27th June 1978

Queen Elizabeth II visits Jersey… again

June has been a good month for royal visits. The queen visited twice during the month – once in 1949 when she was still a princess, and again almost 30 years later. In the interim, she stepped ashore in 1957, and Princess Margaret came to the island in 1959.

On her 1978 visit, Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, landed at Albert Pier where they were greeted by thousands of locals waving Union Flags. They stopped at Grainville School and the chamber of the Royal Court House, the latter of which was captured in an oil painting by Ken Howard.

Islanders put on a welcome

Colour footage of the event shows islanders lining the roads as the Queen and Prince Philip were driven past, and the Queen herself riding a horse in front of spectators at the Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society where she was presented with a cow, which was added to the royal dairy herd at Windsor. The cow, which an edition of The Times published the following day stated was a six-year-old called Ansom Dienette, was in calf at the time.

Jersey Post Office produced a set of two stamps to coincide with the visit celebrating the monarch’s 25 years on the throne, which had passed the previous year. The 8p stamp depicted both the Queen and Prince Philip on a red background, and the 25p stamp showed two sides of the Queen’s head.

The Queen visited again in 1989, 2001 and 2005, with the last of those occasions marking the 60-year anniversary of Jersey’s liberation following the end of the Second World War.