‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’ Those were the words of the thirty-four-year-old explorer and mountaineer Edmund Hillary to his fellow mountaineer, George Lowe, upon his successful ascent of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953. The New Zealander and his Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had achieved something widely believed to be impossible: they had scaled the highest mountain in the world, overcoming weather conditions, a lack of bottled oxygen, and health fears occasioned by the height of the altitude, to write themselves into history. Their names, deservedly, would live for ever.
Yet the immediate challenge upon their return from the peak of Everest was how to inform the rest of the world. That challenge fell to James – later Jan – Morris, then a reporter for The Times and the only journalist who had been attached to the expedition. Everest was over four and a half thousand miles away from London, and Morris sent a coded message to the newspaper on 30 May via the British embassy in Kathmandu, reading, ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.’ The message – innocuous to the uncomprehending – announced that the summit had been reached (‘snow conditions bad’), and that those who had done so were Hillary (‘advanced base abandoned’) and Norgay (‘awaiting improvement’). The news took two days to reach Britain, where – by pure, serendipitous coincidence – the story led the newspapers on 2 June 1953: the day of the coronation.
Had Elizabeth had a moment to glance at the headlines that morning, she would undoubtedly have been delighted at the way the ascent of Everest was conflated with her sacred duties that day. The Daily Mail called Hillary’s achievement ‘The Crowning Glory’, and the Daily Express, above the headline ‘All This – and Everest Too!’ – declared, ‘Be Proud of Britain on This Day, Coronation Day’. Despite the errors of fact (Hillary was a New Zealand citizen, not the Briton the paper claimed, but he was, at least, a member of the Commonwealth, as well as the ‘20th Century Elizabethan’ he was described as), the fortunate tidings gave the country a much-needed morale boost amid the miserable wet weather that had threatened to mar the coronation celebrations.
In the event, the downpour could not dampen the spirits of those who had thronged the streets, desperate to catch a glimpse of the young queen on her way to the ceremony. The Express’s reporter, R. M. MacColl, wrote, with a touch of colour, that ‘Despite the rain, defying the rain, singing in the rain, the people surged into London all day yesterday and equably sat or lay down in its streets.’ Just as there had been on VE Day, nearly eight years earlier to the day, there were spontaneous public singalongs; MacColl observed that the most popular tune appeared to be ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Coronation’ sung to the tune of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, and wrote with wry indulgence that ‘Near the Admiralty Arch a Highland reel was started by some youths wearing tartan bonnets. In no time a great section of the crowd was bobbing up and down with them and when a couple of good-humoured policemen moved up their arms were raised and they too for a few moments appeared to be swaying to the rhythm.’1
Amid the noise and celebrations and good humour, the queen prepared for the day. There had been a gradual build-up of excitement over the previous ten days, culminating in a Buckingham Palace garden party on 29 May with a cast of characters that ranged from foreign royalty to English bishops, all brought together with one aim: to see the coronation, and to watch the young monarch succeed. Even the usually straight-faced Colville, not a man given to hyperbole or unnecessary excitement, wrote in his diary, ‘Never has there been such excitement … never has a monarch received such adulation.’2 The rehearsals, masterminded by Prince Philip and the Duke of Norfolk, had gone well, although the queen had one unorthodox request: the Bishop of Durham, Michael Ramsey, who was graced with suitably dramatic eyebrows, had to be asked during one rehearsal to keep his brows still, on the grounds, in the words of Ramsey’s biographer, Owen Chadwick, that ‘they made her smile and she did not wish to smile in the wrong place’.3
On the day itself, the weather remained atrocious and inauspicious, both grey and wet, it was enough to lower the spirits of all but the most ardent royalists. Which on that day seemed to comprise virtually the entire country, not least the half-million who lined the streets to cheer the dignitaries, foreign and domestic alike, who began arriving at Westminster Abbey from eight o’clock in the morning. One of them, Queen Salote of Tonga, occasioned one of Noël Coward’s greatest apocryphal quips: the queen was statuesque, to say the least, and accompanied by the minuscule Sultan of Kelantan, they made an incongruous duo in their open carriage, visible to the cheering crowds. When a friend of Coward’s asked, ‘Who’s that?’ as they sat watching the ceremony on television, Coward reportedly said, ‘Her lunch.’4
Churchill, as at the royal wedding six years earlier, attracted cheers and excitement that practically rivalled the monarch’s welcome for giddy approval. He was, appropriately, clad in the robes of the Order of the Garter that he had recently received, and, fearing exhaustion, had spent the previous night at Downing Street, a short carriage ride from the abbey. A few days earlier, he had addressed the queen and Prince Philip at a lunch reception for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and had hinted at what she might expect from the events of the coronation and beyond, saying, ‘in our island, by trial and error, and by perseverance across the centuries, we have found out a very good plan … the Queen can do no wrong. But advisers can be changed as often as the people like to use their rights for that purpose. A great battle is lost: Parliament turns out this Government. A great battle is won – crowds cheer the Queen.’ He called this ‘a very commanding and durable doctrine’, and offered a paradox designed to indicate the immortal, unchanging nature of the Crown: ‘what goes wrong passes away with the politicians responsible … what goes right is laid on the altar of our united Commonwealth and Empire’.5
