Armchair Nation (14 page)

On Tuesday 2 June, BBC television opened earlier than ever, at 9.15 a.m., with the test card, to allow people to tweak their aerials. A million and a half people were gathering in public places, such as town hall ballrooms, hospitals and parish churches, which had all been granted a special collective licence to watch television. In London's Royal Festival Hall, 3,000 holders of tickets, which had sold out within fifty-four minutes of going on sale in April, arrived at 10 a.m. and collected a packed lunch at the doors. The same number filled the Odeon at Leicester Square. Butlin's holiday campers in resorts like Filey, Skegness and Clacton watched on big screens. In clubs along the Mall like the Reform and White's, members watched in darkened rooms where they could also look through the windows at the curtained grandstands to see the procession in real life. A reporter present in one of these clubs wrote that ‘the experience seemed to break down some stubborn middle-class prejudices against television'.
⁵⁰

Some 20.4 million people watched at least half an hour of the service, nearly double the radio audience, with almost as many watching the processions. Since there were only 2.7 million television sets, that meant an average of seven and a half people to a set, excluding children, who were not counted in the stats. A Mass Observation researcher on the London Underground noticed how every family party was ‘carrying bags with food or bottles. And those with just bottles grinned at each other in an understanding sort of way. They were obviously all people going to TV parties.' Bradford in the early morning, according to another Mass Observer, was ‘full of people crossing the city, with baskets of provisions and thermos flasks … half Bradford seemed to be off early to a television party with the other half'. Viewing parties had their own etiquette. Best clothes were the norm, with children sporting coronation favours and carrying their own cushions, and guests arriving with a small gift. The
Daily Herald
's doctor advised that the set should be on the floor, resting on books, for ‘the best way to strain your eyes and get a first-class headache is by looking upwards'.
⁵¹
Living rooms across Britain soon gave off a heady mixed scent of flowers, furniture polish and sweat.

We do not know how many viewers followed the pious instructions
of newspapers that they add their own ‘Amens' to the prayers and stand and repeat the cry ‘Vivat Regina!' along with the Abbey congregation. Mass Observation's investigators discovered that a reverent silence was certainly not being observed in front of all TV sets. Among the working classes, who tended to be neither strong royalists nor resentful republicans, comments were jocular. ‘Look at the Queen. She's like a plum pudding by now, they've put so many dresses on her,' said a young woman in an ice-cream parlour in a poor area of London where television and free ice cream for children were provided. ‘I bet they've doped him with bromide,' said the hostess in a house in Finsbury Drive, Bradford, when the camera rested on Prince Charles in the gallery, with his hair neatly plastered down.
⁵²

Among the VIP-only audience at the Gaumont cinema, Manchester, there was the odd burst of applause for the Queen and Winston Churchill, combined with much shuffling, chatting and fidgeting. Nineteen-year-old Alan Bennett, on leave from his national service, watched at a friend's house. ‘As so often with the central rituals of English life, I was in two minds about it,' he said later. ‘Yes the pageantry was moving, the music thrilling, but I was a soldier. I knew there was no pageantry without a great deal of bullying.' Bennett could already do an impression of Geoffrey Fisher who, despite his fears about television, seemed to be enjoying himself at the ceremony with his resonant recitations, and whom Bennett thought emblematic of that yet unnamed thing, the Establishment: ‘Not a whiff of doubt … that mixture of hypocrisy and self-assurance that will always get you to the top in English public life.'
⁵³

Mass Observation asked children to keep diaries before and after the coronation. Almost all watched the TV, often at aunties' or grandparents' houses, many making journeys of fifty or sixty miles in cars and on public transport to do so. Some were confused by what they saw – one thought the Queen was being crowned by Winston Churchill – and others were disappointed that it was not in colour, perhaps because they had heard so much beforehand about the Queen's golden coach and her red velvet train. There were some non-viewers. ‘I hope that someone will at least be kind enough to let me have a short look
at their Television Set,' wrote eleven-year-old Peter Johnson, dejectedly. ‘Our next door neighbour has a Television Set but all I have seen of it is the aerial.'
⁵⁴

Many adults seemed unimpressed with the padding surrounding the ceremony. One Mass Observer pronounced himself ‘bored by the crowd reportage and lame bits of interviewing, and the three nightmare New Zealanders who the commentator seemed unable to get rid of'. Four other Mass Observers said they found the procession ‘boring'; another fell asleep during it. After the event, 109 viewers were asked what they thought was the day's most inspiring moment. The crowning came second with eleven votes, seven behind that day's news of the conquest of Everest, a moment unrecorded by television.
⁵⁵

Over 20 million viewers still left many people unaccounted for. ‘I did not fancy accepting any of the numerous invitations to TV as I regard it as a very inferior cinema and I felt the conversation would be inane,' wrote one Mass Observation diarist. While this television agnostic actually ended up watching briefly at a friend's house, another went walking on Dartmoor, ‘determined to avoid at all costs any news and activity connected with the Coronation'. Another arranged an anti-coronation party at which ‘republican songs were sung, the Queen symbolically executed and various anti-royalist parlour games played'. A student who tried to avoid the coronation by cycling through Sussex country lanes kept being reminded of it by the deserted villages, with bursts of noise coming from houses with television aerials and the curtains drawn. Joan Bakewell did not bother to watch with her fellow students on a TV set newly acquired by Newnham College, Cambridge, and she noted later that she had made no reference to the coronation in her diary for that day: ‘So much for all that fanciful talk about new Elizabethans.'
⁵⁶

