by Andrew Marr
Churchill had come across her as a girl and had found time during the grim days in April 1941, when the British army in Greece was desperately evacuating before the German advance, to send her roses for her fifteenth birthday. Now old, ill and barely able to cope with the demands of being prime minister, he still cast a pungent word-spell over the country. The Queen puts him in a different category from any of his successors and recently recalled being gently rebuked by him. When she and Prince Philip returned from their gruelling post-Coronation six-month tour of the Commonwealth in May 1954, Sir Winston was invited to join them for the last part of the voyage on the still-new Royal Yacht Britannia from Yarmouth up the Thames. There were cheering crowds and a 41-gun salute from the Tower of London; but the Queen remembers the grim weather and saying to Churchill as they went up the Pool of London, ‘Look at this awful dirty river.’ Churchill turned on her with a growl: ‘This is the silver thread that goes through British history – never forget it.’3
No later prime minister would have dared to correct her like that. She complained at times that he failed to listen to her properly – rather as Queen Victoria complained that her great prime minister Gladstone addressed her as if she was a public meeting. As it happened, on that day on the Thames, Churchill was bluffing a bit. According to his doctor, he was chilled to the marrow, had a cold and ‘had never been up the river before’. When he had first come aboard, ‘I did not at once recognize a masculine figure in khaki trousers. It was the Queen, who had taken off her coat.’4 Princess Elizabeth revered Churchill but, by the time she came to the throne, the Conservative grandees were already talking about how to ease him out of Downing Street.
Shortly before George VI had died – so the Queen Mother told Anthony Eden – the King had made up his mind to have a talk with Churchill about retiring. His death meant it never happened.5 Churchill, though deeply saddened by the King’s demise, had seized on the opportunity the new reign offered as another excellent reason for staying put. He would be there for the Coronation, naturally. There was, surely, no tearing hurry about that? Churchill’s fruity blend of romanticism and self-interest made it perfectly obvious to him that the new Queen would need his grand-paternal, guiding hand for some to come.
The Coronation: What It Meant
Back in 1953, all was optimism and widening horizons. The Queen’s Coronation that June was a national carnival but also a religious celebration and a yearned-for moment of patriotic rebirth. A year of planning went into it, from the invitations and seating plan at Westminster Abbey to who would make the sandwiches at fêtes in villages and housing estates. In the main avenues of central London through which the procession would pass, arches were raised with lights, bunting and crowns. But ceremonial arches appeared in most British cities, and in small towns and villages too. In factories at Birmingham and York (and there were factories there, in those days) flags, bicyclists’ pennants, savings boxes, chocolates, biscuits, badges and tea-caddies were manufactured. In Stoke and the Potteries mugs, plates, teapots were fired, painted and packed, the first such painted and coloured ware since before the war. Decorative plants with red, white and blue flowers were nurtured by market gardeners. Newspaper editors planned lavish special editions. The best-known writers were signed up by magazines well in advance.
The Coronation Headquarters, centre of the official planning, opened in Berkeley Square in London, a stone’s throw from the Queen’s birthplace, in October 1952. Prince Philip, already straining for a more substantial public role, was given the job of chairing the preparations. Far away, the people of St Keverne on the Lizard in Cornwall began a difficult negotiation with the Ministry of Food. They had roasted a whole ox for the accession of the last monarch and they were jolly well going to do the same for Elizabeth. This was fighting talk: rationing of meat would last more than another year and to start with, the ministry was outraged.
Peter Hennessy, now Lord Hennessy, has been one of the premier constitutional and social historians of the reign, and for him as a small boy, the Coronation was a pivotal moment. He remembers like million of others the Coronation mugs at school, a Dinky Toy version of the Golden Coach and going to watch the great event on his family friend’s television in Barnet. But it was about more than the Coronation as a national celebration; Britain had captured the airspeed record and conquered Mount Everest and had the first jet airliner (the Comet);
And you had stories of empire which nobody would dare write or read in that way these days, and here [Britain] was, an ancient settled nation, naturally good at ceremony, comes through the heroic 1940s, standing alone, and yet at the same time we would produce the most advanced bits of kit in the world; and it was one of those rare moments of optimism. And the Queen looked terrific. She was beautiful, and she had this dashing consort . . . and it was going to get better.
