She famously stored her breakfast cereal in Tupperware containers, an incongruous sight among the gilt and silver at Buckingham Palace, a fact revealed by a tabloid journalist who managed to work undercover as a footman for two months. While the ‘Tupperware Queen’ made headlines, the reporter also revealed that staff were given a detailed blueprint of the monarch’s breakfast table, detailing the exact positions of every utensil, condiment and cereal. Huddled under the breakfast table, her corgis and dorgies sat patiently, waiting for their mistress to drop them toast spread with “light” marmalade. According to his account, it took several servants to deliver her a cup of coffee: a maid to take the coffee pot from a stove and pour it into a silver jug. a pedestrian to get the disc 20 meters on a page; and the page to carry it another eight yards to the Queen in her dining room. Her grand fireplaces, set in rooms groaning with original artwork, housed cheap two-bar electric fires – or convection heaters – costing around £20, and were spotted in official photographs at occasions such as David Cameron’s stay at Balmoral. ITV documentary maker Michael Waldman described her private sitting room at Balmoral as being filled with personal paraphernalia, including several teddy bears, a basket of pebbles, miniature statues and dog baskets of flowers. The Queen drives her jaguar around the grounds of Windsor Castle in November 2021. Photo: REX/Shutterstock Balmoral was also where she liked to roll up her sleeves and get stuck into the wash after Prince Philip’s famous barbecues. Margaret Thatcher, horrified that the monarch had no washing gloves, bought her a pair. Cherie Blair recalled a visit to Balmoral: “The Queen asks if you’re done, stacks the dishes and goes to the sink.” Some of the funniest personal items she owned seem to be gifts from her family, who exchange funny gifts at Christmas. The Duke of York once bought her a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing animatronic fish, which briefly had its place on the piano at Balmoral. A plumber, called to Buckingham Palace to go into the Queen’s private bathroom, delighted the Sun with his discovery that he had a rubber duck wearing an inflatable crown. A pillow, embroidered with the words ‘It’s good to be Queen’ spied at Balmoral, was probably from one of her grandchildren. William is said to have once gifted her a pair of slippers with her face on them, and Harry reportedly once gave her a shower cap. Palace aides liked to highlight some of her more modest touches, a legacy of her wartime years, and were delighted to see reports that she recycled her clothes, went round her residences turning off the lights and smoothed and saved Christmas wrapping paper for reuse next year. Her position meant that she was denied some of the rituals of life. He never went to school, for example, and taught in the palace. He never had to take a driving test, learning during the second world war. But driving itself was one of her pleasures and she was regularly behind the wheel on her estates until her later years. Proof, if any were needed, of her willingness to appear less distant from her subjects than critics might say came from a surprising source in 2005. A scientific analysis of her accent, using four decades of her Christmas shows and published in the magazine Nature, found her vowels moving steadily downwards. “There was a shift in the Queen’s accent towards that which is characteristic of speakers who are younger and/or lower in the social hierarchy,” researchers from Macquarie University in Sydney found.
