The British Film Institute has rediscovered footage of Queen Victoria on her last trip to Ireland in 1900.
Viewable online on their free library the rare black and white film has stunned royal watchers.
The film was captured just a year before she died and shows the royal smiling and nodding in her horse drawn carriage.
Holding a decorative umbrella, protecting her from the sun she is also wearing sunglasses which has many royal experts in awe.
‘She’s wearing sunglasses and you would never be able to see that normally,’ one curator of the BFI said.
‘I nearly fell off my chair, I have never seen her in close up before,’ she continued.
In all of her posed painted portraits she doesn’t smile, yet this footage captures her grin.
‘It’s very rare to see her smile,’ the curator goes on ‘it humanizes her, I think, for the first time.’
What an incredible part of history!
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