Queen Mother at 100: An icon in silk and link to a dignified past

LONDON - The Queen Mother Elizabeth, 100 years old this Friday, is not what she seems. Small, gray-haired ladies in flowered dresses are not usually national icons, but this one is as much a part of Britain's self-image as the Union Jack and the Rolling Stones.

As mother of Queen Elizabeth II, her most significant public activity for some years has been to accept bouquets and represent the regal dignity of another age. But it was exactly this unwavering standard that appealed to many Britons in the 1990s, a disastrous and deeply undignified decade for the royal family and the monarchy.

''It seems strange in a way that someone as diaphanous as the Queen Mother - all chiffon and sparkles - should turn out to be a pillar of strength to the monarchy,'' her biographer, Elizabeth Longford, wrote in 1993.

But it is the steel beneath the silk that the Queen Mother's admirers value, especially those who remember her and her husband King George VI during World War II. During the German bombing of Britain, the two forged a bond of solidarity with the British people that won her the steadfast loyalty of most of a generation.

Her charm is a bonus.

The blue eyes still light up when she greets people, tilting her head a bit and smiling up disarmingly from under the brim of her inevitable hat. She totters a little now on her high heels, never having given in to sensible shoes.

But she gets around pretty well with the aid of a walking stick or two, having undergone two hip replacements while in her 90s - and incidentally winning more admiration for the grit she displayed in walking out of the hospital unassisted.

The Queen Mother has a genius for good publicity. Whoever she might be in her private moments, the public woman doesn't get it wrong.

''She displays an extrovert, theatrical sense that is almost totally lacking in her elder daughter,'' royal biographer Robert Lacey wrote in the Sunday Times. ''To express her emotion - at an unexpected round of applause, say, on entering a room - she flutters her eyelashes and places her hand over her bosom, a gesture with which only she and operatic divas can get away.''

She has been beguiling strangers this way for 90-odd years, since her privileged childhood in a large and close-knit aristocratic family at Glamis Castle in Scotland.

Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was the ninth of 10 children of the Scottish 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

A beautiful child and lovely young woman with dark hair and vivid blue eyes, she was admired by many of the young men of her circle. When she accepted the third proposal of the king's shy second son, the Duke of York, his friend the diarist Chips Channon wrote, ''We had begun to despair that she would ever accept him. He is the luckiest of men, and there is not a man in England today who doesn't envy him.''

A child of the Edwardian Age, she had tended wounded soldiers at Glamis during World War I. During World War II, she became a bulwark of support for her husband, who had been forced unprepared onto the throne when his brother King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

The monarchy was struggling to regain popularity during the worst of the war as bombs were devastating British cities, particularly London's poor East End. It was a widely published comment of the queen's that seemed to turn the tide for the royals.

In September 1940, after the king and queen survived a bomb strike on Buckingham Palace, she said, ''I'm glad we have been bombed. I feel I can look the East End in the face.''

It was so certainly the right thing to say at the moment that it has never been forgotten.

With the king's death in 1952 began their daughter's reign, which has seen a half-century of huge social change. The telephoto lens has peered into the monarchy and revealed the family inside to be human. Royal divorce - literally inconceivable before the war - is occurring at about the same rate as everyone else's.

The Queen Mother, whose social and political ideas are reported to be conservative, does not make public comments about these changes.

She has remained at the center of royal life since the king's death, instead of fading into the background as a dowager queen might.

She lives at Clarence House, less than 500 yards from her daughter's Buckingham Palace home.

The two queens speak to each other by telephone every morning - a conversation that follows the switchboard's standard ''Your Majesty? I have Her Majesty on the line, Your Majesty.''

A fawning tabloid press has labeled the Queen Mother ''the nation's favorite granny'' - an image that fits nicely with the sweet smiles and tea parties. But there is at least as much evidence that she is a sophisticated and witty woman who prefers gin to tea, loves the horse races and entertains in exactly the sort of lavish style that the monarchy is trying to pare down.

She is said to have a very large overdraft at her bank and to tug heavily on the purse strings of her daughter, who has been economizing and taking her cousins and children off the taxpayers' hands.

Verifiable information about the Queen Mother's opinions and her character is hard to come by. A circle of loyal friends and staff maintain the kind of discreet silence that most other royals can no longer count on.

What does emerge is the occasional fond anecdote: Told that her meal was being delayed by a dispute among her staff, many of whom are gay, the Queen Mother sent the message, ''My compliments to the old queens down there, but this old queen is hungry and wants her dinner.''

One thing is certain - she is a very strong-willed and determined woman.

The late Lord Charteris, the present queen's private secretary for 27 years, once said of the Queen Mother, ''She has charm, is steel tough and loves people. Without her there would be no monarchy. She re-established the monarchy after the abdication and made all the difference during the war: She is the most remarkable woman ever and we adore her.''

As a member of the palace inner circle, Charteris was no disinterested critic, but his job put him in the ideal position to know his subject.

The newspapers have been lavishing praise on the Queen Mother steadily as her birthday approaches, but dissenting voices have been heard.

Francis Wheen, columnist in the liberal Guardian newspaper, reminded readers that in the year before Britain went to war with Germany, the king and his queen had been strong supporters of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler, although it meant abandoning Czechoslovakia to Germany.

Historian Andrew Roberts wrote in 1994 that in their attitude to appeasement, the royal family were ''firmly in the mainstream of British opinion at the time; what is interesting is how long and how strongly they continued to paddle even after the current had changed direction.''

The other blot on the Queen Mother's image stems from the same era: She is seen as unforgiving in her anger at Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII - later the Duke and Duchess of Windsor - whose determination to marry had forced her reluctant husband onto the throne.

She is said to believe this led to the king's early death, although he was suffering from cancer when he died.

It is widely believed that the break between the brothers never healed because the duchess was denied the dignity of H.R.H - Her Royal Highness - before her title, at the Queen Mother's insistence.

''She has often protested that she is not as sweet a personality as is popularly supposed, but this has invariably been put down to modesty,'' Roberts wrote.

The British public may never learn the whole truth, but most are not likely to mind.

Publicist Max Clifford, best-known as the negotiator of kiss-and-tell sales to the tabloids, is an experienced judge of fact and fable.

With the Queen Mother, he told the Sunday Times recently, ''the myth just goes on and on. It has not been destroyed by the reality, because we don't know what the reality is - and deep down inside, we don't want to know.''