3. ‘This is the day of the people’: the 1937 coronation

Barely had the dust stirred by the abdication crisis begun to settle when, with these words, Cosmo Lang publicly excoriated Edward VIII for his rejection of the throne in favour of personal fulfilment with his lover Wallis Simpson. The archbishop of Canterbury claimed to speak on behalf of the entire nation when he scolded the former monarch and his friends, declaring that Edward’s irreligious and self-indulgent existence was incompatible with the British way of life. In this respect, he also made implicit comparisons with the version of kingship he had helped to project through the God-fearing, family-centred public image of George V, in which duty had always seemed to come before ‘private happiness’. The archbishop’s conciliatory suggestion that Edward had possessed all the ‘natural gifts’ required of a monarch not only failed to conceal the contempt he harboured for the now former king but was also disingenuous. Yes, Edward had been, and continued to be, extremely popular, having developed a worldwide following as a prince of Wales renowned for his globe-trotting tours of the empire, for the interest he took in the lives of the working classes and the democratic candour with which he conducted himself both at home and abroad.² But his neglect of religion and royal protocol in favour of the fast life had put him at odds with the elderly archbishop.³ Earlier on in the year, during a meeting with the king, Lang had also had to defend the importance of the Christian ritual involved in the coronation service when challenged by a sovereign who wanted to scale back what he perceived as the humbuggery of royal ceremonial.⁴ This was just one example in a catalogue of offences which the prelate had compiled against Edward and which compelled him to help to pave the way for the removal of a monarch whose mistress, modernizing agenda and haphazard approach to public affairs posed a significant threat to the status quo.⁵

Edward’s decision to pursue ‘true love’ resonated with the interwar emphasis on self-fulfilment and met with popular approval among sections of the public. However when it was finally announced by the British media on 3 December 1936 that the king was in a relationship with, and intended to wed, a woman who had already been married twice and whose ex-husbands were both still living, his choice of Simpson as a wife challenged the model of Christian domesticity that had been diligently promoted by the House of Windsor under George V and which had been widely celebrated as a pillar of Britain’s national life. Edward was also deemed by some of his contemporaries to be too outspoken on political issues, putting him at odds with government ministers, including his prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who gradually determined that the king lacked the dutiful and moral characteristics that his father had embodied as a constitutional figurehead. Backed by a socially conservative political and religious elite, the prime minister made it clear to the king that he would be unable to marry Simpson unless he first gave up the throne – the alternative being that his government would resign in protest because he would have directly disregarded his ministers’ advice. Although Edward initially opposed Baldwin’s position, he ultimately yielded, recognizing that because he was a constitutional monarch he had to heed the will of parliament (as relayed to him by his prime minister in this instance). Consequently, on 10 December Edward signed the instrument of abdication that saw the throne pass to his younger brother, the duke of York, who acceded as King George VI.⁶

Following a week of press-led speculation and political wrangling, Lang took to the microphone in order to offer listeners spiritual guidance on recent events. After all, Edward had already had his say: on the evening of Friday 11 December he had delivered a special abdication broadcast confessing that he had ‘found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge [his] duties as king as [he] would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman [he] love[d]’.⁷ The powerful emotional appeal of this message, which did much to accelerate the idea that kingship was a burdensome enterprise, resonated with many who tuned in that night; and Lang now viewed it as a moral obligation to publicly speak out, given how the constitutional crisis had, through the femme fatale figure of the twice-divorced Simpson, called into question both the authority of the Church of England’s teachings on the sanctity of marriage and the virtue of the House of Windsor’s family life. However, with Edward taking leave of Britain for Europe and the foreseeable future, a number of commentators interpreted the archbishop’s intervention as unbecoming in the way it seemed to hound out of his homeland a man who was already down.⁸ Lang’s chaplains had received intelligence from clergy across Britain warning of the strong loyalties that still existed for Edward among many of his former subjects, but the archbishop chose to ignore this information in speaking out and, in doing so, turned himself and the Church into targets of popular resentment.⁹ In the same address he also commended Edward’s successor to listeners by praising George VI’s ‘happy and united’ domesticity and ‘high ideals of life and duty’. Then, in what the archbishop termed a ‘parentheses’, he added that the new king’s subjects should not be put off by his speech pattern, marked as it was by ‘an occasional and momentary hesitation’: ‘he has brought it into full control, and to those who hear, it need cause no sort of embarrassment, for it causes none to him’.¹⁰ This was a second serious misstep on Lang’s part: a British people left reeling by the sudden departure of their beloved Edward now learned that his replacement, no matter how dutiful and family orientated, was defective: George VI, with his conspicuous stammer, was a victim of his predecessors’ success as broadcasters and was at a grave disadvantage compared to both his older brother and father in the age of mass communication.

This chapter picks up the abdication story in the weeks that followed Edward’s sudden departure and Lang’s infamous broadcast. It examines how the duke of Windsor (as Edward became known) cast a long shadow over his successor and the way George VI, aided by royal and religious officials, sought to contain the aftershocks of the events of December 1936 through to and beyond the 1937 coronation.¹¹ The royal public relations repair job began immediately and should be viewed as an exercise in crisis management: the human drama at the centre of the abdication had thrown into question the core values that had underpinned the monarchy in the final years of George V’s reign. Under the old king, the House of Windsor was a family monarchy celebrated for the intimate culture of domesticity that it exemplified and, crucially, the ability of a well-known, caring sovereign to foster national unity through his concern for, and sense of duty to, his people.¹² Edward ultimately failed on both counts and it was left to his successor and those behind the throne to try to heal the deep divisions opened up by the abdication and to reunite the nation around a tarnished crown. In this respect, the royal household’s construction of George VI’s image and the expert orchestration of his coronation should be interpreted as part of a strategy to stabilize the monarchy’s position after Edward’s disastrous reign.

