The Queen's Homes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 752, 11 December 1953, Page 27

The Queen's Homes

\/ HEN Hector Bolitho was a boy, spending his holidays on a farm beside Manukau Harbour, Harrison Ainsworth’s book about Windsor : Castle was among his favourite reading. Looking back he»thinks he must have read it ten times, so that he grew up thinking he knew the stones of Windsor -the oldest inhabited castle in the world. Twenty years later he went to live at Windsor ‘and began to write his books about the Roya] family. He sees the castle as the shrine of the history of the monafchy that has ruled from its towers for almost 900 years, and in two talks to be broadcast from YA and YZ. stations next week he has tried to capture something of the atmosphere of the castle through the ages. These talks are the first of a series of five about the Queen’s homes. If Windsor is where the monarchy’s history is enshrined, Balmoral, which Mr. Bolitho describes in his third talk, is where the Royal family can escape into solitude, Queen Victoria, who built it 100 years ago, said of it: "All seems to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoil." Sandringham House, on the other hand, is the home of the Queen, "in the same sense that your threshold and mine admit us to the private comfort of our own hearth." (It will be from somewhere near Sandringham, as the Queen’s home, that the last message in the Commonwealth Christmas Day programme will come, most likely, before the Queen herself is heard in her message to her peoples.) Sandringham is the subject of Mr. Bolitho’s fourth talk. He will go on then to end the series with one about Buckingham Palace-the headquarters, the office of the monarchy, where the Queen’s secretaries work. The Queen's Home will be heard from YA and YZ stations at 9.15 p.m. on December 14, 15, 17, 18 and, 21.