FULL FEATURE: An Unexpected Coronation

That saved the British monarchy...

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the coronation of George VI in 1937. Seeing as we also saw one a year ago this week too, (until 2023, you had to be well over 70 to remember the last) I thought I’d do a write up on it to see how it compared to what we saw and experienced. Stay with me, because there is a twist.

At 3:00am on 12th May 1937, King George VI was rudely awoken. The culprits were a collection of loudspeakers being tested on Constitution Hill, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. He wrote that they might as well have been in the royal bedroom for the racket they made. Then troops and marching bands began tramping by on their way to their ceremonial duties, and all chance of sleep was gone.

The King had been dreading this day. He was not a man for who life in the spotlight came easy, he knew full well that in this sense he was inferior to his brother, who had abdicated and done a runner to France. Speaking in public was torment for him, he hadn’t been trained for this, and it was not only his future that had been irrevocably skewed onto a new path. The presence of the throne was going to impact his children, and his children’s children. Nothing would be the same. But someone had to take this on, and if he was anything, George VI was loyal, and he was resolved to do the right thing. So here he was, climbing out of bed and getting ready to be crowned. I’d argue that it takes more of a man to pledge his life to unwanted, massive responsibilities that belonged to someone else, than if he was a narcissist born to play to the crowds.

‘I could eat no breakfast & had a sinking feeling inside,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘I knew that I was to spend the most trying day, and to go through the most important ceremony of my life. The hours of waiting before leaving for Westminster Abbey were the most nerve racking.' As the ceremony played out, he could be seen anxiously working his jaw. One of the bishops managed to tread on the King’s cumbersome robes and almost tripped him up as he tried to get off his throne to depart the abbey. ‘I had to tell him to get off it pretty sharply as I nearly fell down.’

This all went unnoticed, and King George emerged from Westminster Abbey unscathed and with a heavy weight balanced on his head and a nervous expression. The most terrifying ordeals were still to come. The new King had obsessed over the public radio broadcast most of all. His trouble in getting his words out was no secret. Then, there was the balcony. He clung to humour throughout the day; all of the mishaps and errors that occurred, he used to to break the tension. As he prepared to step out onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace to wave to thousands waiting for him, and they chanted ‘we want the King,’ he joked: ‘The King wants his dinner.’

Queen Mary, who ditched the medieval protocol of the late King’s widow not attending the coronation to support her son in fraught circumstances on 12th May 1937, Princess Margaret Rose and her father, King George VI on the balcony at Buckingham Palace.

---

It’s not hard to cover the coronation from the perspective of the man at the centre of it all. Everyone was watching him, listening to him. What’s tougher to reconstruct is the day through the eyes of normal people. So I’m going to rewind, to three hours before those loudspeakers on Constitution Hill woke up the King and take you out onto the streets of London, my hometown, instead…

---

At midnight, London was shrouded in a thick, wet fog. People were already beginning to arrive at the big railway termini in the city; Waterloo, King’s Cross, London Bridge. At Paddington, by 1:45am all of the available seats were crowded with people eating, reading. Half an hour later one of the restaurants put out a sign: 'Breakfast served now.’

Plenty of those on the streets had stayed out later than usual on account of all of the displays throughout the centre of the city. You would have had to have been in your mid-thirties to have any detailed recollection of the coronation of George V, so for the young, this was a novel experience. The West End was alive with music; navy men giving their rendition of Popeye The Sailor Man. Two rival groups tried to drown each other out with Shoe-Shine Boy versus Annie Laurie, side by side. Girls worse for wear after a night of drinking found their way to Kensington Gardens, which was was being utilised as a military camp for some of the 32,500 troops due to participate in the celebrations. They leaned over the park railings shouting  to the soldiers, who ruefully gestured to the guards hemming them in. On and around the processional route, the crowds were thick enough at 2:30am that people were forced into the road to walk.

This route was well established for royal events. Setting out from Buckingham Palace, the King’s coach was to take a direct route down The Mall, turning right at Trafalgar Square and passing along Whitehall. Afterwards, the route was more circuitous in order to allow people to gather and watch. The procession would pass along the Embankment, cut across Trafalgar Square and then proceed on a loop up past Piccadilly Circus, along Oxford Street to Marble Arch. Some of the last crowds to see the King would be thousands gathered along East Carriage Drive and Park Lane. From Hyde Park Corner it was a straight shot along Constitution Hill to get back to Buckingham Palace.

London was filling up. Before 3:00am it was already taking fifteen minutes to get up to street level from the platform at Oxford Circus. Traders were out in force early, weighed down with anything and everything they thought they might sell to spectators. Flags and portraits were standard. Old ladies weaved their way through the crowds offering rosettes. Patriotic paraphernalia was everywhere, with one company even selling pet mice coloured red, white and blue. ‘Hearth rugs and bathroom mats, bicycles and bedsteads, carpets and cushions, dinner services and toilet ware, coal-scuttles and linoleums, all are on sale in Coronation colours.’ There was seemingly no dignity about where to draw the line. ‘Had I not viewed the actual goods with my own eyes,’ wrote one astonished witness, ‘I would never have believed that girls would wear red, white and blue 'undies', and go to bed in dainty sleeping suits bespattered with Imperial Crowns and Royal Monograms. But apparently they do.’ Perhaps the most amusing effort at cashing in came from London Zoo, who threw a special chimpanzee tea-party. ‘The chimpanzees will drink their milk from Coronation mugs and their table will be decorated with a Union Jack.’ The resident elephants were to have their nails gilded in Indian style.

---