The Queen, who celebrated her 90th birthday this week, has been on the throne since 1952, a symbol of both continuity and change during a period when Britain and its role in the world have been transformed almost beyond recognition.

The Queen’s ability to react to those changes as head of state of her country and its remaining overseas territories like Bermuda and head of the Commonwealth, her ability to read and respond to the public mood, have ensured the monarchy remains a vital and hugely popular institution — just as she remains one of the most beloved public figures in the world.

Not only is she now Britain’s longest-lived monarch, last September the Queen became the longest-reigning sovereign in the institution’s 1,100-year history. Surpassing the 63-year reign of Victoria, her great-great-grandmother, a woman so formidable she stamped an entire era with her name, the Queen has now served 15 years longer than her four 20th-century predecessors combined.

Winston Churchill was Prime Minister when she ascended the throne, Britain was still coping with postwar rationing, all four future Beatles were still in junior school — and future Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron had not yet been born.

Her enduring popularity both in Britain and around the world owes, in large measure, to widespread recognition of her dignity, diligence and unwavering sense of duty.

But it has also helped that the monarchy has undergone subtle adaptations and shifts in image in recent decades as the Queen has remade what could very easily have become an anachronistic holdover from the days of hereditary privilege into a relevant, responsive and positive force.

Now a great-grandmother, the Queen has in fact presided over a renaissance in the fortunes and reputation of the British monarchy perhaps best symbolised by the global appeal and standing of her grandsons the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry.

The Queen has visited Bermuda five times during her reign, most recently in 2009 to take part in celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the Sea Venture wreck which led to the island’s permanent settlement.

But her first visit in 1953, when Bermuda was the inaugural stop on a global goodwill tour of the Commonwealth following her coronation, remains both the most memorable and the most significant.

The excitement generated by the first visit to Bermuda of a reigning monarch cannot be overstated — “Our proudest moment” was how this newspaper described her arrival in a breathless headline.

But the long-term consequences of that two-day visit were to be profound and far-reaching in ways few Bermudians of the period could ever have imagined.

For only 60 of more than a thousand guests invited to a Government House garden party for the Queen were black — and not a single black Bermudian had been asked to attend a state dinner for the young monarch.

At a time when Britain was withdrawing from Empire and beginning its transformation into a modern and more progressive liberal welfare state, Bermuda’s backward-looking and, frankly, discreditable social structure proved to be red meat to left-leaning London newspapers.

“The newspapers Daily Mirror and Daily Herald today angrily protest the absence of any Negro representative at a state banquet in Bermuda welcoming the Queen,” said a Reuter news service report on the ensuing uproar in Britain.

“The pro-Labour Mirror tells its 4.5 million readers that officials in Bermuda had blundered and demanded ‘an end to blind snobbery’.

“The Daily Herald, newspaper of the Labour Party and trade unions, said Sir Alexander Hood, Governor of the colony has insulted more than 500,000,000 people in the British Commonwealth.

“Both papers flatly reject Hood’s explanation that the list of 30 guests invited to the banquet was drawn up according to precedent. ‘Why weren’t the top 30 knocked off the stupid list’, asks the Mirror, which points out 60 per cent of Bermuda’s population is coloured. ‘To blazes with the first families of Bermuda. Offend them for a change’ …”

Bermuda was accused of placing the Queen in an embarrassing and unseemly situation as she embarked on a tour of the racially and culturally diverse Commonwealth.

The Daily Herald, now The Sun, commented in an editorial: “Perhaps others may benefit from this instance of gross ill manners.

“It is time everyone from Governors downwards grasped the facts about this British Commonwealth.

“Within its frontiers coloured people outnumber whites by more than eight to one. One of the moral pledges by which it is held together is that the colour bar should be utterly destroyed as speedily as possible …”

The furore surrounding the Queen’s visit helped to ensure firm British pressure began to be applied to recalcitrant local officials, accelerating the slow pace of social and structural reform under way in post-Second World War Bermuda.

When she was on the island in 1994 the Queen actually touched on the subject at a dinner held in her honour, noting how much Bermuda had changed in the 42 years since that first visit.

She pointedly remarked on how “black people have taken the lead in many areas of national life, politics, the judiciary and the police, to name a few,” in the intervening decades.

Listing off some of the ways Britain has become a better and more inclusive country during her six-decade reign, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party and himself a committed republican, this week paid warm-hearted tribute to the Queen in the House Commons.

And he made particular mention of her engagement with the Commonwealth and overseas territories in comments marking her 90th birthday.

“We have enacted equality legislation, ended colonialism and created the national health service, the welfare state and the Open University,” he said. “As Head of the Commonwealth, she has been a defender of that incredible multicultural global institution. We are all very grateful for the way in which she has stood up for the Commonwealth …

“Whatever differing views people [have] about the institution, the vast majority share an opinion that Her Majesty has served this country [and the overseas territories and Commonwealth] with a clear sense of public service and public duty … and has carried out that duty with great warmth.”

Mr Corbyn’s views were surely shared by the vast majority of Bermudians, whatever our own differing views on the institution of the monarchy and its continuing relevance.

During a visit to Ireland in 2011, the Queen famously remarked on the obligation we all have to “to bow to the past, but not be bound by it” in a rapidly changing world. That sentiment could equally well apply to her own indefatigable efforts to ensure the monarchy has kept pace with these sometimes dramatic changes for the past six decades.