A BBC documentary featuring never-before-seen footage of the Queen taken from her personal archive will include clips of the monarch beaming at her engagement ring – months before the announcement was made public. The Queen granted the BBC unprecedented access to hundreds of home-made recordings shot by her, her parents and the Duke of Edinburgh in honour of her upcoming Platinum Jubilee.
The home movies, which had been held privately by the Royal Collection in the vaults of the British Film Institute (BFI), capture the Queen’s life from being pushed in a pram by her mother to her coronation in 1953. The 75-minute documentary, titled Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen, captures the first extended visit of Prince Philip to Balmoral in 1946 while the couple’s engagement was still not public.
It depicts a beaming Princess Elizabeth showing the camera her engagement ring. The Queen was a young princess when she first met naval cadet Prince Philip of Greece in 1939, during a visit to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth where he was studying.
