by Sue Shephard
The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace. To that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races I shall give myself heart and soul every day of my life.
Determined that the symbolism of her coronation should include references to the Commonwealth, she asked Norman Hartnell to embroider her gown with emblems of the Commonwealth countries (eight at that time) – the lotus flower for Ceylon and India, mimosa (what Australians call wattle) for Australia, wheat and jute for Pakistan, the protea for South Africa, fern for New Zealand, shamrock for Ireland, thistle for Scotland, leek for Wales – and the rose for England.
Connie wanted to create a similar symbolic floral effect at the Commonwealth stand on the processional route, but live flowers were much more difficult to obtain than jewels for embroidery. The kind of pageant that Eccles and his team were struggling to create was not going to be easy to achieve against so much bureaucracy and postwar ennui. Eccles again wrote to Connie:
Our duty is to give her blossoming renown an outward and visible form significant to the popular imagination. If we made a mess of it, we should disappoint the hearts of millions. We might even be guilty of splintering the Commonwealth at the one and only moment allowed us to reverse the process of separation which has gone so far. And this chance must be taken with nothing better than the passive support of the Cabinet, whose thoughts are on the House of Commons and the daily conduct of State affairs, e.g. in all these months not one small suggestion for the Coronation preparations has come from either the Colonial or the Commonwealth Relations Office. As far as I know, they may be quite indifferent to the influence of the pageant upon the lives and loyalties of those for whom they are responsible, or with whom they are the link with HMG.
Despite his conservatism the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshall, had a very down-to-earth attitude to the preparations: ‘Solve the problem of what they call the toilets and you will have made a very good start indeed.’ Unfortunately, by the following spring they were still arguing about just that. Perhaps with their war experience, Oliver Messel or Victor Stiebel could come up with a colourful way to camouflage them. Eccles wrote to Connie on 6 April 1953:
You know those corrugated tank-like structures which are lavatories, and are going up in the Parks. I won’t have them blocks of Government green, and I have suggested stripes, blue and white (MEN) and pink and white (WOMEN).* Then the public would quickly grasp the colour signal and we need not have such huge notices ‘Gents’ ‘Ladies’ etc. But I fear this is too frivolous for the Parks Director of MOW [the Ministry of Works].
The stands started to go up along the processional route and the memos became more frequent and more frantic. Eccles and his team made regular tours of inspection. By May, tensions had risen and there was concern about costs and flower supplies. Eccles wrote again to Connie: ‘I am going over the route all day on Thursday with Sir Charles Mole, to see about the timetable. It will give me an opportunity to have a look at the flower positions. Next week I will try to get from the Parks just how many flowers we are going to have. I have sent for a breakdown of their Coronation budget (£15,000) which is a means of seeing what they are doing.’
The problem was that Mr Hepburn and his team of gardeners in Parks could not provide anything like the prodigious quantities of flowers in the kind of exotic and brilliant colours that Connie now required. Fortunately, the mayor and citizens of San Remo in Italy promised a coronation gift of red flowers: roses, carnations, gladioli and strelitzias. David Eccles had finally persuaded the Commonwealth countries to contribute huge quantities of their indigenous flowers. And as well as planning special supplies in her own gardens, Connie called in help from friends with large private gardens and her regular nurserymen to prepare sufficient planting for cut flowers the following June. The RHS offered branches of late-flowering rhododendrons, azaleas and lilac from Wisley.
In the last few months the shop’s routine work had more than doubled. Regular clients wanted special effects for their private coronation parties and to brighten their London window boxes. ‘All hands to the pump’ was Connie’s battle cry. Tony, still happily working at the BBC, was persuaded, initially very reluctantly, to join the business permanently. Shav, by now too old to have any serious involvement, remained for the most part in Scotland. George Foss, Robbo, Sheila McQueen, Flo Standfast, Whitey and their team in ‘Arts’ kept up their unceasing labour – modelling, painting, wiring, stripping, painting and sewing. The pace hotted up through May, but the Chelsea Flower Show could not be ignored and Connie insisted on her usual displays.
