Family Britain, 1951-1957 (47 page)

I shall spend Coronation day quite quietly. I can see myself going to bed and there won’t be all that noise going on with the bulldozer outside, so I shall be able to sleep peacefully. I’m so tired of the noise of men hammering, it will be so peaceful. I’m very thankful for the holiday for that reason.
(74-year-old woman)

If I’m not working I think the best thing to do will be to make friends with someone with a television set a week or so before and then drop in casually like, and most likely they’ll let you have a look.
(32-year-old baker’s roundsman)

Well, I’d very much like to go, but my husband won’t hear of it; he says I’d be a fool to go pushing in all those crowds. He says, what’s the point of having television if I go up to town? So I expect we’ll just look in, but I must say I yearn to go and see it in the live flesh.
(42-year-old wife of builder’s foreman)

The 55-year-old wife of a clerical officer struck a rare religious note: ‘I shall spend a good bit of the day on my knees, praying for that poor soul. She’s so young. I don’t think she knows what she’s let herself in for. But she’s got that beautiful husband beside her – hasn’t he the loveliest face?’

May was a month of mounting anticipation. ‘Everyone is hoping that either this glorious weather will hold for the Coronation, or that it will rain soon, and get it over,’ recorded Madge Martin in Oxford on the 12th. Across the country plans for Coronation street parties and celebrations were well under way, though in New Malden, Surrey, it emerged that some organisers had been told by parents that they did not want their offspring to mix with common children, prompting a
People
headline on the 17th, ‘They’re much too posh for street party’. Class was also not forgotten in Brixton. ‘First Coronation decorations up in Vassall Road,’ noted Florence Speed two days later. ‘Paper strips with portraits of the Queen plastered on every window except one . . . All pure Woolworths.’ That same day in Manchester a middle-aged man in the textile trade told M-O that everyone he spoke to agreed there was a ‘Coronation fever about’, and a young working-class woman described how ‘it’s like the Christmassy feeling in the factory where I work’, with pictures of the royal couple ‘all over the factory walls’.
²

Two sometimes grumpy diarists agreed on the 21st that things were astir. ‘The Coronation fever is now growing daily and Keighley puts more and more decorations up each day,’ noted Kenneth Preston, while Anthony Heap in the capital described how ‘the main streets – especially those on the route of the Coronation Procession and subsequent royal drives round London – are rapidly being transformed into newly cleaned, freshly painted, gaily decorated avenues of festive colour’, adding that ‘the preparations for this Coronation seem to be on a much bigger and extensive scale than were those for the last one sixteen years ago’. All this was not to everyone’s liking. ‘London is becoming increasingly hellish, swarms of people and a perpetual misery of traffic congestion,’ complained Noël Coward on the 24th. ‘The streets are chaos owing to the Coronation decorations. It will be a comfort when it is all over.’ Madge Martin, though, was closer to the norm on Saturday the 30th: ‘The enormous feeling of tension and excitement increases daily. How we shall miss it, when Tuesday is over.’ However, as she noted ominously on the Sunday: ‘Very cool, unsettled weather.’
³

One should not exaggerate the euphoria. ‘Would you mind telling me how you feel about the Coronation?’ an M-O investigator asked during May in working-class Fulham:

They overdo it, it’s been going on so long. The press overdoes it till people get sick and tired.
(M70)

Neither one thing nor the other, I don’t mind it, but it doesn’t mean a lot to me personally.
(F27)

Oh rather thrilled, I’m excited to see the children enjoying themselves, we’ve had our turn.
(F41)

Well, er, it’s rather nice to have the day off.
(M54)

I feel alright.
(M45)

I feel it’s a good thing if everybody does their little bit to make it a success.
(M71)

Oh just ordinary.
(F73)

Well I feel very pleased about it myself, I feel quite worked up about it – you see it everywhere now really, don’t you?
(F65)

I think it’s a waste of money.
(M42)

Well, I’d say it cheers the country up. It’s been a bit depressing since the war. Haven’t you noticed it? People don’t seem the same, do they? A thing like this seems to work up the co-operation a bit.
(M40)

Definitely I’m all for it, all in favour!
(M58)

A final reply (
M61
) reminds that the personal always transcends the public. ‘I’d get up there if I could but there is not much chance, it means starting off so early, and my wife died last week so I shan’t be feeling all that much like it.’

