It’s a Tale of Two Biddies.

The Queen Mum always reminded me of my grandmother. The English half of my family my mother’s side jokes about the parallels. My grandmother was born in 1900, a few weeks before the Queen Mum. Both women bore their first daughters the same year, too, so my mother and Queen Elizabeth II are the same age.

There their stories diverge.

Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, who later became Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, grew up in the leisurely world of the Scottish aristocracy, with four homes, umpteen servants and the surety of a very fine place in triumphant turn-of-the century England.

My grandmother’s childhood in Yorkshire was shaped early on when her father died young and her mother was forced to take in boarders and cook for other families to support all seven of her children.

My grandmother was taken by cancer more than three decades ago. The Queen Mum, blessed with better longevity genes and a pampered life, lived well into her 102nd year until she drifted away peacefully in her sleep on Saturday.

They didn’t travel in the same circles, and surely didn’t wear the same style hats. The closest anyone in my family ever got to the monarchy was when I covered a royal wedding as a working stiff.

Still, they were women who epitomized a certain age, an era of monumental challenge and difficulty. No one taught them how to manage, never mind to lead, yet they intuitively did both well enough to save their families and in the case of the Queen Mum, to save her country.

It’s cheap and easy for Americans to swoon about the British royal family. We don’t have to pay for their extravagances or put up with their foibles. Their subjects are a lot more ambivalent. Even the beloved Queen Mum had come in for criticism, particularly when British taxpayers still were paying $1 million a year for her upkeep.

Still, she answered the call of duty like no one else this last century turning her stuttering, unprepared husband into a king and ministering to suffering subjects even as German bombs fell on Buckingham Palace.

More than anything, she was one of “them.” My grandmother scrimped on every morsel to feed a family of seven during the wartime deprivations, and the queen scrimped, too. Windsor Castle had no heat; its many rooms were lit by a single light bulb, and the food was so meager and severely rationed that even the king once complained to a visitor that their sandwiches were made of sawdust.

We should not underestimate the strength of these British women. They never had the style of the French or the beauty of the Italians. They were unafraid to be plump. Their culinary output was unremarkable unless you count the incomparable skill of making a very good cup of tea.

Yet they stood guard over home and castle, street and bomb shelter, as the last bastions of freedom against a horrific dictator breathing at the island’s door. So adept was the Queen Mum at rallying her people that Adolf Hitler called the her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.”

Like a loyal British subject, my grandmother willingly (though surely with a breaking heart) sent four of her five children to live with strangers in the countryside when the bombs hit too close to home, but she stayed put. Elizabeth also refused entreaties to flee to Canada with her daughters.

“The children won’t leave without me,” she said. “I won’t leave without the King and the King will never leave.”

I bet they would have liked each other, Elizabeth and my grandma. One as a leader, one as a subject, they shared courage and dignity in equal measure.

Jane R. Eisner is a columnist for Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is jeisner@phillynews.com.