50 other things you didn't know about the Queen
On Friday, Buckingham Palace released 50 'unknown' facts about our head of state in the run-up to her Golden Jubilee. She has, we learnt, 30 godchildren, and has given 88 state banquets during her reign. Here we reveal some more facts you may have missed from those glorious years - 45, in fact, plus five less than wholly true ones - to throw you. False answers at the end.
1 The Queen stopped dyeing her hair (with something called Chocolate Kiss) in 1990.
2 She refused to leave home for a period in 1971, arguing that 'the crowds' might reinfect her with chickenpox.
3 Two years ago she stayed in a three-bedroom suite in the Principe di Savoia hotel in Milan costing £4,300 a night; an extra room below was taken to accommodate her shoes.
4 Ma'am is pronounced to rhyme with ham.
5 Hanging her handbag over her arm is a sign to staff that she is bored with the person she's talking to.
6 She was so impressed by the 'Duelling Banjos' sequence in the 1972 film Deliverance that she took ukelele lessons, and later played the intro, rather slowly, during an audience with the film's director, John Boorman.
7 Presents at her wedding included a gold tiara from the emperor of Ethiopia, a chestnut filly from the Aga Khan, and a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from Chiang Kai-shek.
8 She retains, from medieval times, ownership of all mute swans on the Thames, and is the only person in the land still allowed by law to eat swan. The swans are marked every year by a 19-strong team, known as the Queen's Swan Uppers.
9 The Queen and her immediate family, according to an authoritative book out last year, appear to need almost precisely a quarter as much land as is used to house the 45 million of her subjects who live in private homes.
10 She quietly told a journalist, during the miners' strike of 1984, 'It's all about one man, isn't it?'
11 She strangles pheasants.
12 She has a plastic duck and a miniature crown in her bath.
13 She mixes the corgis' dinner herself, with a silver knife and fork, feeding them cooked meats, biscuits and gravy at 5pm every day.
14 The Queen was most recently estimated to be worth £300 million, discounting her royal art collection and the Crown Estates, which would take her well over the billion mark. She has paid tax since 1992 and has taken all her family, except herself, her husband and her mother, off the Civil List. And she made a personal donation to the New York disaster fund after September 11 - of £2,000.
15 She asked Mori to compile a poll last year on the popularity of her family, only to discover that 'fewer than one in four people thinks they are hard-working and only one in 10 thinks they are good value for money.'
16 She spends £30 a year renting jigsaws from a club.
17 She has quietly acknowledged that one thing she got wrong was her response to the Aberfan disaster in 1966, by simply issuing a press release and sending Lord Snowdon rather than visiting herself.
18 She uses special black blotting paper on her writing desk to prevent any state or personal secrets being revealed.
19 'Carry on with your party, her bedroom's on the ground floor,' she once told a dinner guest concerned that sister Margaret was threatening to throw herself from a window. 'How can we get her out of the gutter?' she asked, on another occasion. As a child, she had prayed, in vain, for a brother.
20 Apart from jigsaws she also enjoys Scrabble and, lately, surfing the internet. She never reads books, according to Royal biographer Sarah Bradford, 'except about the horses'.
21 She dislikes the colour magenta and any talk of the Duke of Windsor.
22 She rejected one likely stallion as a potential mate for a royal mare because it was owned by a bookie.
23 She was first smitten by Philip at the age of 13. By the time he returned from the Far East in 1946, a besotted Elizabeth was playing 'People Will Say We're in Love' repeatedly on her gramophone. The next year he changed his name to Mountbatten (from Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg) and took British nationality.
24 They have separate bedrooms, and prefer bedclothes to duvets. Philip is said to have told a private dinner party in the south of France a few months after the marriage that his young wife had a high sex drive.
25 She refused to allow an asteroid to be named after her, believing this to be lese-majeste, but allowed one to be named after two of her late corgis. Shandless-McCord Beta was officially named in a Canaries ceremony in 1992.
