Well, er, it’s rather nice to have the day off. (M54)
I feel alright. (M45)
I feel it’s a good thing if everybody does their little bit to make it a success. (M71)
Oh just ordinary. (F73)
Well I feel very pleased about it myself, I feel quite worked up about it – you see it everywhere now really, don’t you? (F65)
I think it’s a waste of money. (M42)
Well, I’d say it cheers the country up. It’s been a bit depressing since the war. Haven’t you noticed it? People don’t seem the same, do they? A thing like this seems to work up the co-operation a bit. (M40)
Definitely I’m all for it, all in favour! (M58)
A final reply (M61) reminds that the personal always transcends the public. ‘I’d get up there if I could but there is not much chance, it means starting off so early, and my wife died last week so I shan’t be feeling all that much like it.’
Even so, it seems that it was precisely in traditional working-class areas like Fulham that the Coronation was celebrated most enthusiastically. ‘In the poorer areas, the streets are thick with bunting and there is much enthusiasm for street parties,’ an M-O panel member suggestively reported in late May about the decorations in Burnley. ‘Out of town,’ by contrast, ‘there are rows of undecorated Semis.’ In Fulham itself, Lillie Walk was a narrow alleyway with 42 houses, mostly lived in by labourers and on the local council’s ‘condemned’ list:
Down the entire length of the Walk [noted the M-O investigator on the 30th] there are rows and rows of bunting, while paper garlands and lines of small Union Jacks are strung across from top windows one side of the road to the windows opposite. Every house has pictures of the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, and Princess Anne pasted in the parlour window and the two small top bedroom windows. Over the doorways are fixed crowns, gold and silver, large and small, posters with the wording ‘God Save Our Queen’ or ‘Long Live Our Queen’ with the initials E.R.II. The outer walls of the front parlours are completely hidden with Union Jacks, more gold and silver crowns or coats-of-arms.
‘It’ll be the last coronation we’ll have down here,’ a 60-year-old woman explained, ‘because they’re pulling the houses down and we’re all going to shift, so we’re making it a kind of farewell party too.’ Money for the street party for the Walk’s children had been collected on a regular basis since the previous June. ‘Usually lots of people go out on Saturday nights to the pubs, but last week-end and the one before that they were sitting on stools near their front-doors chatting away,’ related a middle-aged man about the sacrifices that had been made to pay for the decorations. ‘The same goes for the pictures. They put their picture-money away specially to make the Walk look nice and bright. We’re all in it. We’re all excited and want to make a show.’ Or, in the words of a middle-aged woman who had gone without her drink: ‘We’re all neighbours and we’re all happy-go-lucky and it’s got to be a day all of us will remember – the kids and all of us.’4
By this time the airwaves were pervaded by the impending event, typified by Coronation Music Hall on the 30th attracting 91 per cent of the TV public and getting a ‘Reaction Index’ of 90, the latter figure acclaimed by BBC audience research as the ‘highest ever recorded for a Light Entertainment and the highest for any TV broadcast of any kind’. Accordingly, Woman’s Hour on Monday the 1st, introduced as usual by Marjorie Anderson, included not only the voices of some of the Coronation visitors in London and the latest instalment of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria but also a talk by a housewife expressing her thoughts on Coronation Eve. She called it ‘Dedication’:
Last Christmas the Queen asked us all to pray for her on her Coronation Day. She called us, surely, not to lip service, but to share in her personal dedication in the daily round of our own lives.
What can this dedication mean to an ordinary housewife like me? Selfless living so often seems to be something of the mountain top, something difficult to work out in terms of pots and pans, ration books and children fast growing out of their clothes.
Well, first of all, I’m sure it means that the things we long to see in our nation we must first find for ourselves in our own hearts and homes.
My husband tells me that he believes that what happens in the home makes a tremendous difference to a man in his work, whether he is dealing with men or materials. I believe this is just as true of our children. To send out our husbands and children happily in the morning is a way that we women can link ourselves with the great world outside our homes, and feel that we are helping to contribute to the peace we long for so much . . .
The Queen will live to make our nation great, and so must I. While hers may often be in spectacular ways my own dedication may just be in the caring I put into the tiny details of my everyday life. Yes even in the washing up, in things like seeing that I wash most carefully round the handles of cups and saucepans – in the thought and preparation that goes into the cooking – every tiny eye out of the potatoes and spotless hands to cook with . . .
