Family Britain, 1951-1957 (48 page)

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.” ’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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 S
unday 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.’
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Away from the box, people marked the day in their different ways. Frank Lewis in Barry played a round of miniature golf ‘with 3 rowdy loutish lads’; Kenneth Williams ignored the celebrations and went ‘home to bed early’; another troubled soul, the Somerset batsman Harold Gimblett, was playing against Warwickshire at Coventry and, in the only hour of play possible because of rain, deliberately hit a six at about the moment the Queen was being crowned. In the Welsh-border village of Hanmer, ten-year-old Lorna Stockton (later Sage) was dressed for the children’s fancy-dress parade as ‘a very passable shepherdess complete with black laced bodice, floral panniers, a straw hat and a crook tied with ribbons’, giving her second place in the girls’ section. Another parade, in rain-sodden Keighley, had a notably unimpressed spectator:

I had taken the ciné camera [wrote Kenneth Preston] but photography was out of the question. The tableaux when they did come were travelling too fast for one to be able to make much of them. The youngsters standing upon them looked starved to the marrow and the lads who marched in front, carrying a small notice announcing what the tableaux represented, were so cold that their words and notices were almost slipping from their nerveless hands and it was quite impossible, in some cases, to read what was on the notices. The whole procession was a miserable business and in the circumstances represented hundreds of pounds of money wasted.

Lavinia Mynors, married to a distinguished classicist and doing the West End that evening, was altogether more upbeat. Walking back to Chelsea, all the formal celebrations apparently over and the trains and buses full up, she and her niece were in Buckingham Palace Road when at about eleven they heard cheering. ‘We turned aside to the front of the Palace,’ she recorded afterwards, ‘where there were comparatively few people shouting raggedly. There was nothing in our favour except that the balcony was still lit – and we hesitated there for not above four minutes – and then by Jove they came out, the Queen and the Duke, and they didn’t hurry back either. We were transported with delight and cheered madly. Then we marched home marvelling at our luck . . .’
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Whether on that Tuesday itself or the somewhat drier days after, Coronation celebrations took many forms – concerts, processions, pageants, bonfires, fireworks, etc – but the most emblematic celebration, the one closest to most people’s sense of what was fit and proper, was the street party, predominantly but not exclusively for children. This was particularly so in working-class areas. ‘In nearly every road there was a party,’ was how a Cheshire schoolgirl, in her account of going to her granny’s in Lancashire to watch the events on TV, described the gaily decorated side streets off Liverpool’s Scotland Road. Sadly, the rain on Coronation Day meant that many parties (including in Lillie Walk) had to be held in nearby halls or schools – ‘amid general cries of “Isn’t it a shame?” ’ as V. S. Pritchett observed in Islington – but many were scheduled for the following weekend or even the one after. ‘We had four and a half hours going round street parties, a marvellous show of decorations,’ Clement Attlee was thus able to note with satisfaction, adding that ‘Walthamstow knows how to do it’; Judy Haines and her two daughters, in nearby, somewhat less working-class Chingford, were among those at Priory Avenue’s party:

Girls looked sweet in Fancy Dresses – Ione as a Chinese lady and Pamela as a Ballet Dancer. Both had flowers in their hair. I contributed 85 cakes to party. I enjoyed some items of local talent. The dancing troupe was ‘all tap’. Ione declared the lorries’ wheels were oval. How they banged on the impromptu stage – for two hours! At about 10 pm! the children’s presents were given out. Girls so very late to bed. Pamela had brooch; Ione propelling pencil and scrapbook. Both had orange and bag of sweets.

The parties were not invariably as decorous as they were decorated. Elaine James, a sheet-metal-worker’s daughter growing up in Shoreham, recalled how, as a result of getting it into her head that the Poles had been on the side of the Germans, she lobbed a jelly at the son of a local Polish family and a fight broke out. Moreover, ‘once we had finished eating [sandwiches and sweets, washed down by orange squash and Corona cherryade], the grown-ups tried to set games but it all drifted away from organization and we kids were just allowed to run riot’. It was better organised in Soho Street, Glasgow, where ‘every lamp-post, doorway and windowsill was decorated with bunting and streamers’ and ‘trestle tables were set up in the middle of the road, laden with food and drink’: