When her first grandchild, Peter, was born on 15 November 1977, the Queen was about to conduct an investiture in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. The baby was born at 10.46am and the investiture scheduled to start at 11, but she was so overjoyed she delayed the ceremony for an unprecedented ten minutes, while she asked for a call to be put through to Prince Philip, who was in Germany at the time, so she could tell him the good news. He was equally delighted. He admired his forthright daughter and had always been close to her. He was convinced motherhood would soften her edges and give her another dimension to her life.

Four years later, on 15 May 1981, Anne gave birth to a daughter, Zara, meaning ‘bright as the dawn’, due to her somewhat prompt arrival into the world. As they grew up, the Queen loved having her grandchildren to stay with nanny Pat Moss, but she was firm with the discipline. She might have been a doting granny but she was a strict one too. ‘She was always chastising them,’ a rating on board the royal yacht Britannia recalled. ‘I’ve seen her shake Zara as she was so naughty running up and down the main stairs on board the yacht and refusing to stop even when the Queen told her to do so.’

From the start, Anne refused to be influenced by public opinion or the opinion of her parents as to the way she brought up her children. That meant country pursuits and country schools. And so it was that the Queen and Prince Philip’s first grandchild, the great-great-grandson of King George V, began his education, not with a governess in the peaceful atmosphere of the Buckingham Palace schoolroom, but in a local nursery school in Minchinhampton. ‘I think the Queen found it all rather alarming,’ said a former footman. ‘But Anne wanted to do things her way and deal with the children herself.’

Her father understood. ‘It’s only too easy to think of education as a process of teaching young people about conventional academic subjects in schools,’ he said. ‘That is a very important aspect, but to give education this exclusive quality is to imply that young people need no other instruction or experience to prepare them for adult life.’

Despite her royal duties, including her increasing work with Save the Children (her chosen charity), Anne still found time to be with the children. It had been the idea of her private secretary, the late Peter Gibbs, to affiliate her with Save the Children, and the choice was nothing to do with her parents. It was the same with the way she brought up her children; they let her get on with motherhood and running her working life and were proud of her for doing so.