Christmas Message mysteries #1: Her Majesty's Missing Specs

2016 Broadcast:  "Now you see them..."

 Queen Elizabeth II had been wearing spectacles for reading for several years when she delivered her Christmas message with the aid of glasses for the first time in 1991, suggestive of a weak corrective prescription for distance vision.  This began a run of twenty-six broadcasts featuring a bespectacled Queen.  For many of these, Her Majesty wore Silhouette 1899 eyeglasses, something of a  'trademark' in her later years.  However, between 2008 and 2016 (with the single exception of 2010), Elizabeth II chose to wear more stylish, rimless designer frames by the Danish brand Lindberg to read her annual speech.  The late Queen tended to reserve this pair, which she had begun to wear late in the first decade of the century, for special occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament and state banquets.

2017 Broadcast:  "...now you don't"

In 2017, something strange happened.  For the first time in more than a quarter of a century, Queen Elizabeth II delivered her festive address without her customary eyewear! As far as the Christmas Broadcast was concerned, Her Majesty would not call upon her trusty specs again for the remainder of her reign.

Surprisingly, the media did not appear to pick up on this intriguing piece of trivia.  It is, after all, not unusual for people to begin using glasses, but it is far less common to stop needing them!  One possible explanation is that Queen Elizabeth either underwent laser eye surgery or started to use contact lenses, neither of which would have been consistent with Her Majesty's known lack of vanity.  Another possibility is that teleprompters were, by 2017, able to be adapted for lens prescriptions, although a little ad hoc research suggests that this is not technologically possible.

 

Perhaps the reality was something that I have been told by more than one optician over the years.  Sometimes, as people become increasingly long-sighted and dependent on spectacles for close work, distance vision actually improves in later life, so it is plausible that the reason the late Queen stopped using her glasses for the Christmas Broadcast was simply because she no longer required them.  We will probably never know for sure.