26 Photographs of herself and/or Philip are presented in various states of framing to denote the status of the recipient. Presidents receive silver frames; blue leather follows, then brown: domestic staff receive theirs without frames.
27 When she returned from her 1953 Commonwealth tour, lasting six months, the infant Charles ran to greet her as she passed down a line of dignitaries. She simply patted his back.
28 She bathes every evening using Elizabeth Arden rose fragrance soap and a large natural sea sponge, which is washed each week in a solution of lemon juice and salt water to keep it fresh.
29 She speaks to the Queen Mother by phone every morning. There are tiffs between them, but rare. At a West End opening a few years ago the elder was heard to demand, sotto voce, 'Who do you think you are?' The daughter whispered back: 'The Queen, mummy, the Queen.'
30 At Balmoral, no one is allowed to leave before the Queen retires.
31 She takes quiet photographs with her Leica when she thinks no one is looking.
32 She has overseen numerous cuts to Palace staff in recent years, including the axeing of cheap bars, free soap and free shoe repairs. Staff who have to make summer trips to Balmoral have had fuel allowances cut. Some staff are now having to claim Working Families Tax Credit and that application forms were handed out to them.
33 She continues to insist that, when her mother visits Claridge's, the band plays 'The Teddy Bear's Picnic' for her.
34 When two palace footmen were found together in a bath six years ago, they attempted to excuse the moral lapse by saying they were assisting the Queen's economy drive.
35 A Mr Kevin Giddings was recently awarded a Royal Warrant after six years as the Queen's chimney sweep. He said he was thrilled by the title and by the job. 'I always make sure I wear a clean boiler suit and a shirt and tie,' he said. 'I feel very privileged.'
36 Official plans for royal funerals are codenamed after bridges: Tay Bridge for the Queen Mother, Forth Bridge for Prince Philip, London Bridge for the Queen.
37 She is known to her husband as 'sausage'.
38 The Queen pays over £11,000 an hour to use the Royal Flight. She and her family flew on it 99 times last year.
39 A false hand was attached to the inside window of her official car during a 1981 tour of Australia to save her waving, after she had been weakened by lengthy flu.
40 She thought Margaret Thatcher 'a bit of a frost' and Harold Wilson, whom she compared to Toad in The Wind in the Willows, 'absurd'. She did not trust Anthony Eden and found Edward Heath notoriously heavy weather.
41 A favourite head of state is Nelson Mandela. At a party in the Royal Albert Hall she once joined him in his box and, when Mandela stood up and did his famous bop to Phil Collins's band, she stood up and tried to do the same.
42 She loathes baseball with a passion, and is said to have chided a younger Prince Charles for listening to Paul Simon's 'Mrs Robinson' after she discovered it contained references to Joe DiMaggio.
43 The royal train costs an estimated £30,000 a trip, even though often only one royal is travelling. On average, seven carriages are used.
44 When the Queen was asked how many rooms there were at Buckingham Palace she did not know but thought 600. (There are 609.)
45 Her preference for animals is well-documented. According to one former lady-in-waiting, 'She is godmother to my eldest daughter, who fell ill. I was so distraught I wrote to the Queen. She never replied. A few years ago, one of her corgis was killed, so I sent her my condolences. I got a six-page letter by return of post.'
46 She is said to have remarked of Camilla that 'she does look rather used'; and of Diana that she was, frankly, 'mad'.
47 The Queen has lost an estimated £30m on her share dealing over the past two years. Her exact investments are carefully hidden by a nominee company, but she's thought to have lost £200,000 buying into getmapping.com and a further £50,000 on the flop Poptones record label, whose artists included a gay Mexican Elvis impersonator.
48 Her favourite films are Genevieve, which she has privately screened each Christmas, and Assault on Precinct 13.
49 'The amount of kit and servants he takes around is grotesque,' she said recently, criticising Charles for possessing a staff of 85 (as opposed to her mere 300). On her own latest visit to Sandringham she took no fewer than 12 cooks and four washer-uppers.
50 The Queen loves military marches and keeps a tape of them to play in her Rolls-Royce.
