It was the local wedding of the year, and should have taken place at St Andrew's Church, Ham.

However, Lady Scott was at such loggerheads with the vicar that she obtained a special licence to enable her eldest daughter to marry in the adjoining parish of Petersham.

It was July 16, 1881. The bride was Nina Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, one of Lady Scott's children by her first marriage.

The painfully shy bridegroom was Claude Bowes-Lyon, who was then Lord Glamis but who, in 1904, succeeded his father as Earl of Strathmore.

The little 16th-century church of St Peter was so crowded that many of the distinguished guests were unable to get in.

Afterwards, as the couple drove back home across Ham Common in an open coach, the village schoolgirls, dressed in white, strewed their path with roses and geraniums.

Lady Scott was a proud mother as she presided over the al fresco wedding breakfast on the lawns of Forbes House, her home on Ham Common.

She would have been prouder still had she known the bridal pair were destined to produce a future Queen of England, and that she herself would enter the reference books as grandmother to one queen, great-grandmother to another, and great-great-grandmother to our present Prince of Wales.

This unexpected train of events was set in motion 19 years after that rural wedding at Ham, when the couple produced the ninth of their 10 children and called her Elizabeth Angela Marguerite.

Today she is better known as Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

Her birthplace is a mystery. Clarence House will say only that it was in London, and will not discuss the theory that the happy event took place in a horse-drawn ambulance.

Her birth certificate states she was born at the family's home near Hitchin -- an erroneous piece of information given by her father, who could have been sentenced to penal servitude for life under the Forgery Act of 1861.

He escaped this fate. But he was fined 7s 6d (37.5 pence) for failing to register the birth in time.

Baby Elizabeth was six weeks old before he went to the registrar's office to report her arrival.

The same laissez-faire surrounded her christening on September 23.

The godparents forgot to sign the register.

The priest got the baby's name wrong, and had difficulty correcting it on the baptismal certificate.

He also forgot to say the baby's father was a lord, and had to add that later.

But to return to the new baby's local links, which are never mentioned in the numerous biographies of her.

They were due to her maternal grandmother, the beautiful and bountiful Lady Scott.

She began life as Caroline Burnaby. In 1859, she married the Rev Charles Cavendish-Bentinck, grandson of the third Duke of Portland.

They had three daughters before the Rev Charles died in 1865.

Five years later, his widow married Sir Harry Scott, a Surrey magistrate who served on the Kingston bench.

The couple made their home in Forbes House, facing Ham Common, and here Lady Scott quickly won local fame for her beauty, charm and boundless generosity to good causes.

She was an ardent Anglo-Catholic, and St Luke's in Kingston, and St Alban's in Teddington, were among the "high" churches which received gifts of of carvings and works of art brought back from her regular trips to Italy.

She was equally generous to her own parish church of St Andrew, Ham -- though not during the incumbency of the Rev Thomas Hough.

He was noted for his extreme "low" church views, and eventually the two were at such variance she would not enter his portals.

Lady Scott was a doting grandmother, and the young Bowes-Lyon tribe -- four daughters and six sons -- loved staying with her at Ham.

But a tragedy occurred during one of these holidays when the eldest child, Violet Hyacinth (described by the Surrey Comet as "a well-built and handsome young girl") was suddenly taken ill.

Three weeks later she was dead, aged only 12.

The whole village turned out in silent sympathy as the coffin was borne across Ham Common, the family mourners walking behind, and laid in a violet-strewn grave in St Andrew's churchyard, alongside Sir Harry Scott, who had died in 1889. T

his was in 1893. Seven years later Elizabeth was born, and over the years has often stood at the graveside of the sister she never knew.

Lady Scott died in 1917, but her unmarried daughter, Lady Anne Cavendish-Bentinck, continued to live at Ham, and to be visited by her niece, Elizabeth.

But Lady Scott's name is nowhere to seen on the family grave in the churchyard.

Was it, perhaps, too close to the grave of her old adversary, the Rev Thomas Hough, who died in 1895 after 48 years as Vicar of Ham?

Elizabeth grew into a woman of rare charm, and captivated the Duke of York.

The pair married in 1923, and went to live in White Lodge, Richmond Park.

For 28 years this had been the home of the Duke and Duchess of Teck. Here their daughter, Princess May (later to be Queen Mary) was born and here, in turn, Princess May gave birth to the future King Edward VIII.

The Mayor of Kingston, Councillor A J Fells, sent a congratulatory address on behalf of the Royal borough, and the Comet noted approvingly that the Duke had ordered rose petals made by shell-shocked ex-servicemen to be used at his wedding instead of confetti.

"This latest Royal example should do much to hasten the day when confetti throwing will be a thing of the past, as old-fashioned as rice throwing, both customs being of foreign origin," declared the Comet.

The couple settled at White House, and it would be pleasant to say they liked it. But Elizabeth hated it.

She was particularly resentful that her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, had carried out all the decorations and furnishings to her own taste, and that the small grounds meant they were constantly pestered by sightseers.

Queen Mary wanted the Yorks' first baby to be born at White Lodge. But the Duchess would have none of it.

Her daughter Elizabeth, our present Queen, was born by Caesarian section after an agonising labour, in a house belonging to the Duchess's parents in Bruton Street, London.

The Queen Mother's first official engagement in Kingston was in 1924 when, as Duchess of York, she accompanied the Duke to Kingston Hospital to start two new electric lifts.

Four years later she carried out her second Kingston engagement when she opened the newly-built nurses' home in Wolverton Avenue, and was so impressed by the nurses she met there that, on her daughter Elizabeth's second birthday, she sent then a large piece of the birthday cake and some small mementos.

Her third official visit was for the opening of the electricity power station in 1948. Her fourth was the opening of the YMCA in Surbiton in 1982.

But she has made many informal visits, including one to Hook in 1939 when, with the King, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the American Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, she went to the barrage balloon centre there.

All 1,400 personnel were on the parade, and the station was manned as it would be -- and in fact was --on mobilisation less than six months later.