She could now visualize more clearly where the coronation flowers would go and how many would be wanted. The three-deep line of scarlet geraniums at the Victoria Memorial was too thin – there must be an addition to the shelf to widen the bank of flowers; the baskets swinging above the Duke of York’s Steps were insufficiently lavish, and more ivy-leaved geraniums must be found; the drifts of blue and white hydrangeas interspersed with white stocks on the Colonial Office stand were liable to block the view of those sitting immediately behind. Eric Bedford wanted these last taken out of their pots and laid on their sides in peat, but Mr Hepburn was unhappy about the watering problem this would cause. Doubts were expressed about the stability of the huge container that was to hold the flowers at Hyde Park Corner. Mr Hepburn became increasingly worried that if the weather was hot, plants would open before their time, and his stock of blue cinerarias would be much reduced. Connie suggested that any deficiencies could be filled in with common Rhododendron ponticum, which would look beautiful if stripped of its leaves and massed. And so it went on.
Rosemary, meanwhile, was dealing with the huge responsibility of providing the luncheon for guests from all over the world, some of whom would not eat meat, or at least certain kinds of meat. There were no cooking facilities near Westminster School hall, and only the soup and the coffee could be served hot. On 18 May she gave a lunch party at the cookery school, to which the Minister and his team were invited, to sample the menu proposed:
E II R
Potage de Tomate à l’Estragon
Truite de Rivière
Poulet Reine Élizabeth
ou
Cornets de Jambon Lucullus
Salades
Galettes aux Fraises
Roulade. Mousse au Citron
Café. Friandises.
Moselle Brauneberger ’43
Champagne Krug ’45
Faced with the logistical challenge of coming up with a dish that was special enough to grace such an important event but that could also be prepared in advance and served cold, Rosemary created Poulet Reine Élizabeth (Chicken Queen Elizabeth), or Coronation Chicken, made with strips of cold chicken in a delicate curry-flavoured sauce. Her main source of inspiration came from a nineteenth-century recipe book called Savouries à la mode by Harriet Anne de Salis. According to Griselda Barton, Rosemary’s niece, ‘The recipe was for Queen Adelaide’s [wife of William IV] favourite sandwich – chicken with a curry and apricot butter. My aunt liked the combination of flavours, with the zing of the dried apricot.’
The Winkfield students, acting as waitresses, wore outfits designed for them by Victor Stiebel: grey-sprigged overall dresses tied with a blue sash and adorned with a jewelled crown on blue moiré ribbon around the neck. Connie’s friend Effie Barker, who was still sending her vegetables, was to supply the lettuces for the luncheon from her farm. When told that she would be put in charge of the waiting, Effie protested that she could not possibly take this on. ‘Nonsense!’ – Connie brushed aside her excuses – ‘You’ve been served by waiters all your life, and of course you must know how it’s done.’
David Eccles reported back that the gentlemen found the food delicious and the service impeccable. All doubts about amateurish students were allayed.
By Whit weekend Lo
ndon was already bursting with people who had poured into the city to see the decorations. Souvenir sellers began doing a roaring trade with coronation mugs, programmes, coins and tiny replicas of the royal coach and white horses. The hotels were choked, trains, planes and ships continued to bring people from around the world. Thousands of soldiers, police, firemen, Red Cross and St John Ambulance nurses and doctors stood by. The coronation was the occasion for a huge national party in which everybody participated, from village carnivals to London’s East End street parties. Churchill was determined that people should enjoy themselves. Food rationing had not completely ended, but he insisted that a bonus of an extra pound on the sugar ration should be issued to everyone, despite the Ministry of Food’s dire warnings that this would lead to a shortage. For coronation week, caterers too would be allowed additional sugar, and extra fat to make potato crisps.
