Gibside: THE contrast could not have been more striking.

As mourners filed into the quiet chapel steeped in memories of the Queen Mother to pay their last respects, the sound of children's laughter filled the air.

Face-painting, clowns and Easter egg hunts were the order of the day at the ancestral home of the Bowes-Lyons family, yesterday.

But the Queen Mother who had fond childhood memories of the sprawling Gibside Estate, in Gateshead, would not have had it otherwise.

Property manager Tony Walton said: "In the past two years she made it quite clear that, in the event of her death, she did not want us to close. She is our patron and, of course, this is her ancestral home.

"We will remain open and give free access to anyone wanting to come here and have a quiet reminisce on the day of her funeral."

He added: "She came here with her father as a young girl and picnicked on the estate.

"When the chapel was restored, she made a point of coming to its rededication service. Prince Charles has been here since. It holds a lot of memories."

The grounds are set to become one of the places of pilgrimage in the North-East and people come to sign a book of condolence.

And perhaps it was fitting that one of first to sign it was Elizabeth Lyons, who, as coincidence would have it, was born on the day of the Queen Mother's coronation.

She said: "I have always grown up with the Queen Mother very much part of me.

"I was born on May 12, 1937, and was named after the Queen Mother. Then, 21 years later, I married a Lyons.

"Whenever I introduced myself people would remark that I had the name of the Queen Mother - it was a name I was proud to carry.

Audrey Gilpin, of Durham, said: "It is the end of an era."

Lillian Burbeck, of Sunderland, said: "We all thought she would go on ever."

Schoolgirl Millie Gumbrell, of Hebdon Bridge, near Halifax, West Yorkshire, summed up her feelings in the condolence book: "Life doesn't go on forever".