to March 1982 when the Queen Mother attended the Cheltenham Races in this fantastic woven pink turban with silk flowers.
Image from Getty as indicated
Royal Hats
The Bold, Beautiful and Bizarre World of Royal Millinery
to March 1982 when the Queen Mother attended the Cheltenham Races in this fantastic woven pink turban with silk flowers.
Image from Getty as indicated
Royal Hats 
QEQM appears to be dressed more for Royal Ascot in June, and is holding something else in her hand, perhaps from a church service.
Queen Mother: March 17, 1982, holding the Tote Cheltenham Gold Cup Race card (green wool for St. Patrick’s Day)
Diana: March 18, 1982, with a heavy wool coat and hat; everyone else very tweedy.
Embed from Getty Images
Here we go, in the spirit of all good detectives – a weather analysis month-by-month for 1982 here in the UK. Concentrates mainly on London but It gives a flavour. If the link doesn’t work let me know and I’ll repost as I’m on my iPhone.
http://www.london-weather.eu/article
I agree that it doesn’t make sense that QEQM would be wearing such a spring-like outfit while Diana and the others in Jimbo’s photo are so bundled up, and the booklet she is holding does look like something from a service rather than a race track. Perhaps this was from a Sunday service or other private church event — that might explain why there are no other photos.
This is interesting because visually, to me, it really echoes what I think of as the Queen Mother’s characteristic shape (wideish with the brim folded back off the face, and some sort of fluffy trim) while being of a totally different construction from the usual! I guess the veil also suggests that shape.
This is a fab hat – probably because it was a departure from her usual turned back brim shape by then. I do wonder if the date of the pic might be wrongly captioned – for one, March in the UK is normally quite chilly, so she was normally more bundled up for Cheltenham. No matter, it’s a fab look for the QM.
Good point, JamesB. It doesn’t make sense to see that much sunshine (and coatless spectators!) in March.
The picture doesn’t surprise me at all, despite Cheltenham being further north, and as for the Queen Mother never under-estimate the value of lightweight thermal underwear and her being a hardy Scot.
I live on the South Coast where we’ve had mini heatwaves in March. We’ve just had a couple of very balmy days at the end of February where people have been walking on our seafront with no coats and wearing shorts and t-shirts. Mind you we’ve had snow in April!
Haha! I turn detective on these things too. Lesleyc19 is right we can have an early heatwave here, so it could be. The other thing that made me wonder was that by this time she had mainly settled on the style of hat we knew her for later, but this could have been an old favourite – and I can see why!
I looked around for other shots of her in the same outfit in hopes of getting more of a clue, but the only one I could find was in British Vogue, also identified as Cheltenham (possibly because they got the photo from Getty). However, in a research aside, I zoomed in on the policeman on the left of the photo and did a Google image search on him — didn’t find him, but did discover that his hat with that distinctive design in the front is associated with the London Metropolitan Police, so presumably this photo was at some event in London and not Cheltenham.
It’s good to see her in something that’s not completely covered in flowers. While I dislike turbans, I really like the woven straw.