You have to be more than 80 years of age now to have much memory of any monarch except Elizabeth II. Her 70-year reign is the longest in English and British history (bearing in mind the long history of monarchy in Scotland). The reason for this is partly a matter of genes — the Queen mother lived to 101 — and the short life and reign of her father George VI, who died on February 6 1952, aged 56.
George VI was a lifelong worrier and smoker who famously never intended nor ever wished to be head of state. He became King because his elder brother, Edward VIII abdicated, and he saw out the stresses of the existential war with Germany. By the same token, then, Britain’s longest serving monarch is also one of its “accidental” ones. A happy accident, that is.
