Finished 4th March 2017 - incl. special -.gif :-)

250 Pieces

Long to Reign over us 

queen Elizabeth II 1952-2015

by Mary Evans Picture Library

A Wentworth wooden jigsaw puzzle

To extend the joy of assembling the wooden pieces I decided to separate the whimsies

and to start putting the pieces together row by row from the frame to the center:

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Some detailed views 

 The Queen with her Maids-of-Honour at the coronation, 1953

by Cecil Beaton

 The royal family 1968

 The young Queen

with her husband, Prince Philipp

 just a few decades later

Isn't she lovely?

 an official portrait to celebrate her silver jubilee (25 years) in 1977

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What if...

one day it will happen and HRH Queen Elizabeth will cose her eyes forever.
Hopefully, this will not happen too soon!
 What will happen? A sad by strictly organized chain-reaction

• HRH Prince Charles will be King. 
• All members of the royal family will be informed
• The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say a code word on secure lines.
• From the Foreign Office the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is the head of state, and 36 other nations of the Commonwealth
•  The announcement will go out as a newsflash to the Press Association and the rest of the world’s media simultaneously. 
• A footman in mourning clothes will pin a black-edged notice to the gates. While he does this, the palace website will be transformed into a single page, showing the same text on a dark background.
•  At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated – a cold war-era alarm designed to withstand an attack on the nation’s infrastructure. 
•  Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime. 
•   “If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on. Something terrible has just happened.”The TV schedules in the days after the Queen’s death will change again. Comedy won’t be taken off the BBC completely, but most satire will. There will be Dad’s Army reruns, but no Have I Got News For You.
•  All news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. 
•   there will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. 
•  The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were.
•  the death of a British monarch, and the accession of a new head of state, is a ritual that is passing out of living memory. When she dies, both houses of parliament will be recalled, people will go home from work early, and aircraft pilots will announce the news to their passengers. 
• In the nine days that follow there will be ritual proclamations, a four-nation tour by the new king, bowdlerised television programming, and a diplomatic assembling in London not seen since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.
•  the farewell for this country’s longest-serving monarch will be magnificent
•  It will be 10 days of sorrow and spectacle in which, rather like the dazzling mirror of the monarchy itself, we will revel in who we were and avoid the question of what we have become.
•   The royal undertakers, Leverton & Sons, keep what they call a “first call coffin” ready in case of royal emergencies. 
•  The most elaborate plans are for what happens if she passes away at Balmoral, where she spends three months of the year. This will trigger an initial wave of Scottish ritual. First, the Queen’s body will lie at rest at Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh. Then the coffin will be carried up the Royal Mile to St Giles’s cathedral, before being put on board the Royal Train at Waverley station for a sad progress down the east coast mainline. 
•  In every scenario, the Queen’s body returns to the throne room in Buckingham Palace, which overlooks the north-west corner of the Quadrangle, its interior courtyard. There will be an altar, the pall, the royal standard, and four Grenadier Guards, their bearskin hats inclined, their rifles pointing to the floor, standing watch.
•  Across the country, flags will come down and bells will toll *  The bells at Westminster Abbey sounded and the Sebastopol bell, taken from the Black Sea city during the Crimean war and rung only on the occasion of a sovereign’s death, will be tolled 90+ times.
•  During London Bridge, the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the palace will be the centre of operations. The current version of the plan is largely the work of a Lieutenant-Colonel
•  Someone will have the job of printing around 10,000 tickets for invited guests, the first of which will be required for the proclamation of King Charles in about 24 hours time.
•  It takes 28 minutes at a slow march from the doors of St James’s to the entrance of Westminster Hall. The coffin must have a false lid, to hold the crown jewels, with a rim at least three inches high.
•   in the hours after the Queen has gone, there will be details that only Charles can decide. Charles is scheduled to make his first address as head of state on the evening of his mother’s death.
•   It advised stockpiling books of condolence – loose leaf, so inappropriate messages can be removed – to be placed in town halls, libraries and museums the day after the Queen dies. 
•  In provincial cities, big screens will be erected so crowds can follow events taking place in London, and flags of all possible descriptions, including beach flags (but not red danger flags), will be flown at half mast. 
•  One of the biggest headaches will be for the Foreign Office, dealing with all the dignitaries who descend from all corners of the earth. European royal families will be put up at the palace; the rest will stay at Claridge’s hotel.
