Young Elizabeth

Young Elizabeth captures in vivid detail the 1947 royal tour of southern Africa, during which Princess Elizabeth celebrated her twenty-first birthday. It is an intimate, revealing portrait of the royal family - King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret - hard at work in the national interest, and succeeding triumphantly against all odds.
The year 1947 was a high-water mark of the British Empire. Later that same year India gained independence and just one year later the Afrikaner Nationalist victory in South Africa would lead inexorably to the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and its departure from the Commonwealth.
In a tour to show imperial solidarity and in recognition of South Africa's contribution to the Allied cause during the Second World War, the royal family travelled ceaselessly, from February to April, on a specially commissioned, white-and-gold train, meeting thousands of people at every stop along the way.
'A fascinating book which tells a great deal about [the Queen's] formation. It draws on a single royal trip . . . Young Elizabeth vividly tells the full tale'
Charles Moore, Telegraph
'The literary surprise of the decade . . . a story about a country teetering on the brink of convulsive change and yet almost united, at least for a moment, by love for a king and queen who weren't really ours' Rian Malan, author of My Traitor's Heart
'Brilliantly conveys the glamour and gruelling nature of a tour that temporarily united a divided nation . . . penetrates beyond the frippery and froth to provide fascinating sidelights on the history of twentieth-century South Africa'
Lady Anne Somerset, author of Elizabeth I and Queen Anne

GRAHAM VINEY was educated at the Diocesan College (Bishops), Cape Town, and Oxford University where he read International Relations. He runs an international design company, and, in addition to numerous papers and articles has written two books, Colonial Houses of South Africa and The Cape of Good Hope, 1806-1872.