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Who really said it

Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England

Not Queen Victoria — tentatively Lucy Baldwin, and about a kiss Lucy Baldwin 1869–1945 · English writer and maternal-health campaigner; wife of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
Disputed In copyright

There is no substantive evidence Queen Victoria ever said anything of the kind, and the 1912 journal entry usually offered instead has never been found by any researcher. The earliest instance Quote Investigator ↗ located is a Leonard Lyons newspaper column of 18 May 1943, in which Lucy Baldwin — wife of the former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin — tells her daughter what to do if a young man tries to kiss her: “Just close your eyes and think of England.” QI attributes it to her only tentatively, and we follow that.

Last verified 21 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England” Not Queen Victoria. Earliest documented: Lucy Baldwin, as reported by Leonard Lyons, Washington Post, 18 May 1943 — and she was talking about a kiss.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Queen Victoria. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Leonard Lyons’s estate and the newspapers and syndicate that published his column). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Lucy Baldwin — English writer and maternal-health campaigner; Countess Baldwin of Bewdley. Theme: "Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest documented
“Broadway Gazette” by Leonard Lyons, The Washington Post, 18 May 1943, p. 10, col. 5
Attributed by QI to
Lucy Baldwin (1869–1945), tentatively
The occasion
Advice to her daughter about being kissed — not about the marriage bed
Popularly credited to
Queen Victoria, or Lady Hillingdon’s 1912 journal — neither supported

Stanley Baldwin’s son tells this story of the day his sister went out with a young man who wanted to marry her. She asked her mother for advice, in case the young man should want to kiss her . . . “Do what I did,” said her mother, reminiscing of the beginning of her romance with the man who was to become Prime Minister, “Just close your eyes and think of England.” Leonard Lyons, “Broadway Gazette”, 18 May 1943

The ellipsis is in Lyons’s original. Note what the story is actually about: a kiss, recalled fondly, by a woman remembering her own courtship. Everything bleak that later attached to the phrase was added afterwards.

Quote Investigator: “Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England”

How we verified this

  • We read Quote Investigator’s article ↗ in full. Its verdict: no substantive evidence for Queen Victoria, and the family of sayings starts appearing in print in the 1900s rather than the 1800s.
  • QI’s earliest citation is Leonard Lyons’s “Broadway Gazette” in the Washington Post of 18 May 1943, page 10, column 5 — reprinted three days later in the San Francisco Chronicle. QI notes the same citation was adopted by the Yale Book of Quotations (2006, p. 359) and the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012, p. 70).
  • The 1912 diary is the weak link: The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972) printed it as a chapter epigraph credited to “Lady Hillingham” and, in QI’s quotation of the book, admitted in its own text that the source was “a little suspect”. No researcher has located the journal.
  • The modern, sexual sense of the phrase is traceable to fiction: Pierre Daninos’s satire Les Carnets du Major Thompson (1954), translated in 1955, gives an English mother the identical sentence about the wedding night — and Time reprinted it that September.
  • We also checked Wikiquote’s Queen Victoria page ↗ in full: it carries no instance of the saying in any section, and has no “Misattributed” section at all. Absence is weak evidence on its own, but it is consistent with QI’s finding.
In copyright

The earliest documented text is a newspaper column first published in 1943, later than the 1931 boundary for U.S. public domain, so we assert no public-domain status. U.S. works of that period could lose protection through non-renewal, but we have not examined any renewal record and will not guess. The bare phrase itself is far too short to carry copyright in any case.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

Few sayings have been pinned on so many people with so little paperwork. Three candidates dominate, and the evidence runs from thin to none.

Queen Victoria No evidence

The wedding-night anecdote — a daughter asking, the Queen answering — has no documentary support at all. Quote Investigator ↗ and other researchers find the sayings entering print in the 1900s, after Victoria’s death in 1901.

Lady Alice Hillingdon, in an 1912 journal Source never located

The famous version (“…close my eyes, open my legs and think of England”) first appears as a chapter epigraph in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972), credited to “Lady Hillingham”. As QI records ↗, the book itself called the source “a little suspect”, and no researcher has since found the journal.

