Born: 21st April 1926
Educated at home with her younger sister, Princess Margaret, Princess
Elizabeth became heir presumptive when her father, George VI, ascended
to the throne in 1936. Thereafter,Elizabeth's education had to prepare her
for her future role, so she studied, among other subjects, constitutional
history, law, art and music. As a child, she also learned to ride horses,
enrolled as a Girl Guide, and when she was 13 years old, won the Children's Challenge Shield in a swimming competition at London's Bath Club.
A Subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, Princess Elizabeth climbed to the rank of Junior Commander by the war's end. Her first official overseas visit was a 1947 tour of South Africa alongside her parents and her sister, during which Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday and made a radio broadcast dedicating herself to the Commonwealth. She would repeat this dedication on ascending to the throne in 1952.
Leisure Activities
Elizabeth and her mother, Queen Elizabeth I, both like to spend much of their leisure time in the countryside. Believe it or not, the Queen Mother was also a keen and accomplished fisherwoman in her younger days, and she and her eldest daughter share a deep and abiding love for horse racing. Indeed, the queen goes in for quite a bit of horse breeding. Her horses have won many prizes and, by sheer confidence, in the year of her Silver Jubilee she was named top British horse breeder of the year. On a number of occasions, Her Majesty has also made private visits to America in order to see stallion stations and stud farms in Kentucky.
At 7:18 a.m, on July 9, 1982, the queen woke up to see a young man sitting on her bed. Michael Fagan had climbed through a Buckingham Palace window while a Palace police sergeant assumed he'd heard a faulty alarm bell. As Fagan described his troubled home life to Her Majesty, she pressed the alarm button. It didn't work. Her bedside bell went unanswered, the on-duty footman was exercising the corgis, and two 'calm'-sounding phone calls asking for the police didn't cause concern. Finally, when Fagan asked for a cigarette, the queen exited the bedroom to 'fetch some' and ran into her maid, her footman, and her corgis. Fagan was quickly arrested.