Contrary to the prevailing historical view that the new sovereign was warmly welcomed on his coronation day by a British people who rallied around the media image of him as a family man and a reluctant, yet dutiful king, it is clear that George VI’s personal virtues could not account on their own for the largely positive response to his crowning.¹³ While these were attractive characteristics that were purposely elevated so that he better resembled his father, the media coverage of his coronation and the large body of Mass Observation reports produced in response to the occasion suggest his crowning was celebrated as a symbol of the nation’s democratic vitality at a time of deep anxiety about Britain’s political culture, the nature of public emotion and the growing threat of European authoritarianism.¹⁴ Public intellectuals writing in the mid 1930s and historians writing in the present have noted that, in the last years of George V’s reign, the monarchy was widely projected as the key symbol of Britain’s democracy and that this vision of the nation’s political system provided a crucial liberal counter-narrative to continental dictatorship.¹⁵ Britain’s royal democracy again took centre stage on 12 May 1937, with courtiers, clergy and the media working in tandem to elevate George VI’s crowning as the moment that epitomized the success of the nation’s constitutional arrangement, the strength of its imperial ties and the public’s devotion to the crown. Combining new kinds of coverage with more established styles of reportage, all Britain’s major news outlets joined together to loudly champion to their audiences the nation’s social and political evolution and the significance of the king as the figurehead of democracy. In this way the monarchy entered a new important phase. No longer was it defined by a single magnetic personality who seemed to unite the nation through emotional bonds that connected him to his subjects: rather, George VI’s personal character made way on coronation day for what was instead a celebration of constitutional progress and national greatness against a troubled international backdrop. Indeed, while the king was presented as a brave stand-in for his morally flawed brother, his coronation revealed the limits of the more personal vision of kingship popularized by George V and Edward VIII, when the figure at the centre of the royal family group was a relatively unknown quantity. Fortunately for the new sovereign, his mother, Queen Mary, who was much better known to the public, was close at hand to lend proceedings a reassuring emotional continuity with the past.

‘One matchless blessing’

It was common knowledge among Britain’s journalists that George VI assumed the mantle of kingship unwillingly. Writing as the abdication crisis neared its climax, the London editor of the Manchester Guardian, James Bone, informed his boss, William Crozier, that the duke of York was ‘not keen at first’ to become king.¹⁶ Royal biographers – official and unofficial – have even suggested that, in the days leading up to Edward’s abdication, courtiers considered whether his youngest brother, the duke of Kent, would have been better suited to succeed him as king.¹⁷ This was probably because Kent, with his Hollywood good looks, his popular wife Marina and their growing brood of children, combined a star quality comparable to Edward’s with a domesticity in tune with the family-centred image of George V’s monarchy. As David Cannadine has discussed, there were serious concerns about the duke of York’s personality: ‘lamentably ill-educated, blighted by poor health, devoid of presence or glamour, and further hampered by overwhelming shyness and a debilitating stammer, George VI was initially greeted with muted enthusiasm verging on resentful disappointment’.¹⁸ Even the new queen consort, Elizabeth, expressed reservations about the task that lay ahead of her and her husband, telling her friend the writer Osbert Sitwell that ‘I fully expect that we may be moderately unpopular for some time’.¹⁹ Yet, George VI’s biographers have tended to smooth over the disquiet regarding the king’s personal qualities by presenting his coronation as the ‘crucial test’ through which he proved himself worthy of his role, silencing his critics and stabilizing the monarchy after his elder brother’s abdication.²⁰ Most historians have similarly argued that, after the turbulent events of December 1936, the press and public rallied around the dutiful figure of George VI and his family.²¹ While these accounts have perpetuated the royal household’s own narrative of continuity, they have obscured the deep anxieties that persisted about the new king’s character after his accession. Significantly, only six Mass Observation reports out of more than 150 collected by the organizers of the 1937 coronation project contained some statement of admiration for George VI and just two recorded unequivocal support for him.²² It would be wrong to generalize about how most British people felt about the new king based on the Mass Observation reports alone, but the paucity of supportive sentiment is striking, especially when compared to the large body of positive comments that were recorded about both his elder brother and mother.

From the moment George VI acceded to the throne he was disadvantaged. The key motif that had suffused his father’s public language on the burdens of royal duty seemed fully realized in his person. However, whereas George V had offset ideas of personal suffering through his mobilization of a strong, wise and caring public image, this identity was not available to his second son, who was comparatively unknown. Equally, the dynamic, masculine persona of Edward VIII, which combined the benevolent traits of his father’s image with a ‘forceful and forward looking style of manhood’ that many British people perceived as apposite at a time when autocratic modes of leadership were proving so successful on the Continent, was also unobtainable to George VI.²³ Indeed, the plentiful, admiring descriptions of Edward recorded by Mass Observation vividly contrasted with the lack of support logged for the new king and hinted at widespread doubts about his ability to lead a country threatened by the robust figures of the European dictators.²⁴ This sense of uncertainty about the new king’s qualities is important because it points to the characteristics that the British had come to look for in their royal leaders in the years before the Second World War. As is addressed later, the charisma vacuum created by George VI helped to realign the monarchy with constitutional politics after its brief flirtation with a more authoritarian mode of popular sovereignty as personified by Edward VIII, but the new king’s relative unpopularity compared to his brother suggests that some British people would have preferred to celebrate the version of monarchy captured in the personality cult which centred on the now duke of Windsor.

Lang’s attempt to downplay concerns about the new king’s infamous stammer as part of his broadcast on 13 December 1936 almost certainly had the reverse effect.²⁵ It marked George VI out as lacking the vocal abilities that had defined his father’s public image in the final years of his reign and may even have characterized the new king as psychologically damaged. With the psychologization of science between the wars, The Lancet medical journal had published an exchange of ‘expert’ opinions on the causes of ‘stammering’ at the beginning of 1936; and views converged on the idea that it was a neuropathic condition that stemmed from nervousness in childhood: it was not just a ‘disorder of speech, but a disorder of personality, an emotional disturbance’.²⁶ At a time when psychological understanding of self-development was undergoing popularization, George VI’s subjects may thus have perceived him as an emotionally defective personality.²⁷

But the archbishop’s blunder did not deter the monarchy’s image-makers from trying to project a strong and familiar kingly persona around the new sovereign. In the many biographies of George VI that newspapers published in the days and weeks after the abdication in an effort to introduce him to his people, two features predominated: he was domestic and he was dutiful.²⁸ Edward VIII had led the way in his abdication broadcast when he told listeners that his brother had ‘one matchless blessing, enjoyed by so many of you, and not bestowed on me – a happy home with his wife and children’.²⁹ This point was reiterated by Lang in his post-abdication message when he commended the new king and queen’s home life as a model for popular emulation.³⁰ The 1930s witnessed companionate love and a domesticated masculinity emerge in Britain, with men taking on more active roles in the lives of their children and spouses and finding greater pleasure in the conjugal privacy of the home.³¹ The royal household, the media and the clergy promoted George VI’s image along these lines, as they had done with his father in the last years of his reign. For example, the new king and his family had posed for the photographer Lisa Sheridan in June 1936 at Royal Lodge in Windsor Park and these pictures were now approved for publication, appearing on the front pages of magazines and in newspapers with captions that emphasized the monarch’s loving domestic life (Figure 3.1).³²

Figure 3.1. ‘One Matchless Blessing – a Happy Home with His Wife and Children’, Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal, dcxciv (1937), p. 1.

