When John Batchelor came down for breakfast on a cold winter morning in February 1952, he saw “the King is dead” handwritten in pencil on a board. He was at a preparatory school in Farnborough – a town in southeastern England. He vividly recalled the day he received the news, his shock and surprise aged 10, unable to fully comprehend the king’s prolonged illness. “We all had to adjust to the fact that a very young woman had now become Queen. She was in Kenya and she needed to be brought back because it was a terrible shock to her,” Professor Batchelor, 80, says from his home in Oxford of the m…