Page 6 - Great Elizabethans

INTRODUCTION
Over the last 70 years, thousands of extraordinary people who call Britain home have brightened and changed this country – and the world beyond it. And one of these brilliant Britons who saw it all happen was a little girl nicknamed Lilibet, who grew up to become Queen Elizabeth II.
When Queen Elizabeth was born in 1926, the world looked very different to the one we know today. Just a few months before her birth, one of the very first television sets ever made had been displayed in Britain by the inventor John Logie Baird. However, most people in the country wouldn’t see or own a television until many years later. Queen Elizabeth never watched cartoons when she was little, or went on YouTube – in fact, the Internet and the World Wide Web (invented by Tim Berners-Lee, page 42) wouldn’t exist until the 1980s! As a grown-up, though, she often appeared on TV herself, and her coronation was the very first one to be watched live on television by thousands of people.
When she was a child, Queen Elizabeth lived through the upheaval and destruction caused
by the Second World War. The war affected thousands of other children too, like the writer Judith Kerr (page 22), who came to England because the Nazi government in Germany treated her family very badly because they were Jewish, or the actor Ian McKellen (page 32), who slept under the kitchen table when he was a little boy in case his home in Wigan was bombed.
At age 25, Queen Elizabeth came to the throne in a world that was changing quickly. The war had ended, but life after the conflict was very different for many people. Ways of living that had stayed the same for hundreds of years had been disrupted, and lots of people in Britain had now started to think differently about the world and their places in it.
Many people wanted to change things in the country for the better, like providing healthcare for everyone, not just those who could pay doctors’ bills. Aneurin Bevan (page 14) founded the National Health Service (NHS), to ensure that everyone could be looked after when they become ill.
Britain was also changing in other ways. For many years, it had ruled over a group of other countries, called the British Empire. Britain had invaded these countries to control their resources and treated many people who lived in them very unfairly. Over time, people began to realise how wrong this was, and many of these countries, such as India, now started to become independent from Britain and the Empire. Eventually, a new group of countries was formed called the Commonwealth, who decided to recognise the Queen as the Head of the Commonwealth but ruled their countries completely independently of Britain.
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