Until yesterday the Queen Mother was remembered chiefly by gates, which frankly don’t say a great deal about the life and character of the person they are supposed to remind us of. There isn’t much personality in a gate, except perhaps to convey the entirely correct impression that the lady in question was nothing if not iron-willed and unbending.

Last year the Prince of Wales, who doted on his grandmother, unveiled a set of memorial gates at Glamis Castle, her Scottish childhood home. This ironwork is at least inoffensive.

But another set of commemorative gates have been widely derided as gimmicky, inappropriate and really rather tacky. They stand at Hyde Park Corner and, rather than being a symphony of wrought iron, are a cacophony of various shiny metals with a mixed bag of symbols attached, supposedly illustrating aspects of the Queen Mother’s life and work. More than one art critic has suggested that they be sold off as scrap metal.

They were unveiled by members of the Royal Family on the old lady’s 93rd birthday in 1993, as she watched from a distance. We can only imagine what she thought. One of the inflexible rules of the Last Victorian’s exceedingly long life was: never talk to the press.

Times Archive, 1923: The Royal Wedding

London remembered that this was the Lady Elizabeth's day and had its own welcome for her

• Topic: King George VI

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There was a brief, unhappy interlude in the history of royal memorials that the traditional bronze in the Mall may thankfully have brought to an end. Following the Hyde Park gates came the disastrous Diana Fountain, which variously became blocked with leaves, flooded, attracted bathing dogs and caused minor injuries to those foolish enough to paddle in it.

When the brief went out to architects and sculptors for the new Queen Mother memorial, it stipulated that it should not involve water or any moving parts. Royal Parks, charged with looking after it, had had more than enough grief with that Diana thing.

The new bronze shows the Queen Mother at the age of her finest hour, as a supportive wife to a shy, stammering king leading a nation at war. Yet even then not all her hours were fine. When the couple visited bombed-out Londoners in the early days of the Blitz they were given a distinctly frosty reception as a pair of toffs whose house had not been rearranged by the Luftwaffe. Only when a bomb fell on Buckingham Palace could she remark: “Now I can look the East End in the face.”

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