2022 will go down in the history books as the year we celebrated our longest serving monarch with a Platinum Jubliee weekend in June and just two months later we mourned her passing, with Southwark playing an essential part in the proceedings.
The Queue became a thing of wonder as Southwark Park marked the start of the queue or the end of the queue depending on how you want to look at it; the queue for the queue – or the ‘holding pen’.
Between September 14 and 19 it stretched ten miles westward along the river and over Lambeth Bridge to allow 250,000 people the opportunity see Queen Elizabeth II lying-in-state at Westminster Abbey.
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Operating day and night, it had more than eight first-aid stations, multiple water stations and more than 500 portable toilets, but that did not stop some local people from stepping up including Henrietta Onyema. She opened her toilet at her home on Bermondsey Wall East to those filing past, which happened to include British Olympian Dame Kelly Holmes.
The News marked Her Majesty’s passing with a six page tribute feature.
It is said that a third of the nation at one point or other have met the Queen, so we asked local people to tell us about their audiences with their monarch. From the great and good of Southwark including the Bishop, local funeral director the late, great Barry Albin-Dyer and the Pearly King Jimmy Jukes we were told of medals she gave out and charity functions and openings she attended.
Southwark pays tribute to Her Majesty The Queen – read our six pages of coverage
Others had a more intimate relationship with Elizabeth. Eager to ensure her daughter Princess Anne could enjoy the company of girls her own age, the Queen set up a Brownies club at Buckingham Palace. Sue Badman, vice-chair of the Dulwich Society was one of its members.
In the late ‘50s, Sue was a member of the Holy Trinity Brompton Brownies in Knightsbridge. Through the club, she met a friend of Princess Anne’s and was invited to the Buckingham Palace Brownies.
Sue remembers how the Queen would regularly attend their nativity plays, meetings and badge ceremonies. She said: “The Queen was very generous on reflection. We had quite the run of the palace and you could walk along corridors freely and see the gifts the Queen had received from world monarchs and leaders.
“The Queen and the Duke were always enthusiastic about our activities just like any parents. During this time, the Queen gave birth to Prince Andrew and I remember him as a baby sitting in his pram in the gardens.
“Anne was an amenable companion and a very pleasant girl. But she stood her ground, especially to her older brother Charles. She certainly knew who she was!”
Princess Anne went to Benenden School aged thirteen and the guide company came to an end. Much later in life, Sue went to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party and met the Queen once more.
Bermondsey’s Russell Dryden never got to meet the Queen but used to feed her horses as a boy. Now a fishmonger and running the Blue Bermondsey business improvement district (BID), he used to go with his father to deliver coal to Buckingham Palace in the early 1960s.
His father worked for Charringtons, a company that was first set up in the 1730s, and which had the contract to deliver coal to Buckingham Palace. “It seems strange to think of it now but we used to drive right in through the back entrance,” Russell told the News. He never got to meet the Queen, but while he was waiting he would feed the horses in their stables. Unsurprisingly, Buckingham Palace is no longer heated with coal, since 1994-95 operating on a combined heat and power system that uses natural gas.
And for others their relationship with Her Majesty went back before she took to the throne over 70 years ago. Liberal Democrat councillor for Borough and Bankside Irina von Wiese told the News the story of her German mother’s unlikely friendship with the Queen, just two years after the war.
Irina’s mother, Ossana von Wiese, was born in Cologne in 1926, the same year as the Queen. After the war, she travelled to Britain to take part in a cultural exchange, an early example of post-war reconcilliation. Ossana, aged 21, was one of a cohort that flew to Britain to travel around different UK cities meeting academics and students. But just days into her tour, outside St Paul’s Cathedral, a double-decker bus ran over her foot, flattening it.
Ossana would later recount the agony of waiting in a British A&E clinic for hours as British health services still struggled with a post-war backlog. Ossana couldn’t complete her tour because of the injury. Fortunately, her mother, a Russian refugee, had met a British woman from Windsor in Germany in the 1920s and formed a life-long friendship. So Ossana stayed at their family home. The father of the family happened to be a forester on the Royal Family’s Windsor estate.
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One morning, Ossana attended a chapel in Windsor. But when she went to rise during prayers she couldn’t because her foot hurt so much. The Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, 21, the same age as Ossana, asked her why she couldn’t stand and Ossana explained her ordeal outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Princess Elizabeth congratulated Ossana on her English and they spoke in-depth about British-German reconcilliation.
“Through that exchange, my mother ended up contributing a lot to reconcilliation, all be it not in the way she had intended,” said Irina.
Forever thankful for the Queen’s kind words, Ossana remained a staunch royalist for the rest of her life. Irina remembers how every Christmas Day she would rise for the Queen’s speech, which was broadcasted on German television. 69 years later, aged 90, Ossana wrote to the Queen. The Queen replied, saying she remembered Ossana and was happy to hear from her.
“It made my mother so happy”, said Irina.
READ MORE – REVIEWS OF THE YEAR 2022 – below:
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The Weirdest News Stories
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Killings in 2022
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The Most Shocking Stories
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The Funniest Headlines
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We look back at the people taken from us in 2022
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How locals responded to the cost-of-living crisis
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How we stood with Ukraine
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Labour tightened its hold in the local elections
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Southwark Soapbox hit the screen
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Squabbles over MP Harriet Harman’s succession
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Neil Coyle’s suspension from the Labour Party
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Mass strike action
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Winning the war against the bus cuts
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Primary schools faced closure and the battle to stay afloat continues