For Hennessy it was ‘the zenith . . . a better yesterday’. He would benefit from the 1944 Education Act and he felt Britain was on a virtuous upwards cycle of improvement. For him the Coronation was ‘a tonic . . . Wonderful. Life has never been the same since.’6
Hennessy has a rare and exuberant ability to put these feelings into words but his memories are shared by so many others. The Queen has been Queen of a nation in decline, and many would say her greatest achievement has been to soften and humanize that inevitable process. At the time of her Coronation, though, it seemed she might have a very different reign to enjoy.
Meanwhile, a moon-faced man with a reassuringly familiar voice, deep and rich as after-dinner chocolate, began to assemble a great pile of Coronation facts and figures. The Queen was happily married but it was almost as if she had another suitor. He would soon appear on the Thames in a damp Dutch barge he had bought and which would be moored opposite Westminster to allow its proud owner easy access to the ceremony. Richard Dimbleby was not exactly wooing the Queen, adore her though he did; but his employer, the British Broadcasting Corporation, was certainly wooing the monarchy. This would be the first proper television Coronation, though in 1937 three cameras had been allowed far from the Abbey, at Hyde Park Corner. For the BBC, which was engaged in a losing battle to fend off commercial television, the Coronation was a perfect opportunity to show what it, a cadet member of the establishment family, could do. Like the monarchy the BBC had done well out of the war. Like George VI, the BBC in its Lord Reith era had been instinctively anti-Churchill but, like the King, it had become a supporter and buttress of the war leader. As the House of Windsor, so had the BBC helped tie Britons and imperial subjects together through the darkest years.
As a result, in the early 1950s the BBC had a position hard to imagine today. It was not quite like the Church of England. Its first director general, as a Scottish Presbyterian, would have regarded that as a bit flashy. But thanks in part to Reith, a passionate monarchist, the BBC was solidly part of the establishment – powerful, authoritative, clean-shaven and suavely self-certain. Its director general, Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob, had been an assistant to the war cabinet but its patriotism was more complicated than that of the court, because it had incorporated the voices of radicals, such as George Orwell and J. B. Priestley. Yet it was a part of the establishment, which by the time of the Coronation felt it had special rights, and it had vaulting cultural and moral ambitions. Its wireless services, ranging from the popular Light Programme through the meatier Home Service, to the highbrow Third Programme, were meant, in the words of Jacobs’s predecessor, to lead the listener ‘from good to better, by curiosity, liking and a growth of understanding’.
The first reaction of the Palace old guard, and of the cabinet, was that television remained a vulgar medium, which should not be allowed inside the Abbey – this despite the fact that it had been used to broadcast the funeral of the King in February 1952, helping spark the first wave of mass television purchases. That October, the Palace announced a veto, a decision taken on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Norfolk, and backed up by Churchill and the
cabinet. The BBC refused to take no for an answer and began a quiet lobbying campaign, focused first on the Duke and Archbishop. When the message finally reached Churchill that – as it happened – the Queen herself was in favour of televising her Coronation, he told the diarist Colville that it was, after all, she who was to be crowned, not the cabinet. ‘She alone must decide.’ It would turn out to be a good decision, not least because it made the Coronation the first one ever to be genuinely witnessed by the people; even in Saxon times that had been more a hope than a practical reality.
Now the BBC went into action, planning the biggest outside broadcast ever, including ninety-five sound commentary positions (mostly for overseas audiences) and an unheard-of twenty-one television cameras, five of them inside the Abbey. The newspapers began an informal beauty contest about who would be given the ultimate job of reporting on the Coronation itself from a glass-sided box high above the altar. One popular choice was John Snagge, then probably the best known voice on the wireless – for it was still, just, the age of wireless. Richard Dimbleby, however, was the favourite in newspaper polls, and with his bosses. He had been a brave and unorthodox radio reporter during the war, accompanying RAF bombing raids and witnessing the liberation of Belsen. But he had royal form too. In 1939 he had been the first BBC reporter specially assigned, and accepted, to cover a royal tour, when George VI and Queen Elizabeth had visited Canada. During it, Dimbleby had played the piano for the King and had a long late-night discussion with him about Hitler, democracy and world affairs. Dimbleby’s script for his broadcast describing George VI’s lying in state is a perfect model of evocative, romantic news prose and he was a passionate monarchist.