•  Parliament will gather. If possible, both houses will sit within hours of the monarch’s death.
•  On D+1, the day after the Queen’s death, the flags will go back up, and at 11am, Charles will be proclaimed king. The Accession Council, which convenes in the red-carpeted Entrée Room of St James’s Palace, long predates parliament. 
•  The clerk will read out the formal wording, “Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth the Second of Blessed and Glorious memory…” and Charles will carry out the first official duties of his reign, swearing to protect the Church in Scotland, and speaking of the heavy burden that is now his.
•  After Charles has spoken, trumpeters from the Life Guards, wearing red plumes on their helmets, will step outside, give three blasts and the Garter King of Arms, a genealogist named Thomas Woodcock, will stand on the balcony and begin the ritual proclamations of King Charles III. The band of the Coldstream Guards will play the national anthem on drums that are wrapped in black cloth.
•  A 41-gun salute – almost seven minutes of artillery – will be fired from Hyde Park
•  The new king will immediately tour the country, visiting Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff to attend services of remembrance for his mother and to meet the leaders of the devolved governments. 
•  The Queen, by all accounts a practical and unsentimental person, understands the theatrical power of the crown. “I have to be seen to be believed,” is said to be one of her catchphrases. And there is no reason to doubt that her funeral rites will evoke a rush of collective feeling.
•  The wave of feeling will help to swamp the awkward facts of the succession. The rehabilitation of Camilla as the Duchess of Cornwall has been a quiet success for the monarchy, but her accession as queen will test how far that has come. Since she married Charles in 2005, Camilla has been officially known as Princess Consort, a formulation that has no historical or legal meaning. 
• The Queen’s 10 pallbearers will be chosen, and practise carrying their burden out of sight in a barracks somewhere. British royals are buried in lead-lined coffins. Diana’s weighed a quarter of a ton.
•  On D+4, the coffin will move to Westminster Hall, to lie in state for four full days. The procession from Buckingham Palace will be the first great military parade of London Bridge: down the Mall, through Horse Guards, and past the Cenotaph.
•  Inside the hall, there will be psalms as the coffin is placed on a catafalque draped in purple. King Charles will be back from his tour of the home nations, to lead the mourners. The orb, the sceptre and the Imperial Crown will be fixed in place, soldiers will stand guard and then the doors opened to the multitude that will have formed outside and will now stream past the Queen for 23 hours a day. 
•  Four soldiers will stand silent vigil for 20 minutes at a time, with two ready in reserve. The RAF, the Army, the Royal Navy, the Beefeaters, the Gurkhas – everyone will take part. The most senior officer of the four will stand at the foot of the coffin, the most junior at the head. The wreaths on the coffin will be renewed every day. 
•  In 1936, the four sons of George V revived The Prince’s Vigil, in which members of the royal family arrive unannounced and stand watch. The Queen’s children and grandchildren – including women for the first time – will do the same.
•  Before dawn on D+9, the day of the funeral, in the silent hall, the jewels will be taken off the coffin and cleaned.
•   Most of the country will be waking to a day off. Shops will close, or go to bank holiday hours. Some will display pictures of the Queen in their windows. The stock market will not open. The night before, there will have been church services in towns across the UK. There are plans to open football stadiums for memorial services if necessary.
•  At 9am, Big Ben will strike. The bell’s hammer will then be covered with a leather pad seven-sixteenths of an inch thick, and it will ring out in muffled tones. The distance from Westminster Hall to the Abbey is only a few hundred metres. The occasion will feel familiar, even though it is new: the Queen will be the first British monarch to have her funeral in the Abbey since 1760.
•  When the coffin reaches the abbey doors, at 11 o’clock, the country will fall silent. The clatter will still. Train stations will cease announcements. Buses will stop and drivers will get out at the side of the road.
•  Inside the Abbey, the archbishop will speak. During prayers, the broadcasters will refrain from showing royal faces. When the coffin emerges again, the pallbearers will place it on the green gun carriage that was used for the Queen’s father, and his father and his father’s father, and 138 junior sailors will drop their heads to their chests and pull.
•  The crowds will be deep for the Queen. She will get everything. From Hyde Park Corner, the hearse will go 23 miles by road to Windsor Castle, which claims the bodies of British sovereigns. The royal household will be waiting for her, standing on the grass. Then the cloister gates will be closed and cameras will stop broadcasting. Inside the chapel, the lift to the royal vault will descend, and King Charles will drop a handful of red earth from a silver bowl.
• stamps will be replaced with the portrait of King Charles
• The national anthem will change from "God save the Queen" to "God save the King" 

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