English monarch Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, latterly known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, was BOTD in 1900. Born in London to an Anglo-Scottish aristocratic family, she was raised in her father’s ancestral home Glamis Castle, and was educated in London in her teens. During World War One, she helped run a convalescent home for wounded soldiers at Glamis, while two of her brothers and her love interest Charles Gordon-Lennox were killed in combat. In 1923, she became engaged to Prince Albert, second son of King George V, after refusing him twice over her concerns about the restrictions of Royal life. Unlike many Royal marriages, they had an unusually loving relationship, and had two daughters together, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. In 1936, her brother-in-law King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry his mistress Wallis Simpson, styled the Duke and Duchess of Windsor before retreating to exile in France. Albert was crowned King George VI in 1937, and Elizabeth became Queen Consort. She never forgave Edward for the abdication, and spent the rest of her life engaged in a war of attrition against the Windsors, including spreading rumours about Simpson’s residency in a Shanghai brothel. As Queen, she guided her husband through the difficulties of kingship and privately arranging tutorials with speech therapist Lionel Logue to improve his stutter. At her insistence, the Royal Family remained in London during World War Two, regularly visiting bomb sites in the city and generating significant goodwill from their cap-doffing subjects. When Buckingham Palace was bombed in 1940, she expressed relief, saying “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Her influence over the King became so well-known that Adolf Hitler referred to her as “the most dangerous woman in Europe”. Following George’s sudden death in 1952 and her daughter Elizabeth’s ascent to the throne, she became self-styled as “the Queen Mother”. She remained a Privy Councillor and continued influencing royal policy behind the scenes, engineering the engagement of her grandson Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, the granddaughter of her lady-in-waiting. A lover of diamonds, she collected a vast jewellery collection, much of it “gifted” to her by friends at her request. Though casually dismissive of homosexuality, she was personal friends with an astonishing number of queens, including her childhood playmate Stephen Tennant, the photographer Cecil Beaton and fashion designer Norman Hartnell (both of whom were instrumental in crafting her benign, grandmotherly public image) and the playwright Noël Coward, and her home at Clarence House was staffed with sycophantic gay courtiers. While waiting to be served the first of several daily gin-and-Dubonnets, she is reported to have shouted downstairs to the servants’ quarters: “I don’t know about any of you queens down there, but this Queen up here wants a drink.” (Princess Margaret followed her mother into camp icon status, eventually marrying the bisexual photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones). One of the most beloved members of the Royal Family, she died in 2002, aged 101, after overseeing plans for her own funeral. She has been portrayed frequently onscreen, notably by Sylvia Syms in The Queen, Helena Bonham-Carter in The King’s Speech and by Victoria Hamilton and Marion Bailey in TV drama series The Crown.