Sad, lost in thought, but managing a brave smile for her husband, this is the first image of the Queen after she learnt that her father had died.
For 60 years cine footage of the Queen as she flew back to London to take up her new role remained locked up in her private archive. Not even the Prince of Wales had seen it.
Last night the film sequence, and Prince Charles’s emotional reaction on seeing it, was shown for the first time as part of the Prince’s television tribute to his mother.
The footage, shot by the Duke of Edinburgh on the same 16mm camera that the couple had used to film game in Kenya, shows the Queen and other members of the royal party sitting around a table for lunch on the chartered BOAC aircraft as they flew from Entebbe to London.
“That’s the aeroplane,” said the Prince in A Jubilee Tribute to the Queen by the Prince of Wales on BBC One. As he watched the film in the library at Balmoral just after Easter, the Prince appears moist-eyed and emotional. “I presume it was my father taking photographs. I’ve never seen this.”
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As the camera pans across to the Queen, who is wearing a blue suit with three rows of pearls, she is shown looking out of the window with a sad, distant expression on her face. As she realises she is being filmed, she slowly begins to smile before beaming broadly at her husband.
“This must be the first picture of my Mama after she knew she was Queen,” Charles said.
The footage was probably shot the day after the Queen acceded to the throne. She and Prince Philip were at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya en route to Australia when George VI died in the early hours of February 6, 1952.
The news took several hours to reach the royal couple, who then had to fly from the Nanyuki airbase in Kenya to Entebbe in Uganda, where they were delayed by a storm before embarking on the 24-hour flight home.
The Queen’s mourning clothes, which no royal travels without, had already gone on ahead of her to Australia. When her flight touched down in London a mourning outfit was brought on to the plane so that she could change before disembarking.
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The Prince’s tribute, which includes much private film of the Royal Family never seen before, also shows Charles talking of his regret that his grandfather the King died when he was only three years old. Looking at footage of himself as an infant with his parents and grandparents, he said: “I had not realised that my parents had taken those films when I was very small and my grandfather was still around. One of my greatest regrets is not having really known him. I really mind that.”
In another emotional moment, the Prince is seen watching a film of the funeral of his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, who was murdered by the IRA. “My Mama was deeply fond of Lord Mountbatten,” he said. “We were all left bereft.”
Thirty-two years after his death, she paid her first state visit to Ireland in May last year. “The fact that the Queen managed to go to Ireland on a state visit is a remarkable thing in itself,” Charles said. “That’s her greatest achievement, to have been after so many years . . . It is remarkable how it has helped to lay so many ghosts. It completely transformed the situation and the relationship. It has really made a difference.”