One photograph that was widely reproduced showed the king and his children playing with the royal corgis while the queen looked on from a window of Princess Elizabeth’s life-size play cottage. This carefully arranged scene, with the king crouched in a lounge suit and the princesses in summer dresses, presented the royals as a ‘normal’ family group and complemented a media narrative that stressed the everyday qualities of the king. The words ‘homely’ – meaning ordinary – and ‘intimate’ predominated in reports like the one presented by the Daily Mirror to accompany its publication of Sheridan’s photographs: ‘No more homely family has ever ascended the British Throne than that of the Duke and Duchess of York. From her childhood days the new Queen has found her happiness in the simple pleasures of life … Her marriage to the Duke of York did not change her life; as these intimate pictures show, her children have inherited her simple and homely ideas’.³³

The media sustained its emphasis on the new royal family’s domesticity through to, and beyond, the coronation. In February 1937 the Guardian’s William Crozier told his London editor that he wanted an article written on the king and queen’s home life, interests and hobbies that should be ‘lively and intimate’.³⁴ The subsequent article was one of many published by newspapers that drew attention to the pleasure the new monarch took in gardening, Sunday drives in the car with his wife and daughters and family walks.³⁵ This focus on the private lives of the monarchs reflected the interwar obsession with human-interest journalism, as was exemplified by a full-page report published by the Sunday Express three days before the coronation, titled ‘Our Happy Family King’, which again used Sheridan’s photographs and informed readers that ‘[the king] is a happy man. His family life made him that. He, the Queen, and the Princesses are passionately devoted to each other. Their joy in each other is complete and perfect’.³⁶ This highly personal language could also be found in reports that described George VI as a ‘loving husband’.³⁷ The media stories of the companionate, domesticated king – who had found self-fulfilment in his relationship with his wife and in his role as a father to the princesses – built on the imagery used to characterize the 1934 royal wedding and George V’s happy home life in order to restore the picture of the virtuous domesticity of the House of Windsor.³⁸ And these reports appear to have had at least some impact on media audiences: three Mass Observation respondents positively remarked on the new king’s domesticity, with one referring to the fact that her neighbours liked him ‘because he is a family man’.³⁹

The media also highlighted George VI’s family image by focusing on the theme of dynasty and presented him in photographs and newsreels alongside his father to emphasize continuity through the order of succession.⁴⁰ British Movietone News produced a special ‘Retrospect of the King’s Life’ that provided viewers with an in-depth character profile of the new ruler and linked his childhood through visual images to the reigns of his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and his grandfather Edward VII.⁴¹ The final section of this biographical profile also presented close-up scenes of George VI’s consort and daughters, the commentator stating ‘how fortunate we are in this domestic family’ and that the nation entertained ‘great hopes … of the two princesses’ – the implication being that, with the new royal family, the dynasty would continue and flourish.

Courtiers and the media worked to create a sense of continuity between George V’s reign and that of his second son through an emphasis on the new king’s dutiful character as well. The Daily Mail was typical in the way it drew readers’ attention to George VI’s scripted declaration at the accession meeting of the privy council after Edward VIII’s abdication: ‘Now that the duties of sovereignty have fallen to me I declare to you my adherence to the strict principles of constitutional government and my resolve to work before all else for the welfare of the British Commonwealth of Nations. With my wife as helpmate by my side, I take up the heavy task which lies before me. In it I look for the support of all my peoples’.⁴² With these words, courtiers ensured that the public language regarding the burdens of royal duty passed seamlessly to the new king and queen. The media also discussed the monarch’s history of public service – including his leadership of the duke of York’s camps and the tours he had undertaken of Britain’s industrial centres – and reports stressed that he had successfully adapted to his new state duties with headlines like ‘The king plans [his] day like his father’.⁴³

The language of royal public service was also recurrently invoked the week before the coronation in relation to the empire. On Friday 7 May the king addressed the prime ministers of the Dominions as part of an elaborate lunch meeting of the British and imperial social and political elite at Westminster hall. The editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, described it in his diary as ‘a well staged performance’ that was orchestrated ‘for the King to meet his Parliaments’.⁴⁴ His newspaper was typical in suggesting that the event had demonstrated the continuing strength of the relationship between the empire and the throne, with reports highlighting that ‘the assembled company cheered for several minutes while the King stood obviously deeply moved by the warmth of his reception’.⁴⁵ This relationship was given fuller meaning the day before the coronation when the king met with imperial representatives for a second time. Returning the addresses presented to him by the Dominion prime ministers and envoys of India and the colonies at Buckingham Palace, George VI told them that, after his father’s death, it had ‘pleased God to call me to be the head of this great family’. He then echoed George V’s words on the burdens of royal duty: ‘[H]eavy are the responsibilities that have so suddenly and unexpectedly come upon me, but it gives me courage to know that I can count on your unfailing help and affection’. Having thus entreated the support of his subjects, the king offered his reciprocal service as part of the familiar moral contract that connected ruler and people: ‘[F]or my part I shall do my utmost to carry on my father’s work for the welfare of our great Empire’.⁴⁶ The sub-heading used by the Manchester Guardian in its report on this meeting proclaimed the ‘King Speaks as Head of a Great Family’ and, in capitalized font, that he had followed ‘HIS FATHER’S EXAMPLE’.⁴⁷ In this way, then, the royal household and media sought to connect George VI to the pattern of kingship established by George V, with its emphasis on imperial unity, duty and mutual assistance, in the hope that this would ensure the loyalties of the empire and Commonwealth were transferred to the new monarch, despite the fact that only six months earlier they had focused on Edward VIII as the human symbol that embodied the British imperial system.