Among those who watched it, though, there were some converts among the quasi-republicans. At 6 p.m. in Finsbury Drive, Bradford, the Mass Observation investigator dispatched someone to buy a bottle of Dry Fly sherry, and they all toasted the Queen, with remarks along the lines of: ‘Who could have thought that we would all have turned such Royalists?' There was high praise for the BBC and the
medium of television itself. Huw Wheldon, then BBC Television's Publicity Officer, gave out audience reaction figures: ninety-eight per cent said they had enjoyed the broadcast ‘very much'. When a
Daily Express
reporter wondered what the recalcitrant had objected to, Wheldon replied, ‘If Our Lord came back to earth two per cent of the people would complain, “There He goes again, always walking on the water”.'
⁵⁷
Many praised Richard Dimbleby's softly sonorous commentary, so expertly woven in between the Archbishop's words and the blasts of trumpets that it was as though he were conducting the ceremony himself.

Viewers also commended the BBC on the quality of the pictures, for the newer television sets no longer had those curved screens like cod's eyes which warped the image when viewed at an angle. TV cameras now had derivative equalisers which eliminated distortion, and there were none of the blank screens and juddering images which used to occur when switching from one camera to another. The new zoom lenses allowed cameras to move in smoothly and, as Queen Elizabeth walked down the aisle, her face grew bigger in the frame as the ill-defined rule about close-ups was disregarded. The popular historian and eager monarchist Arthur Bryant reflected that television was best when the actors were unconscious of it, thus avoiding ‘that note of forced insincerity which, as in early Victorian photographic groups, is its besetting fault as an artistic medium'. By these lights the Queen was a TV natural, with ‘the same unchallengeable ascendancy over the eye and mind of the watcher that Charlie Chaplin had on the cinema screen'.
⁵⁸

At 5.20 p.m., after the Queen's last appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony, twenty-six per cent of the adult population carried on watching the children's programmes and about the same number stayed for the rest of the evening until, at 11.30 p.m., Richard Dimbleby delivered an unannounced, impromptu sermon, summing up the day from an empty, silent Westminster Abbey – ‘an epilogue sublime, touching and human as had been the great day itself', according to the
Television Annual for 1954
.
⁵⁹

Many viewers must still have been watching this late because
traffic was slack until midnight, when a rush of people returned home from their television parties and the last trams and buses were full. For the first time in British history, television had emptied streets and becalmed the nation. Thousands of viewers sent congratulations to the BBC or the
Radio Times
. ‘Praise may seem paltry and congratulations colourless but we must try to express our overwhelming gratitude,' wrote Donald Davey of Uppermoor Pudsey. ‘To all who brought us such joy we can but say thank you, and again, thank you.' In many parts of the provinces and regions, though, the feeling that the coronation was a London affair persisted until the day itself, ‘and even this was not entirely broken down by the chance to participate offered by the television'.
⁶⁰

People who rented sets just for the coronation usually held on to them, and the normal summer slump in television sales failed to materialise. By autumn, manufacturers were able to lower production costs and reduce prices. The TV screens at the Earls Court radio show in August had increased in average size from twelve to seventeen inches: no longer would anyone complain about the picture being too small. When the Christmas trade in 1953 broke all records for furniture and electrical goods, retailers speculated that this was due to ‘the stay-at-home propensities induced by television' and ‘the television party … fostering a new pride in the home'.
⁶¹

The post-coronation television boom coincided happily with the end of rationing. The easing of restrictions on hire purchase in July 1954 was probably more important than the coronation in turning television into a mass medium, for people could now walk into a shop and buy a £60 TV for £6 down, or sometimes no deposit at all, with the repayments spread over as long as the shopkeeper would allow. For those who could still not afford a set on the ‘never never', pubs now had televisions. A glossy new publication,
TV Mirror
, featured a 200-year-old inn in south London which advertised ‘Good Beer and
Television Nightly' and photographed a woman wearing field glasses so she could see the screen more clearly.
⁶²

The rural writer and conservationist John Moore, living on the rustic borders of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, noted that three out of five cottages in his nearest village, Bredon, now had an aerial on the roof. He had overheard farmers and labourers talking about Margot Fonteyn and Shakespeare, after switching on for the boxing and variety shows and finding these programmes by accident. ‘Whereas the countryman always regarded sound radio with a faint awe, he accepts television as a commonplace,' reflected Moore after watching the coronation in his local, the Fox and Hound. ‘Standing there in the bar – and yet standing, it seemed, within a few feet of the altar in Westminster Abbey – we accepted that sheer magic of the business without turning a hair.' Watching the majestic occasion in this ordinary setting, though, Moore felt ‘doubtful and afraid … it took a lot of foam-flecked horses, and a lot of bonfires, too, to bring to us the first tidings of Waterloo … The countryman is a countryman no longer. The TV camera has given him one of the dubious gifts which the Devil gave to Faust: the privilege of “looking in” at whatever he wanted to see. It didn't do much good to poor Faust.'
⁶³

The televising of the coronation heightened the sense of injustice in those towns and villages that still did not have television. Unlucky places like Southampton, Aberdeen and Plymouth had missed out because of the awkward shape of the island, and its fractal coastline, which the TV signal strained to reach. Brighton had managed to acquire a signal, just in time, from a temporary mast mounted in an old wartime trailer, hastily resprayed BBC green to conceal the military camouflage, high up on the South Downs at Truleigh Hill on the site of an old radar station. There was much muttering among its coastal cousins about how exactly the well-connected ‘London by the Sea' had managed to acquire pictures while they remained televisionless.