On the Friday night before the coronation, Connie and her team waited anxiously in the Hyde Park Frame Ground for news that the BOAC planes had arrived bearing the promised gifts of flowers. When by midnight they had not landed, Connie started to panic and to wonder where they might find suitable last-minute alternatives. Eventually the special liaison officer telephoned to inform them that some of the planes had landed, and he would rush the flowers through customs for immediate collection. Late on Saturday the San Remo gift finally arrived and with relief they began unpacking case after case of marvellous flowers. Seeing that the rosebuds had begun to show signs of distress, they prepared dozens of pails of warm water, took off the lowest leaves, hammered the ends of the stems and set them all in a cool place to recover.
As Saturday night turned into Sunday morning they were still tirelessly preparing the flowers, cutting stems, trimming and splitting the ends of the gladioli, which were stood in deep pails of even warmer water to induce them to open their still-folded buds. There was more panic on Sunday when the roses recovered too well and the buds began expanding; they had visions of overblown roses and fallen petals, but the cool stone-walled rooms prevented this. On Monday they started decorating the hall. But the lighting was too subdued and the brilliance of the huge richred arrangements seemed dimmed. In order to increase the colour range and intensify the effect Connie added azaleas and rhododendrons in pink and orange. The final flaming torches of colour that warmed the hall’s cold walls were achieved by adding yet more rich reds and oranges, including jazzy strelitzias.
By now, yet more flowers had arrived at Heathrow. Case upon case was brought in, gifts from all the countries of the Commonwealth including forty huge boxes from Australia and three dozen bundles and bamboo cases from India. Amanda Williams remembers consternation at the late arrival, and rather sad appearance, of the proteas from South Africa. After treatment they were sent to Parliament Square where they were used to decorate the stand where the Commonwealth VIPs would sit to watch the procession.
A sense of unreality pervaded the nervous and exhausted flower decorators who worked flat out through that night with Connie. As they unpacked, the light of the arc-lamps revealed time and again flowers of extraordinary strangeness and exotic beauty, which filled the chill night air with their sweet tropical smells. The scene behind the Commonwealth stand was turned into a little Covent Garden. Throughout, Connie supervised and her helpers toiled away. Sheila McQueen recalled:
I can still hear her excited cry as the lids of the boxes were lifted. And then she would straighten up and decide in a split second, as only she could decide, how to make each kind of flower look its best. Her imagination told her what to do and slowly harmony grew out of confusion and Parliament Square became an exotic garden. That night’s work is one of my most vivid memories of Connie.
Tension, excitement and anticipation seemed to mount as the crowds watched them work. There were the exotic orchids, the richly perfumed frangipani, huge golden flowers that looked like many-beaked birds of paradise, and Indian umbrellas composed of wax-like jasmine. A whole raft of wild flowers came from Australia, blossoms of strange trees and lotus blooms. More cases finally arrived from South Africa, from which they unpacked proteas of a size and magnificence that none of them had seen before. They found one particularly extraordinary item: something that resembled an elephant’s tusk, which they puzzled over until they found written in indelible pencil the legend ‘King Coconut from Ceylon’. Ignorant of what it was, they decided to split the hard shell and out tumbled a great ivory tassel bearing a number of weird fruits. ‘That was how we came by material sufficiently grand and spectacular for our unusual purpose,’ Amanda Williams recalled – and so much of it, indeed, that they were able to set some aside for elsewhere – cases of lotus flowers for the banquet at Lancaster House and gold and orange blooms of another tropical plant for the Abbey annexe. As the contents of the cases were set out in the places prepared for them the crowd milled around, looking, admiring and asking the names of the strange foreign flowers. Fortunately, most were carefully labelled, but even those that had not been labelled were identified, their names shouted out by people among the crowd who recognized them from their homelands, expressing pride and perhaps homesickness too. ‘It was all incredibly moving,’ said Sheila, ‘and emotional . . . for us all.’