‘We have lost a good king’

The royal household applied pressure on the media in its efforts to maintain the idealized image of the new family monarchy following the abdication crisis. George VI’s assistant private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, wrote to Dawson at The Times on 13 December 1936 and began his letter by criticizing Edward VIII as ‘essentially a changeling, with the three dominant characteristics of changelings – no soul, no moral sense, and great personal charm’. He continued:

Lascelles urged Dawson to help him to protect Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from the advances of the press. He hoped that their characters would not be ‘spoiled’ – as he suggested had been the case with Edward. What we can also see in the letter is Lascelles’s concern to preserve the sanctity of royal family life in order that the princesses – and, in particular, Elizabeth – better understood the roles they would be expected to perform in due course. Two months before the news broke that Edward was in a relationship with Wallis Simpson, the press barons Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere had, at the request of the king, co-ordinated a secretive campaign to prevent Fleet Street from publicly disclosing any information whatsoever about the royal love affair. Following the abdication crisis, some reporters expressed anger about the measures that had stopped news of the romance emerging and, fearing they had lost the trust of their readers, adopted a more irreverent approach to royalty. Journalists thus became more brazen in their attempts to expose royal private life to public view but also more critical of royal personalities for the way they behaved.⁴⁹ Lascelles seems to have anticipated the kinds of problems these new kinds of coverage could create for George VI’s family and his letter to Dawson reveals that he took action in order to shelter his employers from adverse media attention.

Lascelles was wrong, however, when he assumed that Edward, now duke of Windsor, had been knocked off his pedestal as the most popular member of the royal family. The positive media coverage generated around George VI in the period from December 1936 to the coronation was complicated by news stories that continued to focus on his older brother. The popular press – in particular the Mirror and Beaverbrook’s Express group, both of which had come out in support of Edward at the time of the abdication crisis – provided constant updates on the duke’s activities and his forthcoming marriage to Wallis Simpson.⁵⁰ It is clear from Lang’s and Dawson’s personal papers that both men were closely monitoring Edward and viewed the press attention he was receiving with great apprehension: for them, he and Mrs Simpson not only provided an unwelcome distraction from the business of popularizing George VI’s public image; they also represented a different version of royal authority to rival the one embodied by the new king. As was the case during the constitutional crisis, it was felt in the offices of The Times that a minority of newspapers had irresponsibly taken Edward’s side and were championing his marriage in order to ensure he remained a popular figure. Briefing his assistant editor Robert Barrington-Ward on the weekend’s news after a ‘cold Easter holiday’, Dawson informed him that ‘the Simpson Press, as Lady Milner calls it, is getting rather busy’.⁵¹ He enclosed with his memo a selection of articles from the day before and, although unspecified, we can speculate that this included a two-page central spread from the Sunday Express that was provocatively titled, ‘The Case for Mrs Simpson’.⁵² The article was written by the American society hostess and gossip columnist, Elsa Maxwell, who, as a ‘close friend of Mrs. Simpson and the Duke of Windsor’, offered readers first-hand insights into the former’s personal character and love affair. This mini-biography of Simpson presented her in a generally positive light – although the Express tried to avoid a backlash from more critical sections of its readership by distancing itself from Maxwell’s interpretation of events through an editorial précis which emphasized that the American writer and US public did not understand that the British tended to view the status of divorced persons with suspicion.

The royal household and news editors at The Times were also alarmed by the press coverage of Edward and Simpson’s romance the week before George VI’s coronation. Dawson recorded in his diary that on 6 May he had presided over a Times office lunch party where he had spoken with the king’s private secretary, Sir Alexander Hardinge, and noted that their topics of conversation had included ‘the revival of the “Simpson Press” & other gossip’.⁵³ Two days earlier newspapers had published stories on the duke of Windsor’s looming reunion with Simpson at the Château de Candé as it was to be the lovers’ first official meeting since the ex-king’s abdication.⁵⁴ The most striking coverage came from the Daily Mirror, which noted in a leading front-page story how, ‘laughing and joking, happier than he had been for months, the Duke of Windsor is speeding … from Austria to France – to Mrs. Simpson, at the Chateau Cande, Tours [sic]’.⁵⁵ A barrage of articles on the couple followed after they had been reunited as well, with large front-page photographs presenting them arm-in-arm and grinning cheerfully at one another. The accompanying captions emphasized that, at long last, the duke and Simpson were ‘happy’ and ‘smiling’ again (Figure 3.2).⁵⁶

Figure 3.2. ‘We’re Happy at Last’, Daily Mirror, 8 May 1937, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

Figure 3.3. ‘This is the Answer to Dictators/“Very Happy Together”’, Daily Herald, 8 May 1937, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

These upbeat portrayals of the couple’s meeting were significant for two reasons. First of all, they helped to strengthen the idea that kingship was unenviable in that it did not lead to fulfilment in private life. The implication in all the reports was that it was only by relinquishing the throne that the duke had realized true happiness with the women he loved. The media fostered this narrative through indirect comparisons between the emotionally contented duke and his dutiful younger brother, as seen in the Daily Herald’s front-page visual juxtaposition on 8 May, four days before the coronation (Figure 3.3). The left-hand side of the page was taken up by a report on the Westminster hall meeting between George VI and the British and imperial representatives who gathered ‘to do honour to the King on the eve of his crowning’. The headline described the meeting as ‘The Answer to [the] Dictators’ and a subheading proclaimed that ‘King and Premiers [were] Pledged to Democracy’. Meanwhile, the right-hand side of the page was occupied by another smiling photograph of Edward and Mrs Simpson, with the caption ‘Very Happy Together’.⁵⁷ This contrast was intended to communicate to readers the distinction between responsible (constitutional) and irresponsible (unconstitutional) kingship: the duke of Windsor had put self-gratification ahead of his national responsibility.

The second reason reports on Edward and Simpson were significant was because they seemed to celebrate the lovers’ relationship and forthcoming marriage. While they may have contained veiled criticisms of the former king, the stories acted as a strong reminder of the personal determination that had characterized his brief reign. Furthermore, the sheer scale of the reports on the couple’s meeting distracted attention away from George VI and his family in the crucial days leading up to the coronation. Cosmo Lang and the royal household were anxious that this should not be the case. Since January the archbishop had been secretly working together with the bishop of Fulham, who exercised episcopal oversight for Anglican Churches in Europe, to try to ensure that the duke and Mrs Simpson’s wedding would not be consecrated with a religious service for fear that it would endorse the actions of the ex-king and undermine the Church’s teaching on marriage.⁵⁸ At the start of April 1937 the archbishop exchanged a series of letters with the now retired courtier Sir Clive Wigram about the wedding. According to the latter, ‘Queen Mary … guilelessly said that she thought some kind of religious service for [Edward’s] marriage would be rather nice’; and that in response to this the duke’s friend and counsellor, Walter Monckton, had proposed that a royal chaplain officiate at the wedding. Monckton had also suggested that some of the royal family be allowed to attend the ceremony, but Wigram had told him that ‘this would be a firm nail in the coffin of Monarchy’.⁵⁹ Wigram was left to deal with this issue and contacted Lang, asking for his advice in the apparent belief that if the duke were married with a religious service attended by other members of the House of Windsor, then it would not only undermine the sanctity of royal family life, but also threaten the authority of George VI by enabling his relations to demonstrate moral support for his elder brother.

