The 1960s: When The Queen Wore Diamonds And The World Held Its Breath HT
The 1960s, the decade that changed everything. While the world was rocking to the Beatles, marching for civil rights, and watching a man walk on the moon, behind the gilded gates of Buckingham Palace, a young queen was fighting a battle of her own. A battle to keep the oldest monarchy on Earth relevant in a world that was spinning faster than anyone could have imagined.
This is the story of how the British royal family lived through the most turbulent decade of the 20th century. What they wore, what they risked, and the jewels that glittered through it all. The decade began with a fairy tale. On the 6th of May, 1960, Princess Margaret married the photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey.
It was the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television, and an estimated 300 million people around the world tuned in. For women across Britain and America gathered around their television sets that spring morning, it was a moment of pure enchantment. Margaret arrived in the glass coach wearing a deceptively simple silk organza gown by Norman Hartnell.
Clean lines, a fitted bodice with a V-neckline, and long slim sleeves. No heavy embroidery, no excessive ornamentation. It was deliberately modern, and it let the real star of the ensemble do its work. The tiara. Margaret had done something almost unheard of for a royal bride. >> >> Instead of borrowing from her sister the Queen’s vast collection, she purchased her own.
The Poltimore tiara, a towering Victorian diamond piece created by Garrard in 1870 for Lady Poltimore, had been bought at auction the previous year for 5,500 pounds. It was a statement of independence from a princess who had already scandalized the nation with her love life and broken engagement to Group Captain Peter Townsend.
The tiara itself was extraordinary. It could be converted into a fringe necklace and 11 separate brooches, and it came with its own tiny screwdriver for the transformation. Margaret wore it perched high atop an elaborate updo. A strip of brown ribbon cleverly laced into the framework, so only the cloth touched her hair, while the diamonds soared above.
She kept the rest of her wedding jewelry deliberately minimal, >> >> just the Lady Mountsteven necklace, a diamond riviere that had once belonged to Queen Mary, to let the Poltimore do all the talking. It was the first time this extraordinary tiara had been seen in public on a royal. Margaret would go on to wear it faithfully for the rest of her life, at state visits, at galas, and most famously in a cheeky photograph taken by her husband 2 years later, in which she wore nothing but the Poltimore in the
bathtub. For millions watching on their small black and white screens though, that wedding morning was magic. A princess in diamonds marrying for love at last. The world still believed in fairy tales. That same year, Elizabeth herself was expanding the royal nursery. Prince Andrew was born in February 1960, the first child born to a reigning monarch since Queen Victoria’s youngest, Princess Beatrice, >> >> in 1857.
4 years later, in 1964, came Prince Edward. The Queen was in her mid-30s, still young, still glamorous, and her growing family made the monarchy feel fresh and modern. There was a warmth to the early ’60s, >> >> a sense that the future was bright and the best was yet to come. And in the outside world, the early ’60s matched that optimism.
John F. Kennedy was in the White House. The space race was underway. In Britain, Harold Macmillan spoke of winds of change. Young women were discovering new freedoms, the contraceptive pill, Mary Quant’s fashion revolution, a world that suddenly seemed full of possibility. Everything was changing.
But this wasn’t just an era of parties and christenings. Behind the glamour, Elizabeth was proving herself as a formidable diplomat. In November 1961, she undertook what many consider the boldest trip of her entire reign, a state visit to Ghana. Ghana had gained independence from Britain just 4 years earlier, and its president, Kwame Nkrumah, was drifting dangerously close to the Soviet Union.
5 days before Elizabeth was scheduled to arrive, bombs exploded in the capital, Accra. A statue of Nkrumah was hit, showing the president himself was a target. Parliament begged her not to go. Even Winston Churchill personally telephoned the Prime Minister to try to stop the trip.
Elizabeth refused to back down. She had already canceled on Nkrumah once before in 1959 during her pregnancy with Prince Andrew, and the Ghanaian president had been devastated. She would not insult him again. In words that would become legendary, she told Harold Macmillan, “I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth, and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved.
Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children.” She went. Over 100,000 people packed Black Star Square to greet her. And at the state dinner in Accra, she appeared in a breathtaking white gown wearing the Vladimir tiara with its shimmering emerald drops. The Cambridge emeralds swapped in for the tiara’s usual pearl pendants.
At her neck, the jewels of the Delhi Durbar parure glittered under the chandeliers. It was a display of majesty designed to honor her hosts and show the world she was not afraid. Then came the moment that made headlines around the globe. The Queen of England danced the Ghanaian highlife with President Nkrumah.
A white woman dancing with a black African leader broadcast to millions. In 1961, >> >> when segregation still ruled much of America and the civil rights movement was just gathering force, this was extraordinary. The visit was a triumph. Ghana stayed in the Commonwealth, and when Elizabeth returned to London, Macmillan placed a call to President Kennedy with a line that would echo through history.
“I have risked my Queen. You must risk your money.” American funding for Ghana’s Volta Dam came through shortly after, cutting off a key avenue of Soviet influence in Africa. The young Queen had outmaneuvered the Cold War, but the age of innocence was about to end. On the 22nd of November, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
The world reeled, and the ’60s took a much darker turn. The mid-’60s were a time of revolution. The Beatles conquered America. Twiggy redefined beauty. Martin Luther King marched for equality. Young people everywhere were questioning authority, challenging tradition, and demanding that the old world make way for the new.
And inside Buckingham Palace, the Queen carried on. Every year, the state opening of Parliament, the diamond diadem on the journey to Westminster, that iconic silhouette every British woman recognized from stamps, coins, and banknotes. Then the Imperial State Crown, set with over 2,800 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and nearly 300 pearls, placed upon her head as she read the government’s agenda from the gilded throne.
For those watching at home, these rituals were anchors. In a world that felt like it was spinning out of control, the Queen was always there. Same crown, same duty, same steady presence. Your mother knew it. Your grandmother knew it. And you knew it, too. It was during this period that Elizabeth quietly began building her personal jewelry collection with the careful eye of a connoisseur.
After a decade on the throne, she knew exactly which gaps needed filling. In the early 1960s, she acquired the Belgian sapphire tiara, originally a necklace from the collection of Princess Louise of Belgium, and had it mounted onto a tiara frame. Paired with the sapphire suite her father, King George VI, had given her as a wedding present in 1947, it became one of her most beloved combinations.
That deep luminous blue against her pale skin and white evening gowns >> >> became a signature look she would return to for the next six decades. In 1964, she added the Baring ruby necklace to her collection, an elegant, easier-to-wear ruby piece that filled a practical gap. She already owned the magnificent Greville ruby necklace, a wedding gift from her parents, but the crown rubies remained stubbornly with the Queen Mother.
The following year, she accepted the Godman necklace as a gift. Each acquisition was deliberate. Elizabeth was a woman who planned carefully, who thought decades ahead, and who understood that every piece of jewelry she chose to wear sent a diplomatic, personal, and symbolic message. But, the mid-60s brought something no amount of diamonds could shield against.
On the 21st of October, 1966, in the small Welsh mining village of Aberfan, a mountain of coal waste collapsed and slid down onto Pantglas Junior School. 144 people were killed. 116 of them were children. Half the village’s children gone in a single morning. The nation was devastated.
Prince Philip visited the next day. Lord Snowdon, Margaret’s husband, who was Welsh, traveled there on his own. “I felt the Welsh should stick together.” He later said. But, the Queen did not come for 8 days. She later said this was her greatest regret. Believing at the time that her presence would divert attention from the desperate search for survivors.
When she finally walked through the mud of Aberfan on the 29th of October, she was visibly overcome. This was one of the very few times in her entire reign that Elizabeth was seen to shed tears in public. There were no jewels that day, no tiaras, no diamonds, just a woman confronting the most terrible grief imaginable.
A posy of flowers was pressed into her hands by a child. Its inscription read simply, “From the remaining children of Aberfan.” Elizabeth would return to Aberfan again and again in 1973, 1997, and 2012, when she opened the new primary school that replaced the one buried under the coal tip. No other place in all her realms held such a lasting, painful claim on her heart.