In these small ways, I need to accept fully the responsibility for what my nation is, and for what the world is. The fear, the greed, the hate, which so distress me in the world at large ought to distress me just as much when I see them, in smaller ways, in myself. At least there I can fight it, and in my heart and home I need to build a citadel against these things. During her Coronation service the Queen dedicates herself to serve the cause of righteousness. Let us do the same.5
The name of the 42-year-old speaker – living in Wolverhampton, married to a sheet-metal worker, bringing up three sons – was Mary Whitehouse, set to return to obscurity but now having savoured (thanks to the BBC) the buzz of moral exhortation.
There were few more dedicated housewives than Judy Haines in Chingford. ‘I don’t know how, but I’ve worked solidly from 7am to 9pm for days it seems,’ she sighed that Monday. ‘Sylvia’s mother and Valerie’s mother came round to announce the Avenue is to hold a Coronation Party on June the 13th. Had booked for British Legion Party, but decided in favour of former one. What a late hour! We gave 10/-.’ Another, altogether less domestic diarist, Frank Lewis, was rather irritably fending for himself at home in Barry, his mother and sister having gone up to London in the hope of finding a place to watch the procession. ‘I’ve never had a great deal of interest in Royalty, though this IS a big occasion,’ he reflected that day. ‘I just can’t be bothered . . .’ A sense of adventure, meanwhile, also only partially flickered in Hampstead:
I wouldn’t go myself, but my boy friend wants me to come, all the time from ten o’clock tonight. I’m dreading it. I’m only hoping this rain’ll put him off. (F25)
Yes, we’ll be going, a friend of mine and my daughter, we’ll be starting out about ten o’clock. I’m going to borrow an old tweed coat – this one I’ve got is quite warm, I don’t mean that, but I don’t want to use it for sitting around in the rain, lying out in all night. We’ll take some coffee, and a packet of Quickies for my face in the morning. My husband’s furious, he thinks it’s barmy. (F50)
Poor Gladys Langford went – ‘trying to dispel my gloom’ – to Marble Arch to see the decorations:
It was well nigh impossible to look at the decorations, as the pavements were wedged tightly with people. Some sat on the edge of the kerb having taken up already their positions for viewing tomorrow’s procession . . . Outside Selfridge’s the throng was at its thickest. People dragged small children along . . . Many aged and lame women were milling about. I edged out of the crowd into Bond St and thence to Piccadilly. Many people with stools, bed, blankets and bags of fodder were on the kerb under the portico at the Ritz. Later came a heavy downpour. The doctors will be busy after all this for it is quite cold. Here in the hotel [ie the one in Islington where she lived] there is to be a bonfire, fireworks and punch-drinking – but not for me!
‘Everybody – everything – tense and poised,’ wrote Madge Martin in Oxford. ‘The weather simply horrible – fr
eezingly cold, stormy and unkind.’6
It proved a pretty wet night for those camping out in central London, with women outnumbering men by about seven to one. ‘People were very scrupulous about saving the places of those absent – for strangers just as much as friends,’ noted an M-O investigator. ‘There was an empty space near the group with whom Inv was sitting, alleged to belong to “a chap” who was unknown to any of them, yet they had been defending it loyally from all comers for a couple of hours.’ Cold and mostly wet continued the weather in the morning, though according to Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in her seat in a stand in the Mall by 7.00, ‘the crowds were most touching – wrapped in soaked newspapers & plastic mackintoshes but burning with loyalty & full of good humour, tho’ many had been there all night’. It was a good humour increased (across the country as well as in central London) by the triumphant news about a British-led expedition – in the Daily Express’s immortal headline, ‘All This – And Everest Too!’ At least one couple, though, was smugly dry in the covered stand in Parliament Square. ‘The tickets were an even wiser investment than Denis knew when he bought them,’ recalled Margaret Thatcher, ‘for it poured all day and most people in the audience were drenched – not to speak of those in the open carriages of the great procession. The Queen of Tonga never wore that dress again. Mine lived to see another day.’
For the damp, huddled masses, watching the carriage procession after the three-hour service in Westminster Abbey, there was no doubt who were the two stars of the show. ‘It is pouring with rain,’ noted another M-O investigator, ‘but the Queen of Tonga sits in an open carriage beaming on everyone and waving to the crowds who laugh and point and cheer loudly.’ Finally, in a gold state coach drawn by eight greys, came the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth:
The crowd is cheering in a tremendous roar, pushing this way and that to get the best view, standing on tip-toe, jumping up, pressing forward and forward. The cheers are at least six times as loud as they have ever been before . . . But the most anyone gets is a brief view of a pale figure in a shining white dress smiling and waving her hand . . . It is all over so quickly that people seem taken aback. They look at each other and smile almost in a confidential sort of way, there is a kind of sigh, and one or two women are wiping their eyes . . .
