Yesterday’s post explained why we shall never again see the type of Coronation that Queen Elizabeth II had on June 4, 1953.

A September 11, 2022 article from The Times, ‘No time to repeat three-hour coronation that bored the boy prince in 1953’ has more, including photos.

An excerpt follows, emphases mine:

The government funds a coronation while the costs of a royal wedding are met by the family, with the taxpayer meeting any security costs.

It took 14 months to prepare for the Queen’s coronation, under the chairmanship of the Duke of Edinburgh, and it cost £1.57 million (£31 million in modern money). Almost 40,000 troops and reservists took part in the parade, 168 jet fighters in the flypast. More than 8,000 guests packed Westminster Abbey in conditions that would not be tolerated under today’s health and safety rules.

An estimated 3 million spectators lined the streets of London for the procession, with the return path from the abbey to Buckingham Palace extended over five miles. In the evening, crowds shouted “We want the Queen”. The royal party responded by making five appearances on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, the last at 11.30pm.

The symbolism of the ceremony’s high pomp and sacramental mystery would surely be lost on most of a contemporary audience, lacking a deep knowledge of the Bible and of the intricacies of a long-gone, hierarchical society.

It was a daring decision to allow the television cameras in, or, as The Times put it: “For the first time in perhaps a thousand years, the Sovereign was crowned in the sight of many thousands of the humblest of her subjects. By penetrating at last, even vicariously, into the solemn mysteriousness of the Abbey scene, multitudes who had hoped merely to see for themselves the splendour and the pomp found themselves comprehending for the first time the true nature of the occasion.”

Even so, the cameras were not allowed to record the anointing and the blessing: daylight could not be allowed to spoil the deepest magic.

As the male consort of the sovereign, Prince Philip played a walk-on part, sitting between the Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Kent and required to perform homage to her.

As I said yesterday, there was a boom in the purchase of television sets, which most homes did not have. Generous families shared their coronation viewing with neighbours, particularly children.

Afterwards, as the Queen had lunch, so did her subjects. Below is a photo of a Coronation Day street party and a 1977 Silver Jubilee photo of a ten-year-old girl from Liverpool:

There are other interesting facts about Coronation Day 1953 that are worth remembering.

The Queen’s placid nature

The Queen’s maids of honour recalled how calm she was.

After her death, The Times posted a retrospective, ‘Calm princess launched her coronation with two simple words: “Ready, girls?”‘.

Excerpts follow:

… the six maids of honour waited before the nave of Westminster Abbey. Inside, the abbey was crowded almost to the rafters, with heads of state, white-haired dignitaries, politicians, senior clerics and aristocratic families from around the world.

At the head of the maids of honour stood Elizabeth, robed in ermine. She was staring ahead, her face calm but unsmiling. She seemed to be thinking only of dignity and duty. “But then she turned to us maids of honour,” Lady Glenconner recalled in 2013, “and said, ‘Ready, girls?’ It was the first time we had heard her speak that day.”

Before and throughout the long service, the Queen never hinted that she might be feeling anxious or tentative. “She didn’t say anything. She wore a very calm expression. She was concentrating so hard,” said Glenconner. “Everyone present knew that they were living through a moment of history: this was the most important public ceremony of the century so far.

“We were putting on a real show to celebrate winning the war. I didn’t think once about what it might have cost. You must remember that on VE Day [in 1945], everyone was still in uniform.”

The maids of honour were all daughters of dukes, marquesses and earls. Each was unmarried, aged between 17 and 23 and had been chosen for her beauty as much as her lineage. “We looked right,” said Glenconner, who, as the daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, was known then as Lady Anne Coke. Her family seat, Holkham Hall, was only a few miles from Sandringham, and she said the Cokes and Windsors “used to go to each other’s birthday parties”.

The maids of honour were tasked with carrying Elizabeth’s heavy ermine train as she walked before them. This gave them an almost unparalleled close-up of the young monarch — especially when the television cameras were switched off. Behind the maids were the ladies-in-waiting, Glenconner’s mother among them. “We were the only mother and daughter participating in the service,” she recalled with pride.

In another article, which I covered yesterday, Glenconner said that it was probably her mother who rescued the Imperial State Crown from four-year-old Prince Charles when it nearly fell from his hands at Buckingham Palace after the coronation.

