Prince Philip is also an ardent conservationist and for many years has been president of the World Wide Fund for Nature, formerly called the World Wildlife Fund. He has no problem in reconciling his position as president of the fund with his passion for shooting. Nor is he a fan of gun control. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, when sixteen schoolchildren were shot dead with a pistol, there was a cry for more rigorous laws to control the ownership of handguns. Philip famously said: ‘If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?’

Shooting is very much part of the Queen’s life, too – not as a keen shot but as a handler of gundogs trained to pick up the downed birds. The Queen’s love of dogs is well known, but it is not just corgis, which she has had as household pets all her life. She also has a deep involvement with the labradors and spaniels kept as working dogs in the royal kennels at Sandringham. Her skill as a dog handler is renowned. She uses hand signals and whistles to control her labradors. Bill Meldrum, who ran the Sandringham kennels for more than forty years, says that she is the best dog handler he has ever seen – ‘probably the best in the country’. Glimpsed behind the line of guns on shoot days, the Queen is simply, as one of the keepers recalls, ‘a lady in a headscarf with a load of dogs around her, and in a field of sporting people you wouldn’t pick Her Majesty out.’

The dogs do not live only at Sandringham. When the Queen travels to Balmoral for her long summer break, many of the labradors and spaniels are put into lorries and driven through the night to be available for the grouse shoots. The Queen prefers the dogs to be worked outside every other day to avoid becoming too tired or getting bruised paws. After the grouse season, they return to Norfolk for the partridge shoots.

Rather surprisingly, the Queen is also an expert on breeding and racing pigeons, and she has 200 of them. Ever since the days when she fed her grandfather King George V’s parrot with sugar lumps, she has loved birds. When she lived at Royal Lodge as a child, she and her sister had an aviary of budgerigars. She likes birds in their natural environment and knows the breed and songs of many that inhabit the woods and forests around Balmoral Castle.