. She helped her husband with the anti-stuttering breathing
exercises that allowed him for the first time to make speeches without
embarrassment. Their tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1927, in which
her own people skills warmed many surprised republican hearts, was a
triumph and a turning point in his career. The country also delighted in
their two children, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, whose
upbringing was more influenced by the warmth of the Strathmore than the
rigidity of the Windsors – though the eight-month-old Elizabeth was left
back in London for six months during the Australia tour.

Their great crisis, and greater opportunity, came when Bertie’s brother
David, then King Edward VIII, abdicated after only 11 months in December
1936.

Bertie never wanted the crown and was ever more distressed because he
felt the abdication had imperiled it. His early days as King George VI
were miserable. But his stolid sense of duty, coupled with Elizabeth’s
warmth and shrewd sense of the public mood, turned out to be a potent
formula, quickly put to the ultimate test of a world war. Pressed to
evacuate the princesses to Canada during the blitz, Elizabeth refused.
She practiced shooting with a rifle and revolver in case the Germans
tried to seize the royal family. Six bombs hit Buckingham Palace in
September 1940. The King saw the roaring plane coming and pushed his
wife to the floor, after which debris started falling around them. She
turned the close call into a source of enduring public affection. “I am
glad we have been bombed,” she said. “It makes me feel I can look the
East End in the face.”

While the palace mostly abided by food rationing, serving Spam and
sugarless cakes on silver plate, the Queen eschewed rationed clothing as
she energetically toured factories, slums and blitzed cities. Instead
she chose to look like a decorous movie star. She said later: “People
stand for hours waiting to see me, even in the rain. They do not want me
to look like the mothers in Windsor High Street – that would be unfair.”
She plunged into the crowds too, the first royal to do the “walkabouts”
now commonplace. She has that quality of making everybody feel that they
And they alone are being spoken to.” It was her finest hour, “the
hopeless, wonderfully impractical clothes in pastels and in high heels
stepping through the debris, but being very practical,” says her
biographer Ann Morrow. “People of a certain generation will never forget
that.”

She would never again have the same kind of central public importance.
The country reverted to a less demanding peace, and more importantly,
her husband’s death from lung cancer in 1952 meant the powers of state
and the public’s attention swung inevitably to another Queen Elizabeth.
The Queen Mother searched for a role.

She moved into Clarence House and began a splendid, energetic,
half-century “retirement” as a king of ambassador and national
grandmother rolled into one. For 25 years she was Chancellor of the
University of London, delighting in meeting students, going to their
dances, drinking rough red wine with them until the small hours. She is
patron of some 350 organizations and in her 90th year still managed 118
official engagements.

She lives in the highest possible style, with 50 servants from footmen
to gardeners, ladies’ maids to chauffeurs. She is still acquiring
horses, her stable having won 440 races. She spends every penny of the
$970,000 the British government provides annually, and many millions of
her own – or her daughter’s – besides, on artwork, flowers, her
trademark couture and one of the finest tables in London that never
skimps on the Hollandaise or the Jersey cream on fresh strawberries. She
loves a stiff gin and Dubonnet too – or several. “Gin likes her too,”
says Morrow. “It hasn’t the slightest effect on her.”

перевалити, перейти

Boer War – бурська війна

Tumultuous – буйний

Feat – подвиг

Traverse – перетинати

Turbulent – буряний, неспокійний

Brim – криси капелюха

Tilt – нахили

Benign – добрий

Crucial – міцний захист

Commoner – звичайна, проста людина

Uxorious – що дуже кохає свою дружину

Earl – граф

Sampler – вишивка

Pursuits – заняття, справи

Raid – учинити набіг

Snitch – потягти

Outbuilding – флігель

Consume – з’їдати

Palmreader – ворожка по руці

Tease – дражнити

Aplomb – апломб

Reportedly – як розповідають

Stand in – заміщати

Show off – туману напускати

Coincidentally – за збігом обставин

Convalesce – видужувати

Tend – доглядати

Bedridden – прикутий до ліжка хворобою

Tough – важкий, повний нестатків

Natural – людина, створена для чого-н.

Strike – зустрічати на життєвому шляху

Fiancay – наречена

Debutante – дебютантка

Martinet – прихильник суворої дисципліни

Remote – байдужий

Stammer – заїкання

Ponderous – нудний, тягучий

Conviviality – веселість

Propose – освідчитися

Bosom – коло, лоно

Maladroit – незкарбний

Fit of rage – напад гніву

Appeal – приваблювати

Decency – порядність

Steady – робити твердим

Stutter – заїкання

Rigidity – суворість

Abdicate – відрікатися

Imperil – піддавати небезпеці

Stolid – безстрасний

Shrewd – гострий

Blitz – бомбування

Debris – осколки, уламки

Call – заклик

Enduring – тривалий

Abide by – твердо триматися чого-н.

Spam – консервований ковбасний фарш

Eschew – книжн. уникати

Slums – нетрі

Decorous – пристойний

Revert – повертатися

Chancellor – номінальний президент університету

Rough – терпкий

Footman – лакей

Skimp – скупитися

Stiff – міцний

Flouncy – оздоблений оборками

Literature

Digest , 2001, №14 , p . 2-3 .

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