‘A vast, brown, smiling bundle with a tall red knitting needle in her hat,’ was how James Lees-Milne described the intrepid Queen Salote, refusing to have the hood of her carriage drawn. ‘The people were delighted. They roared applause . . . Beside her squatted a little man in black and a top hat – her husband. Noël Coward, when asked who he was, said, “Her dinner.” ’7
For the overwhelming majority, of course, the Coronation was experienced through radio or television. Some 32 per cent (11.7 million people) of the adult population listened to at least half an hour of the Service, 29 per cent to the procession to the Abbey and 25 per cent to the procession from the Abbey. The commentators inside the Abbey were two trusty warhorses, Howard Marshall and John Snagge, permitted to describe everything except the Prayer of Consecration just before the Queen took Communion. Other commentators included Wynford Vaughan Thomas at the Victoria Memorial, Jean Metcalfe at Buckingham Palace, Raymond Baxter at Trafalgar Square, Rex Alston at Victoria Embankment and, in an advantageous, well-supplied perch in the Criterion Restaurant, John Arlott at Piccadilly Circus. ‘Slowly this Procession makes its stately way round the great sweep of the Circus with a quality that somehow twists the heart in the chest,’ he burred, ‘and you can feel this coming up down there from the people who have waited so anxiously and are now, by their faces, more than satisfied.’ Equally satisfied listeners included Madge Martin in Oxford – ‘NO Television for us, but nothing could have been more beautiful than the broadcasting of the Service – with the heart-stirring music, the descriptions of every moment of it, and the picture of colourful splendour’ – and Mary King in Birmingham: ‘It was such a wonderful ceremony. At the end I was too dazed, too emotionally disturbed physically & spiritually to write any details.’ Marian Raynham, at home in Surbiton with her husband, son and daughter, ‘listened to it all from 10.30 to 5.30’: ‘I took advantage of the religious part to put the lunch on the table. They loved the lunch – tom soup, a big salad with nut meat brawn & strawberry blanc mange & jam & top of milk . . . I didn’t waste my time. At first part I pulled couch out & spring cleaned behind it & brushed couch well. Did room, later crocheted, later rested. They do do this well. I liked the bit about Justice in the ceremony, & the voice of the Queen & Philip. She never seems nervous . . .’ The solipsistic civil servant Henry St John went to relatives in Southall to listen. ‘One log of an electric fire was switched on, but it was still cold,’ was his considered verdict.8
Yet it was, undeniably, television’s day. No less than 56 per cent (some 20.4 million people) of the adult population watched at least half an hour of the Service – not far short of double the radio audience – with 53 and 51 per cent also watching the processions to and from the Abbey. In fact it had been quite a struggle to persuade the authorities to allow the BBC to cover the Service, with an aggressive campaign led by the Beaverbrook press probably tilting the balance, and even when permission was given it came with certain conditions: four cameras only; no close-ups; no pictures of either the anointing ceremony or the Queen receiving Communion. ‘There will be no TV close-up of the Queen at the moment of bum,’ Kingsley Amis accurately predicted to Philip Larkin a week before. But even if there had been, it would not have disturbed the hushed, reverential tone of the commentator, Richard Dimbleby, an increasingly integral part of the British constitution. After the Service, after the return procession, there was still plenty for viewers to enjoy: at 5.40 almost sixteen million watched the Queen’s appearance on the balcony and accompanying RAF flypast; then, after an early-evening closedown and an edited version of the Service, some ten million watched Churchill’s address followed by the Queen’s, before a broadcast from Outside Buckingham Palace. An unexpected TV turn that night, giving millions their first taste of calypso, was a young Trinidadian performer billed as Young Tiger, real name George Browne, instantly memorialising the day:
Her Majesty looked really divine
In her crimson robe furred with ermine
The Duke of Edinburgh, dignified and neat
Sat beside her as Admiral of the Fleet.
