Her father’s health declined during 1951, and Elizabeth was soon frequently standing in for him at public events. She visited Greece, Italy and Malta (where Philip was then stationed) during that year. In October, she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C. In January, 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand. They had reached Kenya when word arrived of the death of her father, on 6 February 1952, from lung cancer.

Elizabeth was staying at the Treetops Hotel in Thika (today just two hours away from Nairobi) when she was told of her father’s death and of her own succession to the throne — a unique circumstance for any such event. She was the first British monarch since the accession of George I to be outside the country at the moment of succession, and also the first in modern times not to know the exact time of her accession (because her father had died in his sleep at an unknown time). On the night her father died, the Chief Justice of Kenya Sir Horace Hearne, who would later accompany the Royal Party back to the UK, escorted the Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, to a dinner at the Treetops Hotel, which is now a very popular tourist retreat in Kenya. It was there that she “went up a princess and came down a Queen.”

It was Prince Philip who broke the news of her father’s death to Elizabeth. After that, Martin Charteris, then Assistant Private Secretary to the new Queen, asked her what she intended to be called. “Why, my own name; what else?” she replied. The royal party returned immediately to the United Kingdom.

Elizabeth II’s Proclamation of Accession was read at St James’s Palace, on Thursday, 7 February 1952. In Canada, a separate proclamation was issued by the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada on the same day.

The following year, the Queen’s grandmother, Queen Mary, died of lung cancer on 24 March 1953. Reportedly, the Dowager Queen’s dying wish was that the coronation not be postponed. Elizabeth’s coronation took place in Westminster Abbey, on 2 June 1953. Her coronation gown, commissioned from Norman Hartnell, was embroidered with the floral emblems of the countries of the Commonwealth: the Tudor rose of England, the Scots thistle, the Welsh leek, shamrock of Ireland, wattle of Australia, the maple leaf of Canada, the New Zealand fern, South Africa’s protea, two lotus flowers for India and Ceylon, and Pakistan’s wheat, cotton and jute.