EVERY now and again, the demands of a royal visit seemed to catch up with the Queen. “You must have a very tiring time,” 94-year-old Martha Murray, the oldest resident of Kilbarchan village in Renfrewshire, sympathetically asked her when they met in July, 1974.

“Sometimes,” the Queen smiled in reply as she accepted a small posy from Mrs Murray.

The monarch and the Duke of Edinburgh, on a royal tour that took them to Renfrewshire on this particular day, showed no signs of tiredness while on their separate itineraries. But, reported the Glasgow Herald, the Prince “on his visit to Erskine, and later at the Anchor Thread Mills, Paisley, had harassed officials trying to realign his schedule with that of the Queen.”

At Erskine hospital, the Duke, in the words of one of its officials, “threw formality to the winds” as he toured the wards and chatted to veterans whose service included the Boer War to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He spoke to a house steward he had last met at Erskine 16 years earlier, and discussed a copper beech he had planted in the hospital grounds. “This will never grow,” the Duke had remarked at the time, but he was now told that it was “alive and flourishing.”

Afterwards, the Duke was shown around the Anchor Thread Mill (pictured) in Paisley, where he again chatted to staff before making his way to Elderslie, where the Queen had been touring the carpet factory of A.F.Stoddard.