The 1953 Coronation - when television came of age

As a young lad, Bruce Parker, the BBC journalist and presenter now in his 80s, was one of many thousands watching TV for the first time on that momentous day. The coronation on May 6 is being screened in cathedrals up and down the country, including Winchester.

TELEVISION in Britain came of age with coverage of the 1953 coronation in the same way that radio had in the 1926 general strike. The big difference was that the general strike divided the country but the coronation joyously united it, just eight years after the Second World War had ended. Certainly, for me and my friends, all aged around eleven at the time, the coronation of Elizabeth II was an event that would be permanently etched onto our memories.

I was brought up in the Channel Islands where, only a few years before the coronation, German-occupying forces had finally left our shores. I’m guessing the Royal family may have meant even more to our own families than most others in the British Isles. Along with a number of islanders, my school had bought a television set especially to watch the coronation.  It was very much touch-and-go whether we’d actually see anything on the day: the islands relied on a TV signal from the nearest BBC transmitter which was at Wenvoe in South Wales, hundreds of miles away.

Luck was, sort of, with us.  As we waited for our set to ‘warm up’, there it was, a black and white ‘snowy’ picture which, I suppose, matched the weather in faraway, pouring-with-rain London. It was sometimes blurred, sometimes perfectly clear: riveting, though, even for 11-year-olds. We watched the whole event for several hours on this tiny screen, housed in a huge wooden case, transfixed equally by what was unfolding ‘live’ in front of us but also by this wholly magic thing called television.

None of us had ever seen such a spectacle in real time, happening miles away. But, of course, nor had the rest of the British population. Yes, we were used to seeing out-of-date newsreels but only in the cinema on a weekly, probably monthly basis. Good old black and white Pathé News but there wasn’t much ‘new’ about it.

A month or two later, all of us youngsters were dutifully taken to Odeon and Gaumont cinemas to see the official colour film of the Westminster Abbey service and the lengthy processions that went with it. There was only one star of the show, Her Majesty, but the supporting role we all remember was the buxom Queen of Tonga, in her carriage, no umbrella in the pouring rain, gleaming white teeth, smiling away.

Of course, it wasn’t just Britain watching television and the later film coverage of this great event. Europe and beyond were picking up these new-fangled television signals, too.  A French viewer wrote to the BBC: “What a triumph for man to have been able to reduce the world to the span of a little screen and to allow illustrious personalities like Her Majesty to enter our homes.”

Sequel

Four years later, the Queen visited my school, Elizabeth College in Guernsey, founded by her illustrious predecessor, Elizabeth I in 1563.  As part of the cadet force guard of honour that greeted Her Majesty, this 15-year-old found himself momentarily face-to-face with a  beautiful, majestic, royal lady in her late twenties. My abiding memory of that moment is still of Queen Elizabeth’s flawless skin.

For me, though, the coronation connection didn’t end there: an altogether fascinating sequel came some years later after I’d joined the BBC. The Duke of Norfolk who, as Earl Marshal, had been the architect of the Queen’s 1953 coronation, called me in the BBC’s Southampton newsroom. He wanted to go on television to complain about the 1974 reorganisation of local government. His beef was that the proposed new ‘ceremonial’ boundaries meant he would lose the Lord Lieutenancy of East Sussex, only keeping West Sussex where he lived in Arundel Castle.

At Arundel, we duly filmed the rigidly boring TV interview about local government, sitting, as it happens, on chairs that had been used at the Prince of Wales Investiture in Caernarvon which the duke had also organised. Amusingly and surprisingly, he said he was trying to sell dozens of the chairs to highest bidders.

Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard was not a born public speaker and gave few broadcast interviews.  He was not exactly a man of the people, either. At a press conference when he’d been unexpectedly appointed manager of the MCC team to tour Australia, he announced that he didn’t want people to stand on ceremony by referring to him as ‘Your Grace’. ‘Sir’ would do.

Nevertheless, after his little rant about local government, I asked if I might record his memories of not only Elizabeth II’s coronation, but her father George VI’s coronation, which he’d also organised: he’d been in charge, too, of the early plans for Edward’s VIII’s coronation, cancelled after the abdication. He reminisced, as well, of the meticulous details, kept secret for many years, surrounding plans for the funeral of Winston Churchill (‘Operation Hope Not’) which he’d been in charge of.

It was one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had with someone so close to the heart of our royal pageantry. To be able to hear a first-hand account of how these major events in British life had been organised, over three or more momentous decades, was nothing short of mind-blowing. The Duke’s attention to minute detail, meticulous timings and application of strict military discipline to all the events for which he was responsible were to become legendary.

Coronation Music

Was the Duke’s attention to detail outside Westminster Abbey always matched inside ? Apparently not, according to the distinguished British composer, John Rutter, in a recent piece in The Spectator: In 1727, at George II’s coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury noted ‘the anthems in confusion: all irregular in the music’. But Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ (one of them) survived its shaky première and went on to be performed at every subsequent coronation… the problem with the 1727 performance was that Handel wrote four coronation anthems for the occasion and the orchestra, confused as to the running order, struck up two different ones simultaneously. I wonder if I can believe the story that something similar happened at the end of the 1953 coronation, when some of the orchestra started to play Bax’s new ‘Coronation March’ and others went for Elgar. After a few chaotic bars, Elgar prevailed.”

But as Rutter also says, such is the professionalism of all the musicians and choristers taking part in this year's service, everything will go magnificently and we will be uplifted.

What better then, perhaps, to watch and listen to this monarch’s coronation service on screens in the mighty nave of Winchester Cathedral?