The Queen and her court attended a brilliant all-night pre-coronation ball at Hampton Court. The palace was floodlit, the fountains were surrounded by massed flowers, the gentlemen wore tails and the ladies ballgowns and tiaras. ‘We danced in the Great Hall and supped in the Orangery,’ ‘Jock’ Colville, Sir Winston Churchill’s Principal Private Secretary, wrote in his diary. ‘A world that vanished in 1939 lived again for the night.’ Meanwhile, the streets were filling with expectant crowds and already the parks and pavements were impassable, thick with half a million people settling down with blankets and thermoses of tea, hip flasks of brandy, sandwiches and radios, knitting, sleeping bags, even tents improvised from raincoats and rugs. Some had champagne, chicken and asparagus. There was only one problem: it was freezing cold and pouring with rain – in fact, the coldest, wettest June day of the century. Undeterred, people sat or lay chatting in the downpour until every inch of space in the Mall, and from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner and Trafalgar Square, was a mass of cheerful, cold, wet humanity. The rain lashed, the temperature fell to forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. A crowd lit a bonfire in Green Park to keep warm. Throughout the night catering tents and voluntary services kept up the supply of hot tea.
But then came terrible news: William Hepburn, Superintendent of Parks, who for months had struggled with nervous exhaustion, collapsed with a heart attack and died. He was only sixty-four, but the strain had been too much. Just a few hours later his name would appear on the Coronation Honours list – he had been appointed a member of the Royal Victorian Order for personal services to the Queen. His tragic death threw everyone into confusion and distress, but his assistant Mr Barham stepped into the fray and kept the teams of gardeners cutting and gathering all the blooms that Mr Hepburn had nurtured and watched over with so much nervous anxiety for so long.
David and Sybil Eccles stayed up the whole night, helping unpack in the flower-strewn Square, giving advice, answering the questions flung at them by the people all around them; and finally, in the early hours of the morning, they conjured up food that Connie’s team ravenously devoured, undeterred by the proximity of the curious hordes.
Eccles’s and Connie’s dream of a ‘united and living’ Commonwealth was embodied in this unprecedented spectacle. As Connie expresed it:
The historic occasion of the Coronation of Elizabeth II made flower history too. Because of resources undreamed of in the past, its pageantry was enhanced by a gift, a token of love and loyalty from country to country, which would have seemed, not so very many years ago, a fantastic impossibility. The eve of that momentous occasion seemed then, and seems in retrospect, a fabulous moment.
It was the culmination of a lifetime’s work, and her proudest achievement.
At dawn the crowds woke to hear t
he first news broadcast of coronation day: Everest had been conquered by the New Zealander Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tenzing, and there was particular cheering in the ‘Great Australia and New Zealand’ sections of the Commonwealth stand in Parliament Square. Connie and her workers had had no opportunity for sleep, nor would they for several hours yet. They now had one final task – to put flowers in the retiring and luncheon rooms for the royal family. For the Queen’s room Connie chose a simple basket filled to overflowing with the old white rose ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’. ‘We hoped that the sweetness, the simplicity, of this lovely white rose might be found appropriate.’
After the coronation service the hungry guests began to stream out of the Abbey and into Westminster School hall, where the beauty and vivid colour of Connie’s scheme far exceeded her expectations and was further enriched by the lavish attire of the guests:
Jewels scintillated everywhere among cloth of gold, tissues of scarlet, of gold, of blue, and of silver; a wonderful touch of Chinese yellow came from a soft-folded oriental head-dress; there were gorgeous uniforms, and a shimmer of satin and brocade. The room gleamed and glimmered like a jewel-encrusted tapestry, the whole effect heightened by the presence of a small group of Arabs in cream woollen robes with black cords round their traditional head-dresses.
Rosemary’s Cordon Bleu students had to carry great trays of cucumber rice salad and Coronation Chicken from the school kitchen some distance away. One girl tripped and the entire contents of her platter slipped onto the floor. Rosemary, with great aplomb, just swept it back on with a dustpan and brush. As she said afterwards, ‘The pan and brush were scrupulously clean!’