I know this is current events but the Times has a wonderful article on an event taking place during Holyrood week. It is sad and very moving. So many sorrows in HMQs life that we know little about. Here is the link
Queen honours her young bodyguard, killed as war ended | The Times
Here is a summary for those who cant open the Times Link:
SUMMARY taken from the Times 22nd June 2013
During Holyrood week, the Queen will visit a chapel on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where she will remember the young Guards officer assigned to protect her family during the war.
For her, it will be a private act of remembrance, for she will be the only member of the congregation to have known him personally.
The death of Lieutenant Robin Tudsbery in the final week of the war — he was the last allied officer killed on European soil — upset the Royal Family deeply, and his memory has been cherished by them ever since.
In 1943, 23 year old Lieutenant Tudsbery served in a special detachment of the Household Cavalry, which escorted the King, Queen and their two daughters wherever they went at a time invasion was seen as a very real threat.
For nine months the young officer travelled regularly with the King and Queen between Sandringham, Balmoral and Windsor. By the time he left to fight in Europe, he had formed a close bond with the whole family.
On his last day at Buckingham Palace, the King and queen consort presented him with a pair of cuff-links, engraved with their cipher — “a little present to remind you of the time you spent with us,” said the Queen. “I expect you’ll lose them,” said the King, drily. Then, at Windsor Castle, he was given a farewell tea by the princesses, with Elizabeth pouring the tea from a silver kettle and apologising that the water had not boiled properly. She gave him a cutting from the castle walls to plant in his garden at home.
In December 1944, back on leave, he was invited to a party at Buckingham Palace. “I danced with both princesses, and they seemed delighted to see me again,” he wrote to his parents. It was the last time he was to see them.
On May 4, the very day that the Germans surrendered, his family in Scotland received a telegram from the War Office informing them that Lieutenant Tudsbery had been killed in action. On April 30, he and an armoured car crew had pulled off a road and were blown up by a massive roadside bomb, a sea mine hidden by the Germans in a culvert below the road. His body was never found.
His fellow officers were deeply affected. “That such a good friend and gallant officer should have died like this seems a wicked waste,” wrote one. “Nothing I write or say [can] do justice to what we all feel,” wrote another.
And from Windsor Castle came this message to his parents: “Their Majesties and the princesses were so distressed to hear of the death of your son, and I am to tell you how much they liked having him here at the castle.”
Robin had been an only son, and his mother and father, Sir Francis and Lady Isabella Tudsbery, were devastated by his death. They were determined that he should not be forgotten. On the site of a village settlement for disabled ex-servicemen that they had founded at Craigmillar, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, they commissioned a chapel dedicated to his memory.
A place of great simplicity and understated beauty, the Robin Chapel has echoes of King’s College, Cambridge, where he went to university, and St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Stained glass windows show scenes from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, while the east window carries images of a soldier’s battlefield grave, a cross with Lieutenant Tudsbery’s name and the date of his death, as well as the ‘robin’ motif, and the regimental badge of the Royal Horse Guards, with the motto: “He in a short time filled a long time.” Hanging on a wall is a portrait of him as a boy with his favourite dog. Both of his parents are buried in the chapel.
The royal connection has continued. The foundation stone of the Robin Chapel was laid by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1950, and three years later, she and Princess Margaret dedicated the building. The Thistle Foundation, which still runs the settlement, is regularly visited by royalty.
Today it is an interdenominational church. “This place was about bringing together the best of Scotland and England,” said the Rev Coupar. “It is a great honour that the Queen is coming. Here we look back at history, but this is a living church as well, and that is what the Queen will still find here.”
