Elizabeth Became Queen in a Kenyan Treehouse, Not London

In early February 1952, Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, were partway through a Commonwealth tour that had brought them to Kenya, then still a British colony, when they took a break from official engagements for a night at Treetops, a small game-viewing lodge built into the branches of a giant fig tree in the foothills of Mount Kenya. It was meant to be a diversion, a chance to watch elephants and other wildlife from an unusual vantage point. Instead, it became the setting for one of the more unusual accession stories in modern monarchical history.

Thousands of miles away at Sandringham House in Norfolk, England, King George VI died in his sleep during the night of February 5 into February 6, the cause recorded as coronary thrombosis, following a period of declining health that had included lung cancer surgery the previous September. Communications from rural Kenya back to London in 1952 were slow enough that news of the king’s death didn’t reach the royal party at Treetops immediately. Elizabeth and Philip left the lodge and traveled on to another location, Sagana Lodge, before Philip was informed and took on the task of telling his wife that her father had died and that she was now queen, a conversation biographers have described as one of the most consequential private moments of her reign’s beginning.

The story that Elizabeth climbed into a tree a princess and climbed down a queen, often attributed to a line written in the Treetops visitors’ book by the naturalist and hunter Jim Corbett, who had accompanied the royal party, captured public imagination and became one of the most repeated details of her accession, even though the more precise sequence of events, Philip informing her after they’d already left Treetops rather than at the lodge itself, is somewhat less tidy than the phrase suggests. Elizabeth, 25 years old at the time, immediately became Queen Elizabeth II under the principle that the monarchy has no interregnum: sovereignty passes at the exact moment of the predecessor’s death, not at any later formal proclamation or coronation.

The new queen and her husband cut the remainder of their Commonwealth tour short and flew back to Britain within hours, landing to a waiting delegation of government officials, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at London Airport. Her formal coronation didn’t take place until June 1953, more than a year later, but her reign is dated from the moment of her father’s death in February 1952, meaning Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, at the time of her death in 2022, technically began that reign not in a London palace but in a British colonial territory in East Africa, a detail that later became a recurring reference point in discussions of the monarchy’s colonial-era history as Kenya moved toward independence just over a decade later, in 1963.