Antique Image of the Day: Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose on a Rocking Horse, 1932

The Royal Collection

Photographer Frederick Thurston took this unguarded photo of Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) and her sister, Princess Margaret Rose, astride their favorite rocking horse in 1932.

This portrait was taken long before the death of King George V and, certainly, long before the Duke of York imagined that he’d one day be King instead of his elder brother. The photo of the two Princesses was taken in the nursery at St Paul’s Walden Bury, the country home of the Bowes-Lyon family (the family of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) in Hertfordshire. The rocking horse had once been a play-thing of the Queen Mother when she was a girl.