Even so, it seems that it was precisely in traditional working-class areas like Fulham that the Coronation was celebrated most enthusiastically. ‘In the poorer areas, the streets are thick with bunting and there is much enthusiasm for street parties,’ an M-O panel member suggestively reported in late May about the decorations in Burnley. ‘Out of town,’ by contrast, ‘there are rows of undecorated Semis.’ In Fulham itself, Lillie Walk was a narrow alleyway with 42 houses, mostly lived in by labourers and on the local council’s ‘condemned’ list:

Down the entire length of the Walk [noted the M-O investigator on the 30th] there are rows and rows of bunting, while paper garlands and lines of small Union Jacks are strung across from top windows one side of the road to the windows opposite. Every house has pictures of the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, and Princess Anne pasted in the parlour window and the two small top bedroom windows. Over the doorways are fixed crowns, gold and silver, large and small, posters with the wording ‘God Save Our Queen’ or ‘Long Live Our Queen’ with the initials E.R.II. The outer walls of the front parlours are completely hidden with Union Jacks, more gold and silver crowns or coats-of-arms.

‘It’ll be the last coronation we’ll have down here,’ a 60-year-old woman explained, ‘because they’re pulling the houses down and we’re all going to shift, so we’re making it a kind of farewell party too.’ Money for the street party for the Walk’s children had been collected on a regular basis since the previous June. ‘Usually lots of people go out on Saturday nights to the pubs, but last week-end and the one before that they were sitting on stools near their front-doors chatting away,’ related a middle-aged man about the sacrifices that had been made to pay for the decorations. ‘The same goes for the pictures. They put their picture-money away specially to make the Walk look nice and bright. We’re all in it. We’re all excited and want to make a show.’ Or, in the words of a middle-aged woman who had gone without her drink: ‘We’re all neighbours and we’re all happy-go-lucky and it’s got to be a day all of us will remember – the kids and all of us.’
⁴

By this time the airwaves were pervaded by the impending event, typified by
Coronation Music Hall
on the 30th attracting 91 per cent of the TV public and getting a ‘Reaction Index’ of 90, the latter figure acclaimed by BBC audience research as the ‘highest ever recorded for a Light Entertainment and the highest for any TV broadcast of any kind’. Accordingly,
Woman’s Hour
on Monday the 1st, introduced as usual by Marjorie Anderson, included not only the voices of some of the Coronation visitors in London and the latest instalment of Lytton Strachey’s
Queen Victoria
but also a talk by a housewife expressing her thoughts on Coronation Eve. She called it ‘Dedication’:

Last Christmas the Queen asked us all to pray for her on her Coronation Day. She called us, surely, not to lip service, but to share in her personal dedication in the daily round of our own lives.

What can this dedication mean to an ordinary housewife like me? Selfless living so often seems to be something of the mountain top, something difficult to work out in terms of pots and pans, ration books and children fast growing out of their clothes.

Well, first of all, I’m sure it means that the things we long to see in our nation we must first find for ourselves in our own hearts and homes.

My husband tells me that he believes that what happens in the home makes a tremendous difference to a man in his work, whether he is dealing with men or materials. I believe this is just as true of our children. To send out our husbands and children happily in the morning is a way that we women can link ourselves with the great world outside our homes, and feel that we are helping to contribute to the peace we long for so much . . .

The Queen will live to make our nation great, and so must I. While hers may often be in spectacular ways my own dedication may just be in the caring I put into the tiny details of my everyday life. Yes even in the washing up, in things like seeing that I wash most carefully round the handles of cups and saucepans – in the thought and preparation that goes into the cooking – every tiny eye out of the potatoes and spotless hands to cook with . . .

