The Queen was known for her love of corgis (Steve Parsons/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)At the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, the Queen’s presence was announced with a video of corgis sauntering through the red-carpeted halls of Buckingham Palace accompanied by James Bond. As the film played on the enormous screens at the Olympic stadium, a whoosh of recognition went through the crowd. Corgis were as inseparable from the image of Queen Elizabeth II as the colourful headscarves, the delicate hand wave and even the crown.
Corgis came into the Queen’s life at the age of seven when her father brought home a dog named Dookie. The Windsors tended to go for shih tzus and labradors, but a next-door neighbour’s Welsh corgi had caught the eye of the young princesses, Elizabeth, and her sister Margaret.
The family welcomed Dookie in 1933, when they were still very much background royals, before the abdication crisis put her father on the throne as George VI and thrust Elizabeth into the spotlight as his heir. It’s no wonder she kept a pack of corgis for another nine decades. The dogs were a reminder of those carefree days with Dookie before the call of duty came.
She got a corgi of her own during the Second World War. “Susan” was Elizabeth’s 18th birthday present in 1944, when she was preparing to start work in the women’s branch of the army and her romance with Philip was blossoming. Susan and her brood were a rare source of complaint from the duke — “bloody dogs,” he sometimes grumbled — but for Elizabeth the company of her corgis was non-negotiable. They even joined the couple on their honeymoon in 1947.
The Queen’s corgis (and “dorgis”, a cross-breed she kept) are probably the most well-travelled pets in history. Dotted through the rich photographic archive of her reign, there are pictures of courtiers manhandling the dogs on and off planes, and chaperoning them into royal cars. One of them, Berry, had a penchant for photobombing official photographs. When the Queen met England’s World Cup-winning rugby squad in 2003, he wandered into shot, raising a smile from the team. Four corgis appeared with her on the cover of Vanity Fair.
She also used the dogs to break the ice with guests. David Nott, a surgeon who worked in the Syrian city of Aleppo during the civil war, recalled meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace and almost coming to tears when she asked him about his work on the front line.
Sensing his unease, she brought the corgis in and invited Nott to feed them biscuits: “and for the rest of the lunch she took the lead and chatted about her dogs, how many she had, what their names were, how old they were. All the while we were stroking and petting them, and my anxiety and distress drained away.”
While she once had as many as 10 dogs at a time, the Queen decided to stop breeding dogs over a decade ago, given the burden of looking after them in her old age. But after the death of Prince Philip last year, she was cheered slightly by the arrival of two corgi puppies, Fergus and Muick, bought for her by Prince Andrew.
These were the only dogs left with her at the end, and it has now been confirmed that they will be looked after by Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. They will live at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, where the divorced couple live. The dogs were part and parcel of the Elizabethan court, and like the Queen’s courtiers they no doubt will be well looked after their service to Her Majesty.