He thought the House of Windsor ‘means justice, respect for the rights of the individual, and freedom’ and adored the new Queen: ‘She has a great sense of humour that lies just below the surface . . . Photographs rarely do her justice; she is smaller, slimmer, and altogether more lively than they make her. She has a flashing smile . . . and a clear, incisive voice.’7 This was the man the BBC decided should be, for millions, the voice explaining the images never seen by a mass audience before. He would go on to report on a succession of royal marriages, Queen’s speeches and state occasions. These included more funerals: old Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother, had died at the age of eighty-six just ten weeks before the Coronation. Sad timing, but it barely caused a pause in the frantic preparations. Obsessive about proper preparation, Dimbleby spent six months preparing his notes on every aspect of the service. When he left his chilly boat on the morning of the great day, he clambered into the commentary box at 5.30 a.m. and stayed there for seventeen hours. He must have rationed the tea.
The Coronation was probably the most important moment in the Queen’s life and certainly the most important official moment. As the day drew nearer, she practised the complicated ceremony in the Buckingham Palace ballroom, using sheets to mimic her 60-foot train and wearing the heavy crown to familiarize her neck with its weight. Dray horses were borrowed for the carriages, the original beasts having gone during the war. Dukes drilled. Bishops rehearsed. A short walk from the Palace was the royal apothecary, Savory & Moore of New Bond Street, where the holy oil was compounded by its head dispenser from a formula which went back to Stuart times and possibly further back still. It is supposed to involve ambergris, musk, orange, jasmine and rose water. Peers ordered their ceremonial garb and were told that, by special dispensation in these tough economic conditions, rabbit fur would be considered an acceptable alternative to ermine. Thinking ahead to the long day before them, they were also told they could hide sandwiches in their coronets. Churchill later claimed that he vetoed the charging of the 3,000 Abbey guests sixteen shillings each for sandwiches and had ensured alcoholic drinks would be available to crowds waiting in the Royal Parks.
There was a guarded welcome for the announcement that the Coronation would be used for a general amnesty of remaining wartime deserters still at large. Though there were theoretically 13,000 of them, many were thought to be Irish and outside the reach of the law and some had certainly died. The Spectator reflected approvingly that ‘several thousand skeletons can now come out of several thousand closets’.8 When that Coronation amnesty was proposed – some men had been on the run for eight years and often had not been back to see their wives or families – it was noted that ‘the Queen was very keen on this’, even though the armed forces were hostile. London began to disappear under scaffolding and resounded to the banging of hammers as porches, arches and seating were prepared. The papers contained quite a lot of sniffy complaints about the vulgarity of some of the street decorations but much of the speculation focused, of course, on the weather.
At the BBC, lessons were being learned from the broadcasting of the King’s funeral, when it was felt that there had been too many boring studio items and not enough ‘from the London streets’.9 Meticulous arrangements were made to keep the Commonwealth up to speed. Canada was then the only other Commonwealth country to have regular television broadcasts and RAF Canberra bombers were to fly the film over, stopping only for a quick refuelling break in Greenland in Operation Pony Express. In the US, the rival NBC and CBS companies planned their own race to air. The interests of French speakers were taken more seriously than perhaps they would be today; one of the five commentators inside the Abbey was French and the Coronation would prove a major hit across the continent. Monarchs, cavalry detachments, horses, presidents, ministers and journalists arrived from around the world. Every rentable room in London was let, entire hotels booked up, road closures planned, shopfronts bedecked with red, white and blue, coronets and profiled pictures of the young Queen. The wise looked at the weather forecasts and worried.
