Pictures from behind the scenes also shine a fascinating light on the historic day 70 years ago this month
Eugene Byrne
06:00, 26 Apr 2026
Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol. This is a colourised version of an original image you can see in the article below.(Image: Mirrorpix)
Flowers, cheers and pageantry greeted the radiant Queen and smiling Duke as they stepped from the royal train at Temple Meads at 10 o’clock this morning,” said the Post’s late edition on Tuesday April 17 1956.
It would be Elizabeth II’s first official visit to Bristol as Queen, and the city was going to make the most of it. While Bristol still displayed plenty of the scars of wartime, things were getting steadily better for everyone. The tribulations of war and the hungry postwar years of austerity were steadily disappearing into the past. There was a spirit of optimism in the country, much of it was thanks to the new young Queen. Back then, people still spoke of a new “Elizabethan Age.”
All of this would take a serious blow later in the year, with the humiliation of the Suez Crisis when Britain and France learned painfully that going to war with Egypt without American approval could have disastrous consequences.
But that was in a future no-one foresaw in April. For now, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were coming, and to Britons at the time, they were a young couple whose glamour exceeded anything that Hollywood could come up with.
There was huge excitement; flowers, flags and bunting everywhere and from sunrise people were out to lay claim to the best vantage spots, the whole route having been given in detail by the Post in the days beforehand.
Among the most determined was the group of four Bristol University students, three male, one female, who had arrived at the Council House at midnight the night before wearing what they claimed was Elizabethan costume – though under duffel coats and overcoats against the cold.
On the grass directly in front of the statue of Cabot/the Tudor sailor they pitched a tent, got comfortable and set up the primus stove and frying pan before a police sergeant decided this was too much and moved them on.
Undeterred, they returned at 4.30am, sat down on a groundsheet and passed the time playing cards. It would be another two hours before the early-risers started arriving. By 9am there were hundreds, and an hour after that, tens of thousands.
There had been rumours that the royal train was due to arrive at Temple Meads the night before, and dozens had gone to the station then in the hope of seeing them. In fact, the train had spent the night in a siding.
It pulled in at the time the authorities had said it would, and the couple alighted at Platform Nine, cheered by 300 women and children who’d been allowed in to watch from behind a barrier.
All of Bristol beyond the station knew the moment they had arrived; as the train pulled in, Captain A.E. Murdley of 311 (Bristol) Heavy Anti Aircraft Regiment, gave the order by radio to fire, and four anti-aircraft guns on the Downs replied. They fired 21 times watched by a crowd of hundreds, most of them men and boys.
The Queen wore a powder blue coat with a small cherry hat trimmed on one side with flowers.
The couple stepped onto a thick red carpet and were greeted by the Duke of Beaufort, who then introduced them to the Lord Mayor (Alderman Harry Crook) and the rest of the assembled dignitaries before they got into a waiting car, watched by a crowd six or seven people thick as it travelled from Temple Meads and along Victoria Street. As they did so, the grey skies cleared and the sun came out.
The visit had been organised to be reminiscent of the visit to Bristol of the first Queen Elizabeth in 1574. The first stop was St Mary Redcliffe, which – it’s since been claimed with no evidence – was dubbed “the fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England” by Elizabeth I.
Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh visit St Mary Redcliffe(Image: Mirrorpix)
The royal couple were given a private 15-minute tour by the vicar, Canon Richard Cartwright, and his churchwardens. No one else was permitted in the church, and Canon Cartwright showed them the 1571 charter from Elizabeth I giving the church vestry the right to set up a school.
The Duke, himself a sailor, was more interested in the armour and pennants of Admiral Sir William Penn, who had fought the Dutch and the French and had served both under Cromwell and the restored monarchy of King Charles II. Penn’s son, also William, would become a Quaker and went on to found the English colony of Pennsylvania.
After 15 minutes at the church – everything had to be timed to the second – the Queen and Duke were back in their car to be taken to the Albion Dockyard to visit Charles Hill & Sons. They were shown around the shipyard by the Chairman and MD, Charles Loraine Hill and then embarked on the royal barge for a quick tour of the City Docks – just as the first Elizabeth had done.
The royal barge progressing to Broad Quay(Image: Mirrorpix)
The barge had been specially sent from Chatham for this very brief journey.
As the barge glided through the docks, 12 de Havilland Vampire jets of 501 (County of Gloucester) Squadron flew overhead at 500ft, the noise of their engines almost drowned out by the sirens and hooters being sounded by ships in the docks, their decks lined by eager spectators.
Landing at Broad Quay, the Queen inspected a guard of honour mounted by the Severn Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve before getting back into the car to be taken to the new Council House to arrive at noon on the dot and enter accompanied by a fanfare from the city trumpeters.
Her Majesty’s arrival at Broad Quay(Image: Mirrorpix)
The Council House, now City Hall, had been an eternity in the planning, and work on it had finally started in 1938, but of course everything had had to be put on hold during the Second World War and for some years after that because of postwar shortages of labour, materials and money.
The Queen declared the building officially open, and unveiled a commemorative tablet, though in truth it was already in use by now and it was already too small for the large numbers working there. An extension to accommodate the City Engineer’s Department – Cabot House – would be ready a year or two later.
Queen Elizabeth II inspecting Royal Navy reservists(Image: Mirrorpix)
The Lord Mayor presented Her Majesty with a brooch in the form of a nonesuch, the “flower of Bristol”, which was supposedly first brought to England via Bristol in the 16th century – again, an echo of the first Elizabeth.
The Queen and Duke appeared on the balcony by the John Cabot/Tudor sailor statue to greet the tens of thousands packing College Green and the windows, and even roofs, of the surrounding buildings.
They then went to the Mansion House – cheered along the way by around 10,000 schoolchildren lining the Downs – for lunch with the Lord Mayor before going on to the Chew Valley to inaugurate the new reservoir.
Along the way they were driven through Chew Magna where children in Elizabethan costume danced around a maypole on the village green.
On then, to Newton St. Loe where they took tea with tenants on Duchy of Cornwall property before going to the Guildhall in Bath. After that they went to Badminton where they were staying as guests of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort for the horse trials.
A leader column in the Post noted that her inauguration of both the new Council House and the Chew Valley reservoir was a fitting conclusion to two massive projects fit to take us into better times.
Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh open the Chew Valley reservoir 1956(Image: Mirrorpix)
But this was also a simpler and more deferential age. There were no hecklers or demonstrators, and brave would have been the man or woman in the crowd who questioned the whole idea of monarchy, or who asked questions about the comfortable and privileged existence of the royal couple.
Indeed that same leader column said: “British people everywhere see in the daily routine of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh all that they most admire – the desire to lead a decent and useful life, come what may. Let no one underestimate the strength of that moral leadership.”
True enough in 1956, long before the royals were reduced to a soap opera by the lurid claims and revelations about the personal problems and misdeeds of the Queen’s children.