Lady Glenconner recalled more about the day and the rehearsals beforehand:

The Coronation Commission, chaired by Prince Philip, first met 14 months before the service. “We practised with the Duchess of Norfolk, who turned out to walk rather more slowly than the Queen,” Glenconner said. “The Queen came only to the final rehearsal.” The Duke of Norfolk directed proceedings: “He was a stern man, quite the sergeant-major. But then he had to be. I think he was rather proud of us girls.”

The maids rose at 4.30am on the day for make-up. News of Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest reached the party. Then, while they waited in their beautiful but uncomfortable Norman Hartnell dresses: “Suddenly this roar from the crowd came up. I saw the coach begin to turn the corner, and there it was. It was like something out of a fairy story.”

The maids watched the Duke of Edinburgh help the Queen down the tiny steps of the coach. “She was looking down — it would have been awful if she had slipped,” Glenconner said. But when she reached the ground, the Queen lifted her head: “She looked incredible. She had the most wonderful figure, with a tiny waist. She had the most beautiful complexion, and such bright eyes.”

Elizabeth was not thinking only of her own actions and bearing that day. Glenconner said: “I hadn’t slept all night and the dress was terribly tight. At one point, everything went black — I was about to faint.” The Queen noticed and motioned to one of the other maids to escort her from the abbey. But she rallied. “Luckily, Black Rod put his arm out to hold me up, and I soon felt better. When the service was over, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave me a nip of brandy, which I was very grateful for.

“The most moving part, and perhaps the most important for the Queen,” Glenconner said, “was when she was anointed with holy oil. That wasn’t televised because it was religious.”

The Marquess of Cholmondeley — a man who had “barely ever had to tie his own shoelaces” — was charged with fitting the Queen into a white linen dress for the occasion. “He struggled with its hooks and eyes,” Glenconner said, “and the Duke of Norfolk got quite cross at that.” But when he finally managed to fit the Queen in the dress, she pledged to serve the nation and Commonwealth.

Later, Glenconner said, “Prince Philip came up, knelt before her and kissed her on the cheek. That was terribly touching.”

Back at Buckingham Palace, after the flypast, the maids watched the Queen kick off her shoes, take off her crown and sit on a sofa …

Lady Glenconner served as lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret for 34 years:

She saw the Queen quite frequently, she said, although they discussed the coronation only once: “After my mother died, the Queen told me how sorry she was. I said that one of the nicest moments that my mother and I had shared had been the coronation. The Queen said, ‘Yes, I realise how nice that must have been for you. After all, my mother was watching too.’”

Poor Lady Glenconner. She had a miserable marriage to an absolute brute who humiliated her physically and psychologically, sometimes in public. However, it was not the done thing to get divorced. She has recounted her life in writing and in television appearances. Her husband died some years ago.

Floral arrangements

At the beginning of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee on Thursday, June 2, 2022, The Times explained the resurgence of the gladiolus:

Plants do go in and out of fashion. One that’s staged a rapid rise from the doldrums to popularity is the gladiolus … Might the celebrations for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee have something to do with this rise in popularity? The doyenne of florists Constance Spry — who designed the flowers for the Coronation and the luncheon that followed — included gladioli in the arrangements, with roses, delphiniums, sweet peas and carnations.

… The name gladiolus shares the same root as gladiator. Gladius means “sword” in Latin and the spear-like upward-thrusting flower spikes are the horticultural antithesis of a shrinking violet.

Coronation Chicken

One of the most popular sandwich fillings in England is Coronation Chicken: chicken mayo with a touch of curry powder, raisins and, if one is lucky, sliced almonds.

However, today’s Coronation Chicken is rather different to the original created for dignitaries at the Coronation lunch.

On March 30, 2023, The Telegraph told us the story of this dish in ‘How Le Cordon Bleu London created the iconic coronation chicken recipe’:

On June 2 1953, at two o’clock in the afternoon, 350 foreign dignitaries sat down to tuck into the Coronation luncheon after Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. They were served Poulet Reine Elizabeth: a dish that is now better known as coronation chicken.

In the 70 years since, it has gone from a luxury fit for dignitaries, to a lurid 1970s staple, to an enduringly popular supermarket sandwich filling and a regular fixture on bad buffets.

Where did it come from? One common origin theory is that coronation chicken was based on a recipe created for George V’s Silver Jubilee. Others mistakenly say it was made to be served to the Queen (it wasn’t).

Instead, Poulet Reine Elizabeth was created by Rosemary Hume and her students at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in London specifically for the coronation banquet for visiting dignitaries. Constance Spry, the society florist in charge of organising the luncheon, also played a part, although she didn’t have quite as important a role as she is often given credit for.

