Seventy years this weekend, the last king died. CHRIS BISHOP looks back at the moment a global era ended, and another began, at a country home in Norfolk
He slipped away as the sun came up over the pine woods and the geese flew overhead.
A winter morning saw the dawn of a new era after King George VI was found dead in his bed at Sandringham on February 6, 1952.
George, the monarch who was never born to become king, had waved his eldest daughter and heir Princess Elizabeth off from London Airport days earlier against the advice of his doctors not to travel, as she set out on a tour of the Commonwealth.
Elizabeth, just 25, took off as a princess and flew home a queen, after the news of her father's death reached the remote Kenyan game lodge where she was staying with her husband, Prince Philip.
After landing in London, the new Queen travelled to Sandringham, where her father lay in the tiny carrstone church of St Mary Magdalene.
George VI had been baptised in the 16th century church, where his gamekeepers now maintained a vigil in their plus fours.
Carpenters had worked through the night to fashion a coffin from an oak felled on the Norfolk estate.
Memorials to George's ancestors, including his father, adorned the walls of the church around his simple casket.
When George V died in January 1936, at the age of 70, his eldest son became King Edward VIII.
But Edward's reign was short-lived, He was forced to abdicate just 236 days after acceding to the throne, following a constitutional crisis precipitated by his intention to marry divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson.
After he signed away his claim to the monarchy on December 10, 1936, his younger brother Prince Albert, the Duke of York, succeeded to the throne choosing to reign as George VI.
At the age of 10, his eldest daughter Elizabeth became heir presumptive.
How different might the world's fortunes have been had Edward chosen to hold onto his crown instead of his lover.
After his abdication, he visited Nazi Germany and met Adolf Hitler.
The Duke of Windsor, as he became known, favoured appeasement in order to avoid a war with Germany. Senior Nazis wished he'd remained king.
While appeasement briefly became government policy, all hopes of a compromise were off the table after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and the Second World War began.
The rub of the green was against king and country at the outset, as the invading Germans tore through the Low Countries and France.
But the fightback began after Dunkirk, when the remnants of the routed British Expeditionary Force were plucked from the beaches by an armada of small boats.
Soon after the little ships sailed, a new prime minister Winston Churchill would vow never to surrender.
Churchill forged what was said to be the closest of relations with a king who, despite the dangers, remained in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle for much of the war.
George, Queen Elizabeth and their daughters princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were seen to be standing side by side with their subjects as the bombs fell on the capital.
The King visited Normandy soon after the D-Day Landings. As VE Day celebrations began after the German surrender the following year, crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace shouting: "We want the King."
Less than a decade later, the monarch who had become a symbol of national resistance lost his battle with the health complications which had plagued his final years at the age of just 56, as the stresses of the war took their toll.
It seemed like half of Norfolk turned out to see him off, as George VI's cortege trundled slowly along Scotch Belt and down Folly Hill on its way to the Royal Station at Wolferton.
He was taken by train to London, where he would lie in state at Westminster Hall before his funeral at St George's Chapel, at Windsor.
The people of Norfolk have felt an ownership, a closeness, a stake in the Royal family ever since Queen Victoria bought the Sandringham Estate for her oldest son Prince Albert in 1862.
Elizabeth had happy childhood memories of the flower show and the rolling countryside around the estate, which her father had been forced to buy back from his brother when he abdicated.
Sandringham passes down the line of succession upon a monarch's death because it is owned privately by the sovereign - not held in trust on behalf of the nation.
Edward, who had never embraced the country life, wanted shot of it.
George VI's purchase of the estate he came to love as his father did helped secure its future to this day and beyond, as well as the Royal Family's shooting rights and stud farms.
After she became Queen, Elizabeth II devoted a great deal of her time to foreign tours and state occasions far from Norfolk.
The key theme of the new Elizabethan era was one of unity and friendship, as the former British empire continued its evolution into the Commonwealth established by George VI three years before he died.
The King preferred his pheasant coverts to affairs of state in his later years as his health declined, leaving his daughter to take her first steps onto the world stage in his place.
In her first Christmas message after his death, broadcast from her study at Sandringham, the new Queen pledged to devote her life to continuing his work.
The Queen of England would come to symbolise many values over the decades to come; her Christian faith, along with her belief in duty, honour and dignity.
All still underpin the monarchy and all it stands for - an institution which is more permanent than any mortal person, be they king or queen can ever be.
And yet it has remained as uniquely British as a cup of tea in the way it has cemented itself under Elizabeth II.
While much has happened to rock the boat, both within the Royal Family and the wider world, over the last seven decades, the Queen has kept her own course, following her own moral compass and remaining true to the pledge she made from Sandringham, in 1952.
Divorces and domestic scandals fade into insignificance against the bigger picture, the sum total of a uniquely-long reign and all it has seen.
Few owned a car or television at the start of it the second Elizabethan era.
Rationing was still in force and young men would be conscripted into the armed forces for National Service. Some would go on to fight in Korea, Malaya or Kenya.
Technology has since advanced to levels which would have been inconceivable in the 1950s and 60s, as the young Queen juggled sovereignty with family.
Yet while almost every aspect of our lives and how we relate to others around us has changed, one woman has remained constant.
With her late husband, the Duke of Edinburgh at her side until he retired from public life in 2017, she seemed able to weather any storm.
As the Queen begins her Platinum Jubilee at Wolferton - where she has been staying in a cottage on the edge of her Norfolk estate - the geese will still be flying as the Sun begins to set on her remarkable reign.
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