Queen’s reunion with 7/7 blast victim

A survivor of the 7 July bombings in London in 2005 was today reunited with the Queen when she returned to the hospital where he was treated.

Professional dancer Bruce Lait and his dance partner Crystal Yelland were on the way to a rehearsal but were in the same Circle line carriage as Shehzad Tanweer when he detonated a rucksack bomb as the train approached Aldgate.

Both had miraculous escapes but Mr Lait spent three days in the Royal London hospital being treated for two perforated eardrums and shrapnel wounds. The Queen first met him when she visited the injured the day after the atrocity.

Today as she and the Duke of Edinburgh returned to perform the official reopening of the new £650 million hospital in Whitechapel, she spoke again to Mr Lait and was introduced to his wife and two young children as well as Mrs Yelland. 

Mr Lait, 39, said: "She asked for me to be here, which I was amazed at. I thought I was just one of the many thousands of people she has seen.

"I said 'I look a little bit different from the last time you saw me'. She said 'Yes, I remember. You look a lot better now.'

"She asked me about my hearing. I told her my right ear is fully recovered and my left ear is not - I'm partially deaf in my left ear. She asked if I was still dancing. I said 'Yes, I'm a professional dance teacher now'."

Mr Lait, who lives in Hadleigh near Ipswich, and Mrs Yelland had been among the best ballroom and Latin dancers in the UK and competed alongside Strictly Come Dancing stars such as Anton du Beke and Erin Boag.

Mr Lait is now a dance instructor while Mrs Yelland continues to dance professionally.

The Queen and Prince Philip were shown the Royal London’s children’s hospital and its “Alice in Wonderland” style healing area, which uses giant items of furniture, such as a 20ft-tall chair, and hidden loudspeakers and projectors, to create sensory illusions to aid recovering young patients.

The hospital handles more than 40,000 child admissions a year. The Queen also met adult transplant patients and their “live donors” in the renal unit, the largest in Europe, before being shown the first laboratories dedicated to the study of human tissue at the National Centre for Bowel Research and Surgical Innovation.