In these small ways, I need to accept fully the responsibility for what my nation is, and for what the world is. The fear, the greed, the hate, which so distress me in the world at large ought to distress me just as much when I see them, in smaller ways, in myself. At least there I can fight it, and in my heart and home I need to build a citadel against these things. During her Coronation service the Queen dedicates herself to serve the cause of righteousness. Let us do the same.
⁵

The name of the 42-year-old speaker – living in Wolverhampton, married to a sheet-metal worker, bringing up three sons – was Mary Whitehouse, set to return to obscurity but now having savoured (thanks to the BBC) the buzz of moral exhortation.

There were few more dedicated housewives than Judy Haines in Chingford. ‘I don’t know how, but I’ve worked solidly from 7am to 9pm for days it seems,’ she sighed that Monday. ‘Sylvia’s mother and Valerie’s mother came round to announce the Avenue is to hold a Coronation Party on June the 13th. Had booked for British Legion Party, but decided in favour of former one. What a late hour! We gave 10/-.’ Another, altogether less domestic diarist, Frank Lewis, was rather irritably fending for himself at home in Barry, his mother and sister having gone up to London in the hope of finding a place to watch the procession. ‘I’ve never had a great deal of interest in Royalty, though this
IS
a big occasion,’ he reflected that day. ‘I just can’t be bothered . . .’ A sense of adventure, meanwhile, also only partially flickered in Hampstead:

I wouldn’t go myself, but my boy friend wants me to come, all the time from ten o’clock tonight. I’m dreading it. I’m only hoping this rain’ll put him off.
(F25)

Yes, we’ll be going, a friend of mine and my daughter, we’ll be starting out about ten o’clock. I’m going to borrow an old tweed coat – this one I’ve got is quite warm, I don’t mean that, but I don’t want to use it for sitting around in the rain, lying out in all night. We’ll take some coffee, and a packet of Quickies for my face in the morning. My husband’s furious, he thinks it’s barmy.
(F50)

Poor Gladys Langford went – ‘trying to dispel my gloom’ – to Marble Arch to see the decorations:

It was well nigh impossible to look at the decorations, as the pavements were wedged tightly with people. Some sat on the edge of the kerb having taken up already their positions for viewing tomorrow’s procession . . . Outside Selfridge’s the throng was at its thickest. People dragged small children along . . . Many aged and lame women were milling about. I edged out of the crowd into Bond St and thence to Piccadilly. Many people with stools, bed, blankets and bags of fodder were on the kerb under the portico at the Ritz. Later came a heavy downpour. The doctors will be busy after all this for it is quite cold. Here in the hotel [ie the one in Islington where she lived] there is to be a bonfire, fireworks and punch-drinking – but not for me!

‘Everybody – everything – tense and poised,’ wrote Madge Martin in Oxford. ‘The weather simply horrible – freezingly cold, stormy and unkind.’
⁶

It proved a pretty wet night for those camping out in central London, with women outnumbering men by about seven to one. ‘People were very scrupulous about saving the places of those absent – for strangers just as much as friends,’ noted an M-O investigator. ‘There was an empty space near the group with whom Inv was sitting, alleged to belong to “a chap” who was unknown to any of them, yet they had been defending it loyally from all comers for a couple of hours.’ Cold and mostly wet continued the weather in the morning, though according to Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in her seat in a stand in the Mall by 7.00, ‘the crowds were
most
touching – wrapped in soaked newspapers & plastic mackintoshes but burning with loyalty & full of good humour, tho’ many had been there all night’. It was a good humour increased (across the country as well as in central London) by the triumphant news about a British-led expedition – in the
Daily Express
’s immortal headline, ‘All This – And Everest Too!’ At least one couple, though, was smugly dry in the covered stand in Parliament Square. ‘The tickets were an even wiser investment than Denis knew when he bought them,’ recalled Margaret Thatcher, ‘for it poured all day and most people in the audience were drenched – not to speak of those in the open carriages of the great procession. The Queen of Tonga never wore
that
dress again. Mine lived to see another day.’

For the damp, huddled masses, watching the carriage procession after the three-hour service in Westminster Abbey, there was no doubt who were the two stars of the show. ‘It is pouring with rain,’ noted another M-O investigator, ‘but the Queen of Tonga sits in an open carriage beaming on everyone and waving to the crowds who laugh and point and cheer loudly.’ Finally, in a gold state coach drawn by eight greys, came the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth: