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The late Queen Elizabeth’s celebrity status was never more evident than when Kathie Hills brought in two ravaged scrapbooks that she rescued from a Hospice charity shop many years ago.
“I’m not a royalist, but I could see how much care and attention had gone into putting the books together and just couldn’t bear to see them not appreciated,” she said.
The clippings are from a variety of national and international magazines and newspapers, starting around the time of the coronation and then moving through to record deaths, births, tours, meetings with celebrities and celebrations.
Kathy said she had been storing the books in a box and they would probably return to the box for safe keeping.
Interestingly, some of the advertisements on the reverse sides of the cuttings are just as entertaining.
For instance, on the other side of a photo of the Queen in Tonga with Queen Salote there are ads for the movies at long-forgotten cinemas in Auckland’s Queen Street – the Roxy, Plaza, Regent, St James, Oxford, Century, Majestic and Tivoli (near Grafton Bridge), plus the grand Civic.
Gary Cooper was starring in Return to Paradise, Maureen O’Hara in Sons of the Musketeers and Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate!
The clippings also record Sir Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Mt Everest, described on the Auckland’s Star’s front page on June 2, 1953, as a ‘Magnificent Present To The Queen’.