“[Hume] came up with the dish and then two days later she said it had been inspired by a canapé in Mrs De Salis’ cookbook Savouries à la Mode, which I’ve looked at, and it bears very little resemblance,” says food historian Dr Annie Grey. “I think we can credit [Hume] for it pretty much all on her own.”

It was created with practicality in mind. The luncheon was served in the Great Hall of Westminster School, which had limited cooking facilities. The menu needed to be suitable for a “large number of guests of varying and unknown tastes”, in Spry’s words.

“They needed to come up with dishes that were real crowd-pleasers, quite impressive but not budget breaking, and things that they could prepare without a kitchen,” says Gray. They settled on a cold chicken dish in a creamy, mildly curried sauce that, on the day, was washed down with Krug champagne.

The other myth that tends to circulate is that coronation chicken was chosen as a budget-friendly option that home cooks could easily replicate: a recipe that struck the balance between “luxury and austerity” in postwar Britain.

Gray says that isn’t the case. “It’s hard to overplay how much of a blingy dish this would have been at the time… this is a nation that was still suffering from rationing,” she says. “Most people couldn’t afford to eat chicken; it was enormously expensive.”

Chicken was a treat and curry was unheard of so, initially, it wasn’t a dish that many people cooked at home. That started to change with the publication of the Constance Spry Cookery Book in 1956, which included the recipe for coronation chicken.

As home cooks emerged from an era of austerity, it rose in popularity. “It’s one of those dishes that seems to become popular outside Britain first, and then came back in,” explains Gray.” It wasn’t immediate, but certainly by the 1970s it was quite embedded in the psyche as a cold dish for mass catering” …

“Of course, it got rapidly bastardised,” says Gray. “It became nothing like the original dish, which is actually very nice.” Now it’s often “just cold cooked chicken with mayonnaise and curry powder… and sometimes pineapple or sultanas, which really isn’t what it was.”

The article has the recipe.

For the Platinum Jubilee, The Oldie‘s Elizabeth Luard also wrote up the original recipe, which I made at home for the occasion. I shall make it again for the King’s coronation on May 6, even though his dignitaries will be dining on … spinach and broad (fava) bean quiche. Errgh.

The Times featured coronation and jubilee recipes, including not only Coronation Chicken but also Spotted Dick and Black Forest Gateau right up to Roasted Aubergine with Saffron Yoghurt. Any of these would be good to serve on May 6.

The hit song

On October 22, 2022, The Telegraph‘s Eleanor Steafel recounted another Coronation story, ‘My great-grandfather wrote a hit song for the Queen’s coronation — here’s what I know about it’:

In accounts of the day, a song is often mentioned – a popular tune that could be heard coming from those pubs and parties.

It was just a ditty, a schmaltzy sort of ballad that was in the charts and had worked its way into people’s consciousness. It began: “In a golden coach, there’s a heart of gold, driving through old London town. With the sweetest Queen the world’s ever seen, wearing her golden crown…”

People of a certain generation may remember In a Golden Coach, made famous by Dickie Valentine and, later, Billy Cotton and his Band, who both had Top 10 hits with it. I have always known it as part of my family folklore.

To me, it’s the sweet old song that was written for the coronation by my great-grandfather, Jack Henry.

… Every time a jubilee came around, my mum, Penny, or one of my great aunts would remind us of the sheet music buried in a box somewhere. “Don’t you remember, Grandpa Jack wrote that song for the Queen’s coronation?” At family dinners, whenever talk turned to stories of Grandpa Jack (of which there seem to be many – the man was what one might fondly refer to as “a character”), someone would get the song up on YouTube or dig out the old record, put it on and we’d sway to the strains of Dickie Valentine.

But family stories are flimsy things; they slip through the hands of each generation, changing with every retelling. It always seemed odd that this man who was a police inspector and ran a pub with my great-grandmother in Hampstead, could also have written a hit song for the late Queen’s coronation.

Stranger still is a discrepancy we have never been able to explain in the credits for the song. A quick Google names John Henry (his christened name) as the writer of the music and lyrics, but the sheet music we have, beautifully illustrated with the Gold State Coach pulled by white horses, states: “words and music by Ronald Jamieson” – thought, but never confirmed, to be his nom de plume …

The Performing Right Society has six different records of In a Golden Coach, all of them with different songwriters credited, apparently with no telling which came first. John Henry is credited on one iteration, Ronald Jamieson, his possible nom de plume, on another. Two are credited to an entirely different set of names, and a further two are attributed to Jack Henry, with a co-credit for a man called Harry Leon.

