Happy Valentine’s Day, dear readers! In honor of today’s holiday, I thought I’d bring you a sweet, sentimental throwback to an appearance by Queen Elizabeth II in pink during the golden summer of 2019, visiting a hospital where doctors tend to hearts.
On July 9, 2019, Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Cambridge for a royal visit. She’s pictured her arriving for the official opening of the new Royal Papworth Hospital on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. During her visit, she met with doctors, staff, and patients and toured the new facilities of the nation’s leading heart and lung hospital. The hospital is known for its skill in mending hearts. In 1979, the United Kingdom’s first successful heart transplant was performed at Papworth by Sir Terrence English. Prince Philip was treated there for heart issues in 2011, and in 2018, the Queen granted the “royal” designation to the hospital.
For the opening of the hospital’s new building, the Queen arrived wearing a vibrant pink tweed coat and matching hat. Under her coat, she wore a dress with a bright floral print, and the hat was decorated with flowers echoing the pattern.
As she did for almost all daytime engagements in the later decades of her reign, Elizabeth wore her signature pearls for the visit. Her earrings are the Ladies of Devonshire Earrings, gifted to Queen Mary by a committee of women as a wedding present in 1893. Elizabeth, in turn, received them as a wedding present from her grandmother in 1947. Her three-stranded pearl necklace was made for her in 1952 using pearls from the family collection. The necklace has a distinctive diamond clasp. It can be difficult to firmly identify individual pearl necklaces, but many of us believe that this three-stranded pearl necklace is now being worn by Elizabeth’s daughter, the Princess Royal.
Elizabeth also wore a gorgeous gold and diamond brooch from her collection with an intricate floral design. The Bird of Paradise Jubilee Brooch, as I call it in my notes, was presented to the Queen as a Diamond Jubilee gift on behalf of the government of Singapore in 2012. Made by Singapore-based jeweler Thomis Kwan, the brooch is made of yellow gold and set with 61 diamonds. The piece is a traditional Peranakan-style brooch, designed to resemble a bird of paradise plant.
Fittingly, the Queen also wore the brooch for another stop in Cambridge that day: a visit to the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. The botanists there could have mentioned a particularly interesting fact about the Queen’s brooch during her visit. The scientific name of the bird of paradise plant, Strelitzia reginae, was chosen to honor one of the Queen’s ancestors, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The plant was first grown in Britain at the Kew Gardens in 1773 during the reign of Queen Charlotte’s husband, King George III.
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