The Queen Mother of Denmark, Queen Ingrid, who died on November 7th aged 90, possessed a natural talent for one of the oddest jobs in the world. She helped modernise the royal family of her adopted homeland, the oldest royal house in Europe.
Queen Ingrid was the wife of King Frederik IX, ruler of Denmark from 1947 until 1972; the daughter of Crown Prince Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden and Crown Princess Margaret, daughter of Queen Victoria's third son, the Duke of Connaught. The family she joined in the mid1930s was stiff and unbending; the family she leaves provides Denmark with a monarchy supported by more than 90 per cent of the population.
It was at the end of her husband's reign that a law on accession, approved in 1953 following a referendum, was enacted. It permitted women to take the throne of the kingdom. This allowed Queen Ingrid's daughter, Queen Margrethe II, to become the first female monarch of Denmark since Queen Margrethe I (1387-1412).
Queen Ingrid was born at the royal castle in Stockholm. She grew up, with her four brothers, in a happy and, for the time, an open and relaxed family life. But in 1920, when she was 10, her beautiful, highly respected mother died. Observers suggested that Queen Ingrid's strong self-discipline was shaped by these young, rough years after that bereavement. In 1923, her father remarried, his bride being Britain's Lady Louise Mountbatten. On May 24th, 1935, in Stockholm, Ingrid married her distant cousin, Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark. Two days later, they arrived in Copenhagen on the royal yacht.
Unlike their Swedish counterparts, the Danish royal family lived at the royal castle as if it was a military barracks, without affection or charm. Everybody was afraid of the then monarch, King Christian X, who induced fear in his entourage; the exception was the new crown princess, whom he adored.
Slowly, Ingrid began to reinvent the Danish monarchy, but it was not easy. She mastered the difficult Danish language very quickly and established a coterie of friends and young relatives around herself and the crown prince. She redecorated the sombre palace and involved herself in charity work outside the castle.
In April 1940, she gave birth to her first child, Princess (now Queen) Margrethe. In that month too, with the Danish armed forces facing the prospect of a blitz on the capital, the government accepted the reality of the Nazi occupation.
Ingrid - and indeed the entire royal family - took a remarkable position during the war, maintaining normality in an abnormal world. She rode her bicycle as usual, and pushed her pram around the streets of occupied Copenhagen. Part of an understanding with the Nazis was a hands-off policy towards Danish Jews. In 1943, as resistance mounted, the coalition government resigned and the Nazis began to detain Danish Jews. That October, as the result of a national effort, more than 6,000 Danish Jews escaped to safety in Sweden.
In 1944, a second daughter, Princess Benedikte, was born. In 1946, a year before King Frederik's accession, the couple had their last child, Princess Anne-Marie, who, in 1964, married King Constantine of Greece.
It was by then clear that the new king and queen would never have a son. The result was the political initiative to change the law of succession, a move much due to the efforts of Queen Ingrid in her attempts to establish the Danish monarchy as a modern institution.
From her time as crown princess in the 1930s, through the death of her husband, the accession of her daughter - and in the years that followed - Queen Ingrid was the star of Danish royalty. Her daughter, Princess Benedikte, formulated the secret behind her mother's outstanding success: "My mother finds that the thread to the past should not be cut, but it should neither keep us caught in the past."
It was in that spirit that Queen Ingrid democratised and renewed the court. She showed Danes the family in the palace may not have been ordinary, but that they were human. She also strongly supported her eldest daughter as she prepared for the daunting role of monarch.
A woman who had extraordinary willpower, judgment, flair and discipline, Queen Ingrid is survived by her three daughters, Queen Margrethe II, Princess Benedikte and Queen Anne-Marie of the Hellenes.
Ingrid, Queen Mother of Denmark (Ingrid Victoria Sofia Louise Margareta); born 1910; died, November 2000