Leon was a pianist with whom Grandpa Jack is also said to have written the song Hopalong Cassidy a year after the coronation …

It still seems an unlikely career move for a man who had been a Scotland Yard detective, though I’m told his patch was at one time the West End. Showbusiness may well have suited him – an obituary in the Daily Mail refers to him as the “Evening Dress Detective”. Family legend has it that he held the record for the highest number of murders solved in a single year, which later formed the basis for a series of detective novels he wrote. There’s also some talk of “secret war work” after he left the police – he served as a gunner-observer in the Royal Navy Air Force in the First World War, and in the Second World War is said to have helped airmen escape from Lisbon under the cover of being a diplomatic courier.

His obit, from 1956, reads: “He died after a heart attack in his public house in Hampstead last night. He was 62”…

The Mass Observation Project reported that on June 2 1953, people were singing In a Golden Coach in pubs. A story in the Daily Mirror says the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were serenaded with it by a choir of East End boys as they went through Poplar on their first drive in public after the Coronation. And it appears to still have something of a life today. There are renditions on YouTube recorded just this summer for the Platinum Jubilee. Even Lulu filmed a version on TikTok; she remembers singing it sitting on her father’s shoulders at a street party: “The first reaction I got from an audience.”

The Stone of Scone

Scotland’s Stone of Scone is also known as the Stone of Destiny.

Until 1996, when the Conservative Prime Minister John Major had it returned north of the border, it had been in Westminster Abbey for centuries — apart from a period between 1950 and 1952.

The Times has the story in their October 5, 2022 obituary of the man who masterminded its theft, Ian Hamilton:

In 1296, the Stone of Destiny was looted from Scone Abbey, near Perth, by English forces led by Edward I. It was taken to Westminster Abbey and fitted inside the wooden throne upon which most subsequent English and British monarchs have been crowned. Despite promises that it would be returned, including in the 1328 Treaty of Northampton, the stone lay undisturbed for six and a half centuries until four Scottish students, led by Ian Hamilton, decided to bring it back.

At about 6am on Christmas Day 1950, Hamilton and his friends Alan Stuart, Kay Matheson and Gavin Vernon used a crowbar to break into the abbey. They retrieved the stone from inside the coronation chair, only for it to crash to the floor and break in two. While loading the chunks into their borrowed Ford Anglia, they were approached by a policeman who allowed them to carry on after Hamilton and Matheson fell into an embrace, pretending to be lovers.

A police manhunt took place, but Scottish police were less interested, no doubt empathising with the thieves. English police patrolled the southern side of the border. However, Hamilton had travelled east to Kent to bury the two pieces of the stone. Afterwards, he headed home to Scotland:

“I’ve lost my watch — in Westminster Abbey,” was his opening line. “Was it you?” exclaimed his mother in delight. He later called into a central London police station to ask if the watch had been retrieved, but was given short shrift.

Hamilton then contacted the owner of Scone Palace, the Earl of Mansfield. The earl did not wish to get involved and politely declined, assuring Hamilton he would not get in touch with the police.

Early in 1951, Hamilton and his two friends returned to Kent to retrieve the stone pieces, which weighed 152kg (336lb). They drove back to Scotland without incident:

As they crossed the border, “we pulled back the coat that covered the stone, and each poured out a little of the wine of the country on to it, signifying its return to the Celtic people”. He arranged for it to be repaired by a Glasgow builder called Bertie Gray but, fearing a change in public opinion, then had it wrapped in a saltire and left in the ruins of Arbroath Abbey, where the 1320 declaration had been signed asking the Pope to recognise Scottish independence.

Although the obituary omits it, the police received a message in April 1951 and found the stone, which was eventually returned to Westminster Abbey.

Wikipedia’s account differs to the obituary’s. Wikipedia states that the Glaswegian builder Bertie Gray did indeed mend the stone:

Gray placed a brass rod, containing a piece of paper, inside the Stone. What was written on the paper remains unknown.^[6]

In April 1951, the police received a message and the Stone was found on the site of the High Altar at Arbroath Abbey where, in 1320, the assertion of Scottish nationhood was made in the Declaration of Arbroath.^[2]The Stone was returned to Westminster Abbey in February 1952.^[6]

February 1952 was the month when Princess Elizabeth acceded to the throne.