Coronation Day itself, Tuesday, 2 June 1953, did indeed start cold and wet, not just in London, but across most of the United Kingdom. Some 30,000 people are estimated to have slept out overnight on the paving stones and verges of the processional route, with another 20,000 trying but failing to find a good spot to watch from. Writers who went among them remembered the war and the Blitz of a decade before and were impressed by the communal spirit and unquenchable cheerfulness. The journalist Philip Hope-Wallace, who overheard a parent tell a fractious child, waiting for twenty-eight hours, ‘Sit still, or I’ll crown you’, was impressed by the endurance: ‘The crowds schooled to sit out the Luftwaffe’s visits on hard cold stone were not going to be put off by a drop of rain. Nor by the fantastic coldness.’10 Many had wrapped themselves in newspapers, which had become sodden overnight. They then had the dilemma of whether to use special Coronation editions of the fresh morning papers as keepsakes or insulation.
Not many ended up unread, one hopes, because their front pages announced the astonishing news that with perfect patriotic timing, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his guide, Sherpa Tenzing, part of a British-led expedition, had become the first climbers to make it to the top of Everest. Tea was being sold, and jokes made about brandy being more wanted. Overnight there had been some sing-songs and impromptu dancing, but not much because of the rain. The people who waited so long and would have a long walk home afterwards through streets first closed to traffic, then becoming hopelessly congested, were rewarded by one of the most glittering displays of old-fashioned pageantry in Britain’s post-war history. It was a long clatter of cavalry horses’ hoofs and chinking uniforms, a carnival of exotic costumes, foreign potentates and military marching. There were familiar faces: Churchill, who delighted in uniforms, was done up in his Admiral’s gear as Warden of the Cinque Ports. Below a cocked hat and blue-and-gold tunic which would have suited some South American liberator of the previous century, he beamed and waved. There were unfamiliar faces too. Tonga’s jovial Queen Salote Tupou III – the ‘tallest queen of the smallest monarchy’ who lived largely on roast suckling pig and travelled in an open carriage despite the rain, was a particular star.
Waiting inside the Abbey, they shivered in their finery. The Countess of Huntingdon told t
he readers of the New Statesman that her prime memory of the day would be the ‘element of pity and sympathy’ felt for the Queen, ‘for between the inhuman magnificence of the Crown and the glittering of the vestment-like golden robe, the Queen’s face was very young, very human, very tense’. But beyond that it was, ‘Oh, the cold!’ The peeresses had been confined in what became in effect a wind tunnel: ‘Our teeth chattered, we quaked inwardly with cold, we wrapped ourselves in our trains and watched our arms turn blue.’11 Richard Dimbleby was in the relative comfort and warmth of his commentary box, surrounded by his mass of typed and handwritten notes. Later, after it was all over, he would express his amazement at the poor behaviour of some of the peerage, who he felt had behaved like litter louts: ‘Tiers and tiers of stalls in which the peers had been sitting were covered with sandwich wrapping, sandwiches, morning newspapers, fruit peel, sweets and even a few empty bottles.’12 Well, they had been very cold.
Outside London, the rest of the country celebrated and coped with the rain. On the Moray Firth, too far north for television reception, the warship HMS Welcome and local fishing fleet skippers collaborated in an impromptu naval review through a force-eight gale. Further north still, in Stornoway in the Hebrides, a spry ninety-two-year-old minister celebrated an open-air service and told his parishioners about his memories of an equally wet parade in Edinburgh for Queen Victoria. In Belfast, and across loyalist Northern Ireland, decorative arches were erected. The Welsh hills had beacons, first smoking and then blazing. Villages across Britain planted Coronation trees, held running races, fancy-dress parades, football matches, teas for everyone in the hall, and beer-fuelled Coronation suppers in pubs. In Dorset, there were tug-of-war contests between neighbouring hillside villages and in St Keverne in Cornwall they triumphantly roasted their ox, providing a glut of hot sandwiches.13 In London, 350 foreign guests who could not be fitted into the Palace for the formal lunch were treated to a first outing of the day’s most famous culinary invention, ‘poulet Reine Elizabeth’ or Coronation Chicken as it was quickly renamed. A dish of poached fowl in a sauce including curried onions, red wine, apricot purée and mayonnaise, it was created by Rosemary Hume of the London Cookery School and its degraded versions are slathered into lunchtime sandwiches throughout Britain to this day. Made properly, it can be quite pleasant.