Following the heartbreaking news of the Queen's death, we are looking back on her royal visits to Bury both as a monarch and a young girl.
The Royal Family and Queen Elizabeth have visited Lancashire several times and with the aid of Bury Archives, we have been able to view the Bury Times newspapers from the time of her visits.
In 1938, the borough was visited by King George VI and a young Queen Elizabeth.
The visit was a part of the Royal tour of industrial Lancashire which lasted four days with the Majesties being based at Knowsley with The Earl of Derby.
The tour stopped at Wigan, Bolton, Radcliffe, Bury, Heywood, Rochdale, Oldham and concluded in Ashton- under-Lyne before they travelled back to London.
A second brief visit was also conducted by her majesty in 1945, when she was 18-years-old.
The visit had no preliminary announcement; however, thousands of people greeted them as they drove from Bolton to Bury and then on to Heywood.
The Royal visit included chats with ex-servicemen and voluntary workers which gave the keynote to this Royal visit.
One year after her coronation in 1954, Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Lancashire on her first tour as Queen.
The visit took place on the October 22, and included the official opening of Bury Town Hall.
From archive material recovered by Bury Archives, a Bury Times article, dated October 20 describes the anticipation of their arrival.
This came two days before the visit, as the streets had been decorated to the fullest being described ‘as gay with flags and bunting’.
The typical Lancashire weather arrived on the day of their visit; the crowds are "rain-soaked but happy [to] greet [the] royal pair".
The Queen is described to have chatted to Alderman T. Toon who was the mayor in 1943, when her father the late King George VI and her mother had visited the town.
Se did visit on another occasion, in 1968, when she came to Bradley Fold in Radcliffe.
This particular visit was to oversee Operation Springclean and to visit the engineering works of Dobson and Barlow Ltd.
Queen Elizabeth’s most recent visit came after she opened the Metrolink in St Peter’s Square.
After the ceremony, she boarded the tram and travelled to Bury, paying for a visit to the Town Hall which she had opened 38 years before.
She was greeted with familiar cheers and a ‘collective wave of red, white and blue’.
Whilst in recent years Bury has seen a number of royal visits, before 1913, a monarch had never set foot in the borough.
Over a century ago, George V and Queen Mary embarked on their Lancashire tour, at the time, this was the largest tour their Majesties had undertaken.
The tour lasted a week with the royals visiting 30 towns, starting in Warrington and finishing in Manchester.
One of their stops was Bury.
On July 12, 1913, it became the first time that the borough had been visited by a reigning monarch and their consort.
The Town Hall was transformed for the visit, with the windows being treated with thick rich hangings and a canopy to protect them from the elements to and from their carriages.
It was during this tour of Lancashire, that his Majesty laid the foundation stone of King George’s Hall in Blackburn.
This article has been written with the help of Bury Archive and Helen Wilson who collated all the archive material and research.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here