Lang agreed with everything Wigram had said to Monckton. He, too, thought that the presence of members of the royal family at the wedding would legitimize the duke of Windsor’s actions after the latter had damaged the crown’s reputation.⁶⁰ Then, the day after the archbishop had set out his thoughts in writing to Wigram, the Mirror ran a front-page story that claimed Edward had asked the duke of Kent to be best man at his wedding.⁶¹ Rumours like this one appear to have stirred the palace into action, for Wigram then wrote to tell Lang ‘that the Duke of Windsor is going to be told definitely that none of his family can be present at the wedding, and that one of His Majesty’s Chaplains cannot officiate’.⁶² When this news was made public the same sections of the press that had favourably reported Edward’s marriage turned on both the archbishop and the royal household. The Daily Express was typical in arguing that the duke was ‘being treated with rather too much of a rough edge’ by a Church that refused to countenance the wedding and by royal officials who had prohibited the attendance of his relations at the ceremony.⁶³

Although the Express and Mirror groups developed a more irreverent approach to reporting on royalty after the abdication, other voices contested this coverage. In particular, some journalists were critical of the constant updates on Edward and Simpson’s reunion and the way it cast a shadow over the coronation. The Daily Sketch’s Henry Newham, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Candidus’, told his readers that, at the Allied Newspaper Corporation’s coronation dinner, the mayor of Manchester had ‘said publicly something which most of us have been thinking and many of us saying in private. There has been far too much in the newspapers about Mrs. Simpson and the Duke of Windsor’. Newham judged it was ‘definitely against the public interest’ and complained that Simpson had been transformed into a ‘heroine’ who stood ‘in the light of the true heroines’ – namely the new queen consort and George VI’s mother, Queen Mary.⁶⁴ However, only a fraction of the public opinion recorded by the Mass Observation coronation study agreed with Newham that reports on Edward were in poor taste. One young man from Hertford wrote that, on the morning of the coronation, his ‘grandmother was indignant that there was a short column about the Duke of Windsor on the front-page of the News Chronicle’.⁶⁵ Criticism like this was rare, though, and instead the prevailing attitude noted by the Mass Observation panel about Edward was that he was sorely missed and the coronation lacking on account of his absence.⁶⁶

The positive reactions recorded by Mass Observation about the duke on the day of his brother’s crowning pointed to the way that sections of the public preferred his version of kingship to that embodied by George VI. A member of the Mass Observation ‘Mobile Squad’ who was stationed in London on coronation day and tasked with recording conversations she had with the people she encountered, as well as discussions she overheard others having, noted that she had talked to a man she described as ‘lower-middle class’ and a ‘strong partisan of Edward’. The man ‘wanted a come-back and seemed very half-hearted about the coronation’. He complained about the lukewarm coronation service he had attended at church the previous Sunday and agreed with the Mass Observation investigator ‘that many people [were] far less spontaneous about [the] coronation than [the] Jubilee’.⁶⁷ The founders of Mass Observation recognized that what was said in this kind of interview was often influenced by wider social pressures to conform to what was deemed acceptable and respectable to say out loud in public to other people – and, in the case of Mass Observation, to complete strangers. On the coronation day of George VI people might have felt it necessary to voice their loyalty to the new king and yet many, like the aforementioned interviewee, still expressed support for his elder brother, which indicates the depth of positive feeling that persisted for Edward as fostered by sections of the press like the Express and Mirror, which maintained his popular image by reporting his activities.⁶⁸

Other people across Britain shared the belief that Edward’s absence had dampened the coronation mood. A Mass Observation respondent in Birmingham heard a group of girls singing the song ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ (as Edward had been titled since 1911), which prompted the comment, ‘[W]e’d a seen something if it was him today’.⁶⁹ Another respondent, who sat by a ‘working-class man’ on a train in the Midlands, discussed with him the celebrations he had attended that afternoon in Leicester and Nottingham. This man considered that there was ‘not much heart in it this time, not like the Jubilee. The Duke of Windsor was very popular … [he] took all the shine out of it … [wistfully] I practically loved him’.⁷⁰ The highly intimate language the man used to characterize his relationship with the former king reveals that Edward had, during his time as heir to the throne and as monarch, cultivated a close emotional bond with members of the public as a royal personality who willingly transgressed traditional class boundaries. This sense of closeness to the former king informed the man’s regret about his abdication and detracted from his appreciation of George VI. Equally, he judged that the coronation had fared badly compared with the silver jubilee two years before. This suggests that the escalation of royal public ceremonies in the mid 1930s created a sense of anticipation in the lead up to Edward VIII’s accession and that George VI’s crowning in place of his brother failed to live up to expectations. The same idea was conveyed in a number of Mass Observation reports which noted that the crowds which had turned out for the coronation in London were not as large as people had expected, again implying comparison with earlier, more popular royal events.⁷¹

The same working-class man on board the Midlands train described how his sense of anti-climax on coronation day was compounded by his doubts about the new monarch: ‘He didn’t really want it. I saw him once in Halifax. He looked dreadfully tired’.⁷² The belief that a strong king had been replaced with a weak one was, in fact, a common sentiment recorded by the Mass Observation panel and is unsurprising, given how some newspapers repeatedly (if indirectly) contrasted the qualities of the two brothers. A schoolgirl from Port St Mary on the Isle of Man recorded that while ‘everyone [she] knew was very keen on the coronation … there was much comparison of the present king with his brother, the Duke of Windsor, and most people seemed to agree that Edward VIII was a stronger and better king’.⁷³ A twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher from Wellington in Shropshire described Edward’s character in similar terms:

This report contained some of the rare positive remarks on George VI, here rooted in admiration for his sense of duty and his commitment to his role, something which reveals how two of the key characteristics that had defined his father’s reign helped to generate support for him, too. However, both the teacher and her mother appreciated the independence Edward demonstrated during his short reign, particularly in relation to social issues, and believed that his successor would not be as outspoken. The same view was expressed by a female café proprietor in Beer, Devon, who remarked to a Mass Observation respondent: ‘[W]e have lost a good king – one who had sympathy with the working classes and that is largely why he had to go. They got rid of him’.⁷⁵ Several others expressed contempt for a shadowy establishment comprising royal, religious and political figures who had forced Edward off the throne because they considered him too forthright in his opinions, while some directly accused Stanley Baldwin or Cosmo Lang of interference, with a number taking aim at the archbishop in labelling George VI his ‘puppet’.⁷⁶ Reports like these reflected the scorn many harboured for Lang as a result of his disastrous broadcast after the abdication but they also implied that George VI was weak in that he could be easily manipulated by the archbishop.

