The Queen Mother, with a lifetime's popularity, seemed incapable of a bad performance as national grandmother-warm, smiling, human, understanding, she embodied everything the public could want of its grandmother.

Like the old motto of a famous Sunday paper, 'All human life was there' in the stately circle of the Mountbatten-Windsors, as the family coped in semipublic with those everlasting elements of human interest-sickness, scandal, family tension and divorce.