The world in 1952 when Elizabeth II became Britain’s Queen

Little Liam was born on June 7, 1952 in the small town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland. The joy of mother and father is huge – like a few months earlier with the parents of little Harvey, who was born safely in the New York borough of Queens. And on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in Leningrad, a working-class couple is overjoyed that their newborn – a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich – is alive and well. His two older brothers died when they were still children.

Liam Neeson, Harvey Weinstein and Vladimir Putin have little in common except that they were all born in 1952. And their parents still have no idea that their sons will one day achieve worldwide fame. Nor do they dare to dream that the three tots from Northern Ireland, New York and Leningrad will one day meet Elizabeth. Princess Elizabeth, who is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the year the three boys are born. As of Thursday, she was the only British monarch to have met Liam, Harvey and Wladimir.

But first things first. “Princess Elizabeth and her husband found a quiet colony on their trip around the world when they arrived there on February 6 and were greeted by the natives,” reports German television. Elizabeth was 25 years old when she heard the news of her father George’s death in what was then the British colony of Kenya. This automatically makes Elizabeth Queen, and she quickly travels back to London with her husband Philip.

The world was different on that day in 1952 than it is today. A portrait of the king hangs in most offices, and theater and cinema performances usually end with a “God save the King”. By no means every household has a refrigerator, for every 50 million Britons there are almost one and a half million television connections.

Winston Churchill, a staunch supporter of colonialism and the British Empire, lives at 10 Downing Street for the second time in 1952. “Goodbye, Sweetheart” by Vera Lynn is the best-selling single in 1952, Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong run back and forth on the radio. Manchester United become champions in the homeland of football; with twenty Englishmen, two Scots, one Northern Irishman and one Irishman in the squad.

Alongside Truman, Stalin and Mao

What falls in Elizabeth’s lap when her father dies is a world empire – albeit with tendencies towards dissolution. Large parts of the African and Caribbean colonies were still under the British Crown in the 1950s. India and Pakistan have only recently gained independence.

Harry S. Truman, the President who had given the order for the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years earlier, is sitting in the White House. A few months after Elizabeth II was enthroned, he decided not to run again. In the same year, former General Dwight D. Eisenhower won the US presidential election with the slogan “Korea, Communism and Corruption”.

In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin ruled with an iron fist, while in the still young Federal Republic of Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer consistently backed integration with the West. And other heads of state who were in power when Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne are only known from history books: Mao Zedong in China, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi in ​​Iran, Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia or Juan Perón in Argentina. His wife Evita dies in the same year.

In the middle of the Korean War

The beginning of Elizabeth’s time as head of state is marked by hardening fronts in the Cold War. On the Korean Peninsula, South and North are fighting each other in a proxy war along the 38th parallel. The USA detonates a hydrogen bomb for the first time, with which they want to underpin the technical superiority of the West.

The economic situation in western countries recovers in the 1950s. The hard years after the end of the Second World War are over. A certain prosperity is also spreading in Great Britain; More and more people can afford a private car, and washing machines and vacuum cleaners can be seen more and more often in households. Immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean countries are arriving and transforming many corners of London.

Already in her first year at the head of the British Kingdom, the young Queen has to accompany the population through two decisive experiences. On October 8, one of the worst train accidents in British history occurs on the outskirts of London: three trains collide at Harrow and Wealdstone station, taking a footbridge down. 122 people are killed and around 340 others are injured.

A catastrophe of even greater proportions occurs at the beginning of December and goes down in history as “The Great Smog”. Due to the extreme air pollution, coupled with an inversion weather situation, the British capital is shrouded in a dense, black fog for days. Some Londoners can hardly see the toes of their shoes when they look down the street. Driving is unthinkable, thousands of people complain of breathing difficulties. The balance sheet: the number of deaths almost tripled between December 5th and 9th, 1952, thousands died as a result of the smog.

In terms of foreign policy, the British Empire is particularly troubled by the Kenya colony, which Queen Elizabeth visited as a princess in March. The uprising of the independence movement Mau-Mau becomes too unpredictable for the colonial power. On October 20, the governor of the colony declared a state of emergency. Over 8000 people are arrested in the first few days, and tens of thousands of suspected resistance fighters are interned. Still, it is said to be more than a decade before Kenya gains independence.

The Queen as the only constant

Today, more than seventy years after Elizabeth II was enthroned, Britain is a different country. Liz Truss is the head of government, having recently replaced Boris Johnson; the Prime Minister who led Britain out of the European Union and through the Corona crisis. Musicians like David Guetta and Nicki Minaj dominate the streaming charts, and nobody knows Vera Lynn’s “Goodbye, Sweetheart” anymore. And the best-paid footballers in the world play in the Premier League, financed by investors from other continents.

Elizabeth II experienced virtually the entire post-war history during her time on the throne: the end of the British Empire, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the oil price crises in the 1970s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

And Liam, Harvey and Vladimir – the babies of 1952 – rose to worldwide prominence during Elizabeth’s reign. Liam Neeson as an actor, Harvey Weinstein as a Hollywood producer and sex offender, Vladimir Putin as the President of Russia and a warmonger.

All three have met the Queen personally in the course of their lives. Northern Ireland’s Liam Neeson, who made his breakthrough role as Oskar Schindler in ‘Schindler’s List’, met the Queen at a film premiere in 2010. Harvey Weinstein shook her hand at Buckingham Palace in 2014, before his conviction sex offender. Vladimir Putin met Elizabeth several times – and even rode in the carriage with her during his state visit to Great Britain in 2003.

For Neeson, Weinstein and Putin, the world has changed fundamentally since 1952, with the latter two’s lives taking drastic turns. One of the few constants seemed to be Queen Elizabeth II until Thursday.