After he came to the throne, a series of negative rumours encircled the new king regarding his fitness to reign, stimulated, no doubt, in part by Lang’s ill-judged reference to his stammer. Notably, George VI’s biographers have discounted as ‘idle and malicious gossip’ and ‘an undercurrent of doubt’ the concerns regarding his abilities, but it is clear that some media outlets devoted much more attention to these anxieties than has previously been recognized, which in turn influenced public opinion.⁷⁷ For Geoffrey Dawson, the Daily Mirror’s publication of a front-page headline report which proclaimed that the new king had cancelled an eight-month tour of the Dominions because he ‘did not wish to be absent from Britain for any length of time during the first year of his reign’ constituted a ‘really monstrous performance, calculated to worry the whole Empire’.⁷⁸ The editor of The Times knew that the story was a fabrication – a tour had not been considered so could not be cancelled – and added the Mirror’s report to his ‘cuttings from the Simpson Press’. The implication of stories like this one was that George VI was reluctant to take on his role as symbolic figurehead of the nation and empire; and these kinds of negative reports were compounded by rumours about the monarch’s physical strength, which suddenly spiked the week before his coronation. In response to these stories an old friend of George VI spoke out publicly against what he termed the ‘malicious gossip’ concerning the king’s health. The Reverend Robert Hyde had worked alongside the monarch at the duke of York’s camps and, at a public lunch, denied that the king suffered from epileptic fits or a bad heart, or that ‘he may fail at the last moment’.⁷⁹ He also sought to rid George VI of the ‘rubber stamp’ label that had been applied to him – that he had little power and was unable to make his own decisions – by drawing attention to the fact that he had once witnessed the monarch’s bad temper, implying that he would not stand to have his opinions ignored.

Figure 3.4. ‘“Malicious Gossip” About the Health of the King’, Daily Mirror, 7 May 1937, p. 36. © The British Library Board.

As with Lang’s post-abdication broadcast, Hyde’s speech probably did more harm than good, its widespread dissemination via the press fuelling the belief that the king lacked the strength of character required to fulfil his role.⁸⁰ Indeed, the story would probably have received even greater attention had British newspapers not announced that the Hindenburg zeppelin had blown up at Lakehurst in the USA on the same day. All the same, Hyde’s speech was presented as the headline story on the back page of the Daily Mirror (Figure 3.4).⁸¹ Contrary to the press patriotically rallying around the new king, it is clear that doubts about his abilities persisted among some news editors.⁸²

The archbishop of Canterbury may have also exacerbated public concerns about the monarch’s strength of character the week before the coronation. Since George VI had come to the throne, Lang had worked to reaffirm Christian public morality through his promotion of the coronation as a moment of national spiritual renewal. It seems likely that the archbishop’s concerns stemmed from the duke of Windsor’s continued popularity despite his ‘immoral’ behaviour and the knowledge that his own reputation and that of the Church of England had suffered as a result of his attack on the ex-king at the time of the abdication. Lang had, in fact, originally planned to use Edward VIII’s coronation to launch a ‘recall to religion’, but he knew full well that his cause would be better served by George VI and Queen Elizabeth with their Christian home life.⁸³ However, the way the archbishop drew attention to the new king’s religiosity again hinted towards a potential weakness on the part of the monarch. Lang used the Canterbury Diocesan Gazette as his principal vehicle for public communication, knowing that his words would subsequently be disseminated through other newspapers and periodicals. Writing at the start of May, the archbishop highlighted the coronation’s religious meaning and suggested that in preparing for the event the public would ‘surround and support’ the new king and queen with prayers for their welfare at a special service of intercession and dedication on the Sunday night before the coronation: ‘On the previous Sunday evening multitudes in their churches or in their homes throughout the land … will be remembering the King and Queen in their prayers. They will like to know that at that very time their Majesties in their own personal prayers will be associating themselves with the prayers of their people’.⁸⁴ The archbishop sought to engineer this moment of spiritual communion between rulers and subjects at the behest of Cyril Bardsley, bishop of Leicester, who had suggested to him ‘it would do an immense amount of good’ if Lang could let it be known publicly that the king and the queen were taking part in a special service in their own private chapel at the same time as their people.⁸⁵ To amplify his vision of a nation congregated in support of their rulers, the archbishop also oversaw the publication of three special forms of service that were distributed nationally, one of which was used as part of the evening service on the Sunday before the coronation.⁸⁶ Lang went on to lead this service from the BBC concert hall and delivered a sermon titled ‘The King Comes Not Alone’ to an audience of special guests and, via the wireless, to British listeners gathered in their homes and at church services around the country.⁸⁷ Drawing on the language of the burdens of royal service, Lang used his address to focus his audience’s attention on the responsibilities that had been laid upon the new king and his consort, not least of which was enduring a coronation service the ‘whole world’ would observe.⁸⁸

As with Reverend Hyde’s misjudged public intervention in defence of George VI’s health, Lang’s emphasis on the need for public prayer to sustain the king and queen perpetuated an image of the new monarch as physically and mentally fragile. The last time prayers of intercession were offered up for a member of the royal family had been during the grave illness of George V in the winter of 1928 to 1929. Thus the archbishop’s campaign, although instigated with the best intention of generating public support for George VI, drew inadvertent attention to what seemed to be more serious shortcomings in the new king’s character.

‘We shall be crowning ourselves’

The sense of doubt that characterized public attitudes to George VI following his sudden accession meant that the media and the British elite chose to project more dynamic messages as the central themes of the 1937 coronation. In the lead up to 12 May journalists and members of the political establishment repeatedly stressed that the ceremony symbolized a crucial moment in the formation of the relationship between crown and people: the coronation was proof of the evolution and superiority of constitutional democracy and of Britain’s imperial strength at a time of international political uncertainty. Indeed, in many reports George VI was a background figure to his own crowning, with coverage instead focusing on ‘the people’ as the central actors in this story of democratic progress. The coronation thus witnessed a reorientation of the relationship between the king and his subjects around the symbolism of democracy after the nation’s brief flirtation with a more outspoken version of popular sovereignty as embodied by Edward VIII. It was precisely because the new monarch was perceived as lacking personality that public commentators and the media were able to invest his crowning with abstract meaning, using the event to promote validatory statements about the nation’s and empire’s social and political character in a period when both seemed threatened by authoritarianism. Crucially, members of the public internalized these discourses of democracy and progress and reproduced them in Mass Observation reports, sometimes contrasting them directly with European fascism. In this respect we should interpret George VI’s coronation as having a lasting impact in redirecting the trajectory of the monarchy’s transformation in the years immediately before the Second World War.

