LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Winston Churchill described their wedding as “a splash of colour on the hard road we have to travel”. And from that bleak November day in 1947, when bomb-scarred Britain finally had a national event to cheer about, until their final days together, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh remained inseparable.

Royal biographers usually trace this epic love story back to the summer of 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, when the royal family visited the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.

An outbreak of mumps among the cadets was confirmed just as the VIP party arrived so, to safeguard the health of the 13-year-old heiress presumptive and her younger sister Margaret, the girls were taken to the Commodore’s House.

While the King found it difficult to believe his daughter had fallen in love with the first man she had