The day that Queen Elizabeth II received The Beatles. It was October 26, 1965. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr arrived in a Rolls Royce at Buckingham Palace in London to receive the Order of the British Empire from the queen. The band was already the most famous in the world and was on the crest of the wave, its best moment of popularity.
At the time that Elizabeth II decorated each of them with the medal, royalty, at that time stiff and distant from popular culture, winked at worldly tastes, rock, young people, their rebelliousness at the time, and it gave a setback to the most conservative sectors that did not see with good eyes that a title of nobility was delivered for the first time to four emerging rock and pop artists in that decade.
They say that after that act, some military veterans of World War II returned their medals, similar to those received by The Beatles, because they did not conceive of that ‘self-confidence’.
The band said that the meeting with the queen was cordial, that many jokes were made. The queen believed that Ringo was the creator of the group and asked if they had been together for a long time. The drummer replied that he was the last to join the band and told him that they had been playing for 40 years, when the average age of them was 23 years. They all burst out laughing.
The audacity of the young queen went further. She later made Paul and Ringo Sir, as she later did Elton John, Rod Stewart and several others.