One of the queen’s maids of honour, Anne Glenconner, had arrived at the abbey early that morning. She described London as ‘an extraordinary sight, the streets full of tremendously cheerful people sitting or standing in the pouring rain’, and remarked that ‘after the doom and gloom of the post-war years, it was an especially incredible sight to behold’.6 She knew the precise timings of the day: the journey from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey would take nineteen minutes, and so the (notoriously uncomfortable) Gold State Coach that was bearing the queen and Prince Philip had to leave at 10.26 a.m. in order to convey the monarch to the Great West Door of the abbey, from where she would enter to begin the coronation. Perhaps as Glenconner glanced around at the guests, she would have seen Channon, sitting opposite the peeresses’ benches; he pronounced the long wait ‘enthralling’ for people-watching, although, ever sharp, he wrote in his diary that ‘Queen Mum was OK but compared badly with Queen Mary’s entry last time’.7
When the queen and Philip arrived, he was not allowed to enter with her – a decision made by Lascelles – but instead joined the procession, something that Charteris later commented ‘looked awful … when they shouted “Vivat! Vivat Regina!” she was on her own. It was not calculated to make him feel cheerful.’8 It had also been made clear to him that during the ceremony he would be expected to kneel before his wife and declare, ‘I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship, and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die against all manner of folks. So help me God.’9 The keenest-eyed viewer might have detected the hint of a wry smile on his face as he delivered these lines, all bound up with the suspicion of several courtiers and dignitaries that he was not taking the sacred ceremony as seriously as they were,* but was instead prepared to demonstrate what the day’s official photographer Cecil Beaton described as ‘a rather ragging attitude towards proceedings’.10
The duke’s comparative irreverence may or may not have made the queen feel more comfortable as she stood among her ladies-in-waiting, hearing the great swell of trumpets and the abbey’s organ, and preparing to enter for the ceremony. She was attired in a Norman Hartnell dress of ivory silk, embroidered with roses, thistles and the emblems of the British Isles and the Commonwealth, and she wore a long crimson velvet train over it, as was customary. As she waited for the moment that would define the rest of her life, she was calm. If she had any nerves, they were invisible to those around her. Sixteen years earlier, aged eleven, she had been present for her father’s coronation; five and a half years earlier, she had married at Westminster Abbey. It was not a building that held any fear for her.
She remembered the timings that had been so painstakingly worked out over the previous weeks. There was a fifteen-minute pause between her arrival and entrance, and it would take fifty-five seconds for her to walk into the Gothic arch of the abbey, at which point the trumpet fanfares would begin and she would proceed down the central aisle, watched by as many as three hundred and fifty million people round the world. It was estimated that the ceremony that she and her courtiers had been so reluctant to have televised would be viewed by around twenty-seven million people in Britain. Given that the population of the country was thirty-six million, this meant that three quarters of her subjects were able to watch every moment of proceedings.
As she prepared to enter, she may have thought of the broadcast she would deliver that evening. In it, she would declare that ‘Throughout this memorable day I have been uplifted and sustained by the knowledge that your thoughts and prayers were with me’, and, recognising the millions who had watched the event, ‘It is hard for me to find words in which to tell you of the strength which this knowledge has given me.’ Yet most important was the renewed compact that she now made with the British people and the rest of her audience. On her twenty-first birthday, in her Cape Town broadcast, she said that ‘I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’ Now, just over six years later, with the burden of monarchy thrust upon her, she could say, ‘I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.’11
As she glanced around her, with the drizzle falling on her garments, she would have seen the anxious, excited faces of her ladies-in-waiting, as well as the sterner expression of the Duke of Norfolk. When her father had been crowned on 12 May 1937, he had overcome his near-crippling nerves with a sense of religious deliverance; he had remarked afterwards to the Archbishop of Canterbury that ‘he felt throughout that Some One Else was with him’. Now, sixteen years later, as his daughter prepared to take up the mantle of majesty, it was not fanciful to imagine that she was accompanied, on some level, by her father’s spirit. He had inculcated a sense of duty in her, but also a compassion and a humility that meant that she had the potential to take the institution of the Crown in directions unimagined by any monarch since Victoria.
Her uncle had been an appalling, selfish king; her father a dutiful and serviceable one, who had found his true mettle in wartime. But Elizabeth II was someone quite different. The new Elizabethan era would be one of change, of evolution and of hope. She would establish herself as the longest-serving monarch in British history, and in many regards the greatest. Her reign would not be without controversy, incident or upset, but never would she be regarded by her loyal and adoring subjects as anything other than an inspiration to them all, right up until her death in September 2022. In the words of Handel’s coronation anthem, which would sound out so triumphantly during the anointing ceremony:
Zadok the priest
And Nathan the prophet
Anointed Solomon king
And all the people
Rejoiced, rejoiced, rejoiced
The music grew to its climax. It was time for the queen to embrace her destiny. She looked around at her ladies-in-waiting and smiled reassuringly. ‘Ready, girls?’ Then they stepped forward into the abbey and processed into immortality. As the anthem that would be sung so enthusiastically by millions that day, and for decades afterwards, declared:
God save our gracious Queen!
Long live our noble Queen!
God save the Queen!