- If any single year defined the upheaval of the decade, it was this one. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, Robert Kennedy in June. Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Students rioted in Paris. The old world was crumbling. And the British royal family knew it had to change or risk becoming a relic of a vanished age.
The answer came in the form of something unprecedented. On the 21st of June, 1969, the BBC broadcast a documentary simply called Royal Family. For the first time in history, cameras had been allowed inside the private world of the monarchy. For 18 months, a film crew had followed Elizabeth and her family through Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral, and aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia.
Over 30 million people watched in Britain alone, 3/4 of the entire country. Around the world, an estimated 350 million tuned in. And what they saw astonished them. The Queen buying her youngest son Edward sweets in a village shop and paying for them herself. The family barbecuing at Balmoral with Philip manning the grill while Elizabeth mixed a salad dressing.
Prince Charles playing the cello until a string snapped and hit poor little Edward in the face. The Queen making small talk with President Nixon and sighing, “World problems are so complex, aren’t they now?” For women watching at home, it was a revelation. Here was the Queen they had admired from a distance doing the very same things they did with their own families, feeding the children, making conversation with difficult guests.
The documentary made the royal family feel human in a way nothing before ever had. But, it was also a gamble. David Attenborough, who was controller of BBC2 at the time, warned that the film risked destroying the monarchy by removing its mystique. “Once the public saw inside the hut,” he argued, “the whole system of tribal chiefdom was damaged forever.
” Princess Anne was blunter. “I never liked the idea of royal family. I thought it was a rotten idea.” Elizabeth herself seemed to come around to their view. After its initial broadcast, she quietly had the documentary restricted. It has never been officially shown on British television since 1977.
To this day, it remains one of the most elusive pieces of royal footage ever made. The film the Queen tried to make disappear. But, the documentary was just the opening act. 10 days later, on the 1st of July, 1969, the world watched as Queen Elizabeth formally invested her 20-year-old son Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.
It was the culmination of everything the monarchy had been working towards, tradition reimagined for the television age. Lord Snowdon had designed the setting to be camera-friendly, a circular slate dais beneath a transparent Perspex canopy, so millions could see every detail. Elizabeth placed a specially commissioned gold coronet on her son’s head and invested him with the sword, the ring, the rod, and the mantle of ermine.
Charles knelt, placed his hands between his mother’s, and spoke the ancient oath in both English and Welsh. “I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb.” It was a mother crowning her son, and behind the pageantry, >> >> it was not without danger. The day before, two men had been killed when their homemade bomb exploded prematurely near Aber Gale.
>> >> On the day itself, an egg was thrown at the Queen’s carriage. Helicopters circled. Drain covers throughout Caernarfon had been sealed shut. But, the ceremony went ahead, and the image of that young prince kneeling before his Queen became one of the defining moments of the decade. Just 20 days later, on the 20th of July, 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
Families gathered around their television sets to witness the impossible. A new era had begun. And the royal family, for all its ancient tradition, >> >> had found a way to walk into it. The 1960s began with a princess in a diamond tiara marrying in Westminster Abbey and ended with a prince being crowned in a Welsh castle.
In between, the world transformed. The old certainties fell away. The music changed, the fashion changed, the politics changed. But, through it all, Elizabeth was there. In her tiaras and her duty, in her quiet courage and her devastating grief. She danced with presidents and walked through mud.
She wore the Vladimir with emeralds and the Imperial State Crown with equal grace. She bet her safety on the Commonwealth and won. She opened the palace doors to cameras and then, realizing the cost, quietly closed them again. If you lived through the 1960s, you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot.
You remember the first time you heard the Beatles. You remember watching the moon landing with your family crowded around a screen that seemed to hold the entire future inside it. And if you were British, you remember the Queen. Always there, always steady. Diamonds catching the light in a world that was learning to spin in entirely new directions.
The ’60s changed everything. But, some things, the duty, the diamonds, the woman who wore them, endured. If this story took you back, subscribe and share it with someone who remembers. Tell us in the comments, what is your strongest memory of the 1960s? Was it a royal moment, a song, a place? And which jewel from this era do you think was the most magnificent? We would love to hear your story.