Estonian voices roar and soar to welcome British Queen

Oct 20, 2006, 11:32 GMT

Tallinn - The wintry skies of Tallinn rang on Friday morning as thousands of Estonians braved the chill to cheer Queen Elizabeth II on the last day of her Baltic tour.

An estimated 10,000 people raised a roar which would have done credit to a rock concert as the 80-year-old monarch, dressed in a fur-trimmed apricot coat, entered Tallinn's cobbled main square.

And a massed choir of 600 singers shook the whitewashed walls of the mediaeval city with a series of Estonian songs.

'We're honoured that she's here. A visit like this happens once in a lifetime,' 17-year-old Triin told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. Her class had been given the morning off to watch the visit.

The autumn sunshine which followed the Queen from Lithuania to Latvia earlier this week was conspicuous by its absence. Heavy grey clouds hung over Tallinn's ancient spires, and a bitter north wind added a biting edge to the five-degree air.

But nothing could chill the Estonians' enthusiasm for their royal visitor. This is the smallest of the three Baltic states, but the crowd it produced to see the Queen was as large as had gathered in Vilnius and Riga combined.

And more enthusiasts gathered by the ramparts of the Old Town and on a naval quay to watch the Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, pay tribute to a Royal Navy detachment which fought in Estonia's war of independence of 1918-20.

'In Estonia, we place extreme importance on the (British naval detachment). It greatly assisted the birth of our country,' Vice-Admiral Tarmo Kouts of the Estonian Defence Forces said in an address from the deck of visiting British warship HMS Liverpool.

In a symbolic gesture linking past and present, the Queen unveiled the funnel-badge of a mine-hunting ship, one of three the Estonians recently bought from the UK. The ship is to be named after Admiral Sir Walter Cowan - the commander of the 1919 detachment.

'We in the UK know about Horatio Nelson. Estonians know about Sir Walter Cowan,' said the Earl of Carlisle, an expert on the British naval campaign in Baltic waters.

But the day belonged to the Queen. This morning, Estonia's two main newspapers devoted a total of twelve pages to her arrival in Tallinn yesterday - an importance with which the morning's crowd agreed wholeheartedly.

'There's never been such an important person here before,' said 16-year-old Tallinn school-girl Kristina.