Historians of modern Britain have discussed how the interwar period witnessed an eruption in public debates about the ‘national character’, led in part by the political elite: with the advent of full democracy after the Fourth and Fifth Reform Acts, they sought to maintain their hold on power through the promotion of an inclusive language of ‘Englishness’. Conservative politicians like Stanley Baldwin were the most notable proponents of this creed and stressed to voters the ‘common sense, good temper, ordered freedom [and] progress’ that allegedly characterized the national mood.⁸⁹ Baldwin used his model ‘Englishman’ to try to reconcile the politically restless industrial classes to the state by uniting them through a shared sense of national heritage; and as prime minister he placed special emphasis on Britain’s ‘constitutional tradition’, in which the new mass electorate were characterized as the keystone of parliamentary democracy and franchise reform as the core tenet of the nation’s political evolution.⁹⁰ The crown played an integral role in Baldwin’s story: the institution had anchored the nation’s political development across time and the sovereign acted as the safeguard of the individual freedoms of citizens. Against a backdrop of political volatility in Europe, the link between monarchy and democracy quickly crystallized after 1918, with a language of constitutionalism coming to define George V’s later reign.⁹¹ Baldwin’s eulogy to the monarch after his death celebrated the way that he had overseen ‘far-reaching constitutional and Parliamentary changes without precedent in our long history’.⁹² Indeed, by January 1936 the irrepressible rise of the dictators on the Continent meant that the crown’s symbolic defence of the public’s political liberties and the increasing extension of these freedoms through the arteries of the Commonwealth had taken on greater meaning still.

However, the abdication crisis challenged this narrative of unceasing progress by revealing that the crown’s relationship with the British public was much more fluid and unstable than the politicians and royal speechwriters would have had us believe. Letters written to Edward VIII and other key players involved in the crisis show that many sections of the public supported the king in his decision to marry Simpson and endorsed his more forthright – and more authoritarian – version of popular monarchy.⁹³ And, as we have seen, the belief that Edward had been a ‘strong’ king persisted after he had abandoned the throne. Given the deep rupture created by the abdication, it is notable that every mainstream media outlet joined with commentators from across the political spectrum to project George VI’s coronation as the climax to what had otherwise been a story of unhindered evolution. One of the main themes at George V’s silver jubilee in 1935 had been constitutional progress and now, two years on, the crowning of his second son was hailed as proof of the vitality of Britain’s royal democracy – a message designed, at least in part, to consolidate the monarchy’s power but also to re-educate subjects of the crown in the meaning of kingship following Edward VIII’s temporary aberration.⁹⁴

Behind closed doors, journalists discussed the change in direction of the monarchy. In March 1937 the Guardian’s editor, William Crozier, invited J. L. Hammond – one of the newspaper’s most seasoned reporters – to pen the editorial leader for their coronation number ‘on what we think about the monarchy … and what we hope of the new reign’.⁹⁵ Crozier suggested that it was an opportunity to set the record straight after the abdication, putting across the newspaper’s views ‘more realistically’ than they had ‘hitherto done’. In a subsequent letter to Hammond, Crozier went on to admit his regret over the way the Guardian had previously reported on the monarchy:

In Crozier’s opinion, the crown had survived the personality cults of Edward VIII and his father and veneration of the monarchy would now centre more on its success as a political institution than on the characteristics of the sovereign. This can partly be explained with reference to George VI, who was found wanting in terms of personality, but the letter also betrays a belief prevalent among journalists after the abdication that the public had been wrong to place so much faith in the monarch as a national leader in the 1930s.⁹⁷ Crozier judged that, henceforward, the sovereign’s personality would play second fiddle to the crown as a symbol.

The resulting leader that Hammond penned for the Guardian struck all the right notes while at the same time taking the view that many of the ‘traditional’ aspects of the coronation were antiquated and that the political freedoms which characterized British national life were yet to be fully extended to Ireland or India. The article explained the coronation by emphasizing that ‘the Crown becomes more important than the King, the symbol than the man’ in a ceremony which witnessed the monarch swear to ‘govern his many peoples “according to their laws and customs,” under a system, that is to say, by which the Ministers who represent the people take the responsibility for all the sovereign’s acts’. It continued: ‘The Crown is strong in popular esteem to-day because while promising government according to the law and customs of its “subjects” it stands for the same liberty to order their own life that they have gradually asserted for themselves since the days when Kings ordered it for them’.⁹⁸

On the right of the political spectrum, the Daily Express’s leader drew similar attention to the long-standing bond between sovereign and subjects and the idea that the monarchy had overseen the emergence of democracy in Britain. The newspaper provided a clear explanation of ‘The People’s Part’ in the coronation:

This simplified interpretation of how constitutional monarchy operated to guard the freedoms of British people and the way the sovereign was ultimately answerable to his or her subjects was reworked in the liberal News Chronicle in an explicatory article titled ‘What it all means’. Acclaimed political reporter A. J. Cummings tellingly wrote that ‘there is nothing wonderful (we shall freely admit) about [George VI]. We don’t even know him very well … [But] he is a modest and sensible king’. He then went on to describe to readers how the abdication crisis had proved there were ‘two conditions, upon which, in a democracy, the sovereign maintains his position and popularity … The king’s mode of life must be approved by his subjects and his name must not be used for political or party advantage’.¹⁰⁰ The report thus presented an implicit criticism of the right-wing faction that had been led by Winston Churchill and which had sought to make political headway by taking Edward’s side at the time of the abdication, with Cummings articulating the idea that the political liberty of British people was fundamentally bound to the non-partisan nature of kingship. That he also believed public approval of the king’s ‘mode of life’ was now key to the crown’s authority shows that the media’s intense focus on royal private life in the 1930s had witnessed the crystallization of moral virtue as an intrinsic part of the identity of the constitutional monarch. The contingency between a common moral code, British people’s political freedoms and the king’s authority was also conveyed in a comment Cummings quoted from a conversation he reported having had with an unnamed ‘hard-bitten Member of Parliament’, who told him that ‘we shall be crowning not only the King … we shall be crowning ourselves as well’.

