How Queen Mother’s serious car crash nearly resulted in a miscarriage that would change history – and devastate the Royal family

As the centenary of her birth in April approaches, it’s hard to imagine a time where there was no Queen Elizabeth II.

In her day she was the most famous woman in the world – yet we nearly didn’t have her!

A hundred years ago, in January 1926, Elizabeth the Duchess of York was five months pregnant with her first baby. Only by a miracle did she ever gave birth to the child.

The 25-year old duchess and future Queen Mother was involved in a serious car crash, thrown to the floor of the chauffeur-driven limousine she was travelling in, narrowly avoiding a miscarriage.

A reckless motorist had overtaken and cut in front of Elizabeth’s car as she neared Lord’s Cricket Ground in north London on her way home from visiting friends in Hampstead. 

Her chauffeur, taking avoiding action, smashed into a parked bus. She was bruised and severely shaken.

Had circumstances been different this collision would have been no more than an unfortunate accident – though of course to the duke, known as Bertie, and duchess the loss of the baby would be a tragic event.

But less so to the nation – the baby would have grown up to become no more than a royal princess enjoying the same rank and status as our present Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. 

Elizabeth, The Duchess of York, suffered from prolonged morning sickness during her first pregnancy with the future Queen Elizabeth II

After a difficult labour followed by a Caesarian section, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born on the 21 April 1926

Nothing more – because it was expected that soon the bachelor Prince of Wales, now 31, would find a bride, marry, and produce that vital heir to the throne.

Instead, the whole course of history stood on the brink of change.

As it turned out the Duchess, travelling alone, suffered shock but no lasting injury. But the socialite MP Chips Channon, returning from Buckingham Palace with the news, exclaimed, ‘She very nearly had a miscarriage!’

The pregnancy had been kept under wraps. Elizabeth was having a difficult time of it and swapped houses twice during the run-up to the birth – quitting the couple’s marital home White Lodge in Richmond Park to move to Curzon House in Curzon Street, then on to an address in Mayfair’s Grosvenor Square. 

Pretty soon she decided she’d feel safer at her parents’ London home in nearby Bruton Street and moved there – the crash making her even more fearful of the forthcoming event.

And the Palace, refusing to confirm Elizabeth was expecting, did its best to play down the smash.

A statement was put out blaming the entirely innocent bus driver, saying his bus had collided with the royal limousine, rather than the other way round. They added snootily that far too much fuss had been made about a ‘non-event’.

But the accident had rattled the future Queen Mum. The cheery bon viveur found that pregnancy had taken away one of her great pleasures – ‘The sight of wine simply turns me up!’ she confessed to Bertie, her husband. ‘It will be a tragedy if I never recover my drinking powers!’

The socialite MP Chips Channon, returning from Buckingham Palace with the news, exclaimed, ‘She very nearly had a miscarriage!’

The Duchess of York leaving the house for her daughter’s christening with her maternity nurse holding newborn Princess Elizabeth 

She did, of course.

She engaged a maternity nurse, Annie Beevers, to see her through the latter stages of pregnancy and the birth itself, and so well did the pair get on that they remained friends until Annie’s death many years later.

The baby was due at the end of April 1926 but by the beginning of the month, royal doctors decided the birth should be induced.

The little girl who’d one day become the country’s longest-reigning sovereign was born, after a difficult labour, by Caesarian section at 2.40am on 21 April.

Bertie, ‘very worried and anxious’, paced about the house, irritatedly bumping into the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks who, royal protocol dictated, should be present at the birth of a child in the direct line of succession, to ensure no substitution should take place – a ridiculous tradition stretching back three centuries.

King George V and Queen Mary, eager to know, were woken at 4am in Windsor Castle with the news – for, even ten years before his eldest son abdicated, George sensed it entirely possible that the then Prince of Wales wouldn’t last long as king, and therefore Bertie and Elizabeth’s first-born could one day ascend the throne.

The baby’s names were to be Elizabeth (after her mother), Alexandra (after her great-grandmother), and Mary (after her grandmother, the queen consort), and guns in Hyde Park thundered out her arrival to the world in true royal style.

Elizabeth, Duchess of York, was holding a teddy bear which was a gift for her daughter

Meanwhile somewhere in Europe – nobody could be sure on any given day exactly where – a rootless blond and handsome four-year old boy was being shuffled between relations while his father was off with his mistress and his mother in a nursing home. Prince Philip of Greece would never find the comfort and security of family life until he finally married that baby girl, 21 years later.

It could all have been so different if that car crash back in January 1926 had turned out more seriously than it did.