Romp and Circumstance

A birthday bash for the Queen Mum at 80

A flight of ten R.A.F. Red Arrows jets streaked across the sky in a perfect E, for Elizabeth, formation. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti warbled Happy Birthday over champagne at a cozy luncheon. At Covent Garden, Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov leaped through the air in a new ballet created in her honor. Bonfires glowed on the Kent and Sussex coasts. Cannon boomed from the Tower of London.

The cause of all the jubilation was the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who was reluctant for her husband to take the throne in the first place, but is, as the London Times declared, probably the most popular royal personage of all time. To the British she symbolizes more than the monarchy: she is the storybook grandmother, loving and merry, always ready with a Band-Aid or a bag of sweets. Reports TIME London Bureau Chief Bonnie Angelo:

Wherever the "Queen Mum" went during the monthlong birthday jubilee, which had its finale last week, crowds gathered to cheer her. Regent Street shops were awash in commemorative wares. Gifts--ranging from fishing tackle to a chiffon hat--poured into her residence, Clarence House.

Even Scottish Laborite M.P. Willie Hamilton, who has made a career of being the scourge of all royals, great and small, fell under her spell. "For a fleeting moment my hatchet is buried, my venom dissipated," confessed the man who has called the royal family "goldplated scroungers." The zealous antimonarchist explained his truce by marveling at the Queen Mother's ability to combine "a love of the countryside, a passion for horses and dogs, an enthusiasm for angling --and, so it is said, a wholesome taste for a wee dram of her native Scotland's national beverage--harmless pleasures which have never interfered with her sense of duty." More than that, those pleasures nourished the charm with which the Queen Mum humanized British royalty. "She came into the royal family from the outside," observes an old friend. "She brought a naturalness and spontaneity that is trained out of royals."

Elizabeth, ninth child of the 14th Earl of Strathmore, lived an unfettered life until she married Prince Albert, second son of King George V. In her public duties, she was unfailingly gracious, with one conspicuous exception: while her brother-in-law, King Edward VIII reigned, she cold-shouldered Wallis Simpson. Her friends say that she could not accept their rejection of duty.

When the crown was thrust upon her shy, stuttering husband after Edward's 1936 abdication, she promised, "We'll do the best we can." Her best was exemplified by a wartime courage that won the lasting devotion of the British. When London's East End was pummeled nightly by bombs, the King and Queen toured blitzed neighborhoods. Elizabeth's reaction when Buckingham Palace was first bombed: "I'm glad it happened--now I can look the East End in the eye."

This gutsy dedication has been relieved by exuberance and a good sense of humor. She once switched off her television set when the national anthem came on, cracking that it was "like hearing the Lord's Prayer when you're playing canasta." Her stables boast 350 winning horses --and when she is not at the track, she follows the races on the same telephone tie-in that serves bookies. She still fishes Scottish streams in waders and an old waterproof jacket, often with Grandson Prince Charles in tow.

At the Covent Garden gala last week for the radiant Queen Mum, the black-tie audience burst into Happy Birthday as masses of silver paper discs fluttered from the ceiling. Afterward, she joined cast and staff--janitors, tea ladies, all hands--onstage to cut a cake. So ended a birthday celebration that was as much a treat for Britain as for the Queen Mum.

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