Pierre Daninos, Les Carnets du Major Thompson (1954) Popularizer, not author

Daninos’s comic novel — translated into English in 1955 and quoted in Time that September — puts the exact sentence in an English mother’s mouth as wedding-night advice. That is where the phrase acquires the sexual sense it now carries, but Lyons had printed the words a decade earlier about a kiss.

“Advice given to Victorian brides” Later framing

Historians and columnists have repeated the line as archetypal nineteenth-century guidance. QI found no substantive evidence that anything in this family was offered as such advice in the Victorian era.

The earliest documented wording belongs, tentatively, to Lucy Baldwin in Leonard Lyons’s column of 18 May 1943 ↗ — a mother’s joke about a kiss, not a queen’s counsel about the marriage bed.

Context

Why it mattered

The phrase is now shorthand for joyless duty, and it is quoted as evidence of how Victorian women were taught to regard sex. On the documentary record it is nothing of the kind: it starts as a 1943 gossip-column anecdote about a woman remembering, fondly, the start of her courtship.

How it changed is unusually legible. A comic novel moved the line from the doorstep to the bedroom in 1954; a 1972 nanny history supplied a Victorian diary that nobody has ever seen; and the two together gave the saying a past it did not have.

A joke about a kiss, reissued as a verdict on an entire century.

Read the full story

Leonard Lyons (1906–1976) wrote a widely syndicated New York gossip column, “The Lyons Den”. He printed the Baldwin story twice — in May 1943 and again in December 1955, that time as told by Noël Coward — and the second telling still has the daughter asking about a kiss.

Lucy Baldwin herself is worth more than a punchline. After difficult pregnancies and the loss of her first child she became vice-chairman of the National Birthday Trust Fund in 1928 and helped found the Anæsthetics Appeal Fund the following year, campaigning to put pain relief in childbirth within reach of women who could not afford it; her work fed into the Midwives Act 1936. The Lucy Baldwin Apparatus for obstetric analgesia was named after her in the 1960s, long after her death.

Variants proliferated once the sense shifted: “lie still and think of the Empire”, “I shut my eyes tight and thought of the Empire”, and one memorably specific alternative, “I lie still and think of a new way to trim a hat”.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Resilience

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Just Close Your Eyes and Think of Englandquoteinvestigator.com

The full investigation: the 1943 Lyons column, the unlocated 1912 journal, and the 1954 novel that changed the meaning.
Lucy Baldwinen.wikipedia.org

Biography of Lucy Baldwin, Countess Baldwin of Bewdley (1869–1945), maternal-health campaigner.
Leonard Lyonsen.wikipedia.org

The columnist whose 1943 “Broadway Gazette” carries the earliest documented instance.
Queen Victoriaen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s Queen Victoria page — checked in full, and it carries no instance of the saying in any section.
Stanley Baldwinen.wikipedia.org

Lucy Baldwin’s husband, prime minister on three occasions — it was their son who told the 1943 story.

The author

About Lucy Baldwin

Lucy Baldwin

1869–1945 · English writer and maternal-health campaigner; Countess Baldwin of Bewdley

Lucy Baldwin, Countess Baldwin of Bewdley (née Ridsdale, 1869–1945) was an English writer and campaigner for maternal health, and from 1892 the wife of Stanley Baldwin, prime minister on three occasions. She became vice-chairman of the National Birthday Trust Fund in 1928 and helped found the Anæsthetics Appeal Fund in 1929, lobbying to make pain relief in childbirth affordable to low-income women, and was appointed a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. Two decades after her death an obstetric gas-and-air device was named the Lucy Baldwin Apparatus in her honour.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The earliest documented source (Chicago)

Lyons, Leonard. “Broadway Gazette.” The Washington Post, May 18, 1943, 10, col. 5. Quoting Lucy Baldwin as recounted by Stanley Baldwin’s son. Cited in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England,” September 30, 2014.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Just Close Your Eyes and Think of England’?” Last verified 21 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/just-close-your-eyes-and-think-of-england/

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