Wikipedia says that Hamilton, his two friends and a third accomplice were interviewed:

All four of the group were interviewed and all but Ian Hamilton later confessed to their involvement.^[2]The authorities decided not to prosecute as the potential for the event to become politicised was far too great.^[2]

At the time, the Conservative Party was at its peak of popularity in Scotland. The Scots later supported the Labour Party until the Scottish National Party (SNP) eclipsed them in 2007, with a narrow control of the newish Scottish Parliament under Alex Salmond’s leadership. Nicola Sturgeon went on to succeed Salmond in 2014 and resigned as First Minister on February 15, 2023.

This is what happened to the Stone of Scone more recently:

In 1996 John Major, the prime minister, said the stone was to be returned to Scotland on St Andrew’s Day, though it would still be used in London for coronations. Hamilton was unimpressed, declaring it a “cheap election trick”. Today the stone is in Edinburgh Castle and, after being moved to Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Charles III next year, it will head to a museum in Perth.

Returning to Ian Hamilton, what motivated him? The Times obituary states that his mother, Martha (née Robertson), brought him up with Scottish folklore. Hamilton’s father, John, was an experienced tailor who made suits that were sewn to last. His side of the family had criminal elements:

He was from a long line of agitators: a criminal ancestor demanded to be hanged on a silk rope rather than a hemp one, while the military career of his grandmother’s great-uncle Tom almost came to an end when he called publicly for his commanding officer to be prosecuted for cowardice.

Nonetheless, they were practising Presbyterians and took Ian to church with them on Sundays. When he became attracted to girls, he rebelled, and stopped attending.

The Hamiltons had created perhaps the first middle-class rebel. Although we see many Isobels and Tarquins gluing themselves to highways today, Ian Hamilton was also among those who had no contact with the working class:

He was educated at the John Neilson Institute, a fee-paying school in Paisley that “kept me from meeting poorer children”.

Even in his youth, he rejected the notion of monarchy:

During a wartime visit by George VI he was instructed to join fellow pupils cheering along the route but instead “got on my bike and went home”. His absence was noticed and he was hauled up before the entire school.

He became interested in Scottish independence during that time:

Wanting to fly, he tried to join the RAF in 1943 but was too young. He finally signed up in 1945, serving as a flight mechanic and justifying his presence by explaining that “England is my favourite foreign country”. He read law at the University of Glasgow at a time of growing dissatisfaction, with two million Scots signing the Scottish Covenant petition demanding home rule.

As a lawyer, he refused to pledge his loyalty to the Queen:

A year after publishing No Stone Unturned (1952), one of several books about the Stone of Destiny incident, he was admitted to the bar. However, he refused to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, insisting that she was merely Queen Elizabeth and the use of the regnal number was in breach of the 1707 Act of Union because Elizabeth I had been queen of England and not Scotland.

He was not the only one who thought that. A number of red pillar boxes (mailboxes) with EIIR on them were vandalised in Scotland. Some were set on fire.

The Queen’s regnal number became the subject of a court case in Scotland involving Hamilton:

A court case in which he was joined by John MacCormick, rector of the University of Glasgow, ruled against them, saying the monarch’s title was the sole prerogative of the sovereign. Winston Churchill weighed in, suggesting the sovereign should use whichever of the Scottish or English number was higher, though when Hamilton took silk in 1980 [to become a QC, Queen’s Counsel] he simply swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth.

In his private life, Ian Hamilton liked the ladies:

After a “misspent youth” that included “a holiday in Holland as the guest of a glorious woman, the first of many with whom I have been endlessly in love”, he met Sheila Fenwick, a domestic science teacher from Sunderland. They married in 1954 and had three children: Jamie, who works in the royal parks in Edinburgh; Maggie, who predeceased him; and Aileen, who is retired. The marriage was dissolved because “paradoxically, but not perhaps surprisingly, Sheila got fed up with my antics”.

In 1973, while on a canoeing trip across Scotland, he capsized on the Falls of Lora, near Oban. Swimming ashore, he was met by Jeanette Stewart, whose family were hoteliers in Argyll. They married the following year and she also survives him with their son, Stewart, who works in the film industry.

Hamilton’s story has been told in his books and in two films. What a heist.

Tomorrow’s post concludes with Coronation Day memories from two of the Queen’s maids of honour.