The song, called ‘I Was There (at the Coronation)’, was to be given its final outing by Browne at the Roundhouse in 2006, introduced by Damon Albarn.9
People watched where they could. ‘Nearly all the listeners were in their own homes,’ summarised BBC audience research, ‘but more than half the viewers of the Coronation Service were in the homes of friends and about 1,500,000 were viewing in public places like cinemas, shops, etc. The average number of people around each domestic television set was about seven, excluding children.’ ‘We had fully twenty in our workshop viewing it on our set [an Ekco],’ noted Barbara Algie, living in Helensburgh, Scotland. ‘The Marshalls brought me a coronation cake, and others gave me cakes and sweets.’ Improvisation was often the order of the day. ‘I sat down on my plastic commemorative cushion in pouring rain outside the DER showroom to watch the Coronation,’ recalled David Sutch. ‘The whole village clubbed together to rent one, which they put in my father’s barn,’ remembered Ned Sherrin about a pioneering television experience in rural Somerset. ‘I came down from Oxford. It was a sensation. The local squire even came down to watch, with binoculars and a shooting-stick.’ Up and down the country, the recipe of the day, a Constance Spry concoction heavily publicised by women’s magazines, was Coronation Chicken – cooked, cold chicken in a mild curry mayonnaise sauce with apricots – all ready to be eaten off a tray in front of ‘ermine-draped ectoplasm floating about at a rather bizarre séance’, as Ann Leslie has nicely described the TV pictures that day when reception was at its fuzziest.10
Some children may have been bored, but not on the whole adults, certainly not the diarists.
‘Very glad able to see it as happening,’ scribbled the commercial artist Grace Golden. ‘The Queen, robed and crowned, looked like something from the Arabian Nights – quite unbelievably organised, train bearers all moving with such grace. The Duke of E’s lovely voice as he spoke his homage – & the Arch of Cant very fine. Prince Charles in white shirt and ruffles sudden appearance with Queen Mother.’ So too Judy Haines: ‘Television was perfect and most enjoyable. I liked Prince Charles noticing his mother’s new bracelet. I thought the Queen was wonderful, standing up so well to such an ordeal as it must have been.’ It is unlikely, though, that the Service was watched in reverential silence, to judge by an account sent to M-O about half a dozen or more people watching it on a TV at a farm (no location given). Comments included:
It’s hard on the Queen making her walk as slowly as that. It’s a dirty shame I call it.
It’s a tiring day for her. 2½ hours in the Abbey. It’s the whole day really.
I expect she packs herself up a couple of sandwiches.
I wish some of the ladies-in-waiting would trip over [ie when walking backwards] – give us a bit of fun.
It’s the women I want to see. Their dresses.
They put a canopy over her when she’s anointed, that’s nice for her.
‘Their only interest,’ the account suggestively noted, ‘was to see the Queen – close-ups of her in the coach, getting out of the coach, walking up the Abbey. They didn’t stay to watch all the other parts.’ Yet perhaps at least as representative was the experience of a youngish, working-class Irish woman living in London who watched it at a friend’s home. ‘We all thought before it started,’ she related to M-O, ‘that we could never sit solidly throughout the whole procession and ceremony, and felt we would have to have several “breaks”, but once it started we couldn’t tear ourselves away from the set, and considered even eating an unnecessary interruption.’11
Overall, there is little disputing the conventional wisdom that the Coronation ‘made’ television in Britain. Not only did anticipation of the event help stimulate licence holders to rise from 1.45 million in March 1952 to 2.32 million by the end of May 1953, but the coverage of the day itself prompted a further rise, up to 3.25 million by March 1954. ‘Everyone in the TH [Finsbury Town Hall] today raving over the Television transmission of yesterday’s historic events,’ ruefully reflected Anthony Heap on the Wednesday. ‘Which I must admit, makes me rather enviously wish I had a set myself.’ Admittedly Heap added that he was ‘not prepared to lay out sixty or seventy quid – half my scanty capital – just to enjoy the special programme I might occasionally want to see’, but for him as for many others the seed had been sown. Tellingly, the BBC’s own feedback revealed that ‘viewers were immensely pleased and grateful that they were shown so much of the actual Service – “far, far more than we ever expected, and obviously more than most of those present could see”.’ The coverage also, in no small part due to Dimbleby, gave the medium an irreproachable respectability, a sense of it moving for the first time to the centre of national life. ‘The BBC has magnificently vindicated the noble idea of a public service,’ declared the Sunday Times’s television and radio critic, Maurice Wiggin. ‘It has behaved with impeccable tact and dignity and has undoubtedly made innumerable new friends . . . After last Tuesday there can be no looking back.’12
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 36