The left-wing Daily Herald offered its own distinct explanation of how the monarchy embodied the public’s democratic spirit. As part of a series of articles titled ‘Crown and People’, the Labour peer Lord Arthur Ponsonby expressed his approval of the way the monarchy had overseen political progress, noting that George V had ‘shown conspicuous fairness in accepting, with no trace of protest, Labour as the alternative Government’. He suggested there was ‘little sign of any antagonism’ between ‘the tradition of monarchy and practice of Socialism’.¹⁰¹ Indeed, despite the anti-imperial position the Herald had taken in the 1920s while it was still majority-owned by the Trades Union Congress, it would style the meeting of George VI and his Dominion prime ministers at Westminster hall as ‘the answer to dictatorship’, declaring that the king and his prime ministers were ‘pledged to democracy’.¹⁰² The newspaper placed special emphasis on the egalitarian quality of the Westminster hall congregation:

The Herald’s celebration of the Commonwealth and empire in its coronation coverage accorded with a wider shift in the newspaper’s editorial tone as it transformed itself into a popular tabloid after it was bought by Odhams Press in 1930. But it also revealed how pressures created by the rise of fascism in Europe ensured that even those on the political left felt it necessary to reconcile themselves to Britain’s constitutional monarchy as a progressive political system.¹⁰³

Readers had to look further afield if they wanted to find press criticism of the coronation and its imperial connotations. As at George and Marina’s wedding, the communist Daily Worker presented the royal family as ‘parasites’ and criticized the coronation as a distraction from the ‘real Britain’ made up of economically depressed areas.¹⁰⁴ The newspaper was also on its own in standing with the London bus men who went on strike in coronation week, which created traffic chaos in a move that was widely condemned by the mainstream media.¹⁰⁵ In a front-page message, the Communist party leader Harry Pollitt drew attention to the plight of Indian workers suffering under what he perceived as an imperial system that was sustained by royal propaganda.¹⁰⁶ And the writer and renowned critic of the monarchy, George Bernard Shaw, lived up to his reputation when he criticized the coronation for creating ‘illusions and idolatries’.¹⁰⁷ Notably, three Mass Observation respondents recorded seeing Shaw’s column and two of the panel spent some of coronation day selling the Daily Worker in central London.¹⁰⁸ As with the royal wedding three years before, the newspaper went on to claim that it had enjoyed enormous sales on 12 May.¹⁰⁹ While this might hint at greater disaffection with monarchy than is apparent from other sources, the ideological consensus that characterized almost every other national media outlet’s coverage of the coronation – namely pro-royalty, pro-constitutional democracy, pro-empire – crowded out this lone voice of dissent.

The mainstream media also consistently linked Britain’s democratic freedoms to the empire’s international peacekeeping role and emphasized that the crown’s symbolic embodiment of the liberties of its subjects contrasted to the way European dictatorships had eroded the rights of their peoples. The Daily Mirror and Mail were typical in reproducing the coronation message of the South African imperial statesman Jan Smuts to illustrate this distinction. For him, the empire-Commonwealth was a ‘league of peace’, ensuring ‘safety from war’ and succeeding where the League of Nations had failed. Smuts described democracy in conflict with authoritarianism: ‘Parliamentary government is being abandoned, personal liberty derided and the basic principle of government by consent of the governed is being replaced by the principle of dictatorship or Caesarism. Our Commonwealth stands on guard for the ideals of democracy’.¹¹⁰ Smuts’s appraisal resonated with the opinions voiced by some of Britain’s most notable politicians in the lead-up to the coronation on the relationship between monarchy, political liberty and empire. In a series of BBC radio talks titled ‘The Responsibilities of Empire’ that were broadcast in April, May and June of 1937, Churchill, David Lloyd George and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin took to the airwaves alongside a number of other statesmen to celebrate British democratic progress and its impact on the Commonwealth. The last line of Baldwin’s opening broadcast was typical of what followed in the other talks and in keeping with the constitutional story he had crafted during his political career: ‘The British peoples have always set before them the ideal of freedom, and more than ever today it is their duty to maintain and to justify that ideal’.¹¹¹ Again, the radio talks bridged political divides. The Labour peer Lord Snell of Plumstead told listeners in the second of these broadcasts that his party had reconciled itself to the aims of the ‘new Empire’ and that he perceived it as the ‘most hopeful factor of the modern world’ and a ‘great witness to the stabilising power of freedom’.¹¹²

*

Across the country, Mass Observation respondents noted that they and those around them interpreted George VI’s coronation as a symbol of Britain’s liberal political values and national character. They implicitly and explicitly compared the nation’s freedoms with dictatorship and discussed how the Commonwealth exemplified this democratic vision. In Beer, one respondent noted a speech made by his local baker at the community’s coronation celebrations. The baker had said:

The mayor of Manchester also focused on Britain’s unique freedoms in his message to the city’s people on coronation day. He described it as a ‘great day in the history of a freedom-loving community’ and declared that ‘we are able to rejoice in the liberty of the subject, freedom of thought, vote, and action, in which this old country stands supreme’.¹¹⁴ This emphasis on British exceptionalism intersected with a more diffuse patriotism recorded by Mass Observation respondents who noted that foreign visitors would return to their countries and ‘say how impressed they were’ with Britain.¹¹⁵ A schoolteacher who escorted some of his pupils from Northumberland to London to see the coronation procession recorded in his report for Mass Observation that he thought the event had shown the world that national life had managed to continue after the abdication:

The teacher conflated reverence for the monarchy with a broader respect for what he saw as ‘traditional’ British values and was pleased at the reception extended to George VI.

Descriptions of Britain’s unique political culture also focused on the stabilizing roles played by the monarchy and empire. A retired man from County Durham wrote that the coronation benefitted the country ‘as it helps us to realise the unity of the Empire with its privileges and responsibilities’.¹¹⁷ The retiree was, in fact, repeating the exact words used by Baldwin in his BBC talk before the coronation, in which he had told listeners that ‘ten years ago I made a broadcast speech on the Privileges of Empire’ and ‘tonight I am able to speak on the Responsibilities of Empire’.¹¹⁸ Other respondents were more direct in conflating empire with world peace. Writing on the advantages of the coronation, a young chemist who worked in Brighton suggested that it was ‘a clear factor for peace that a group of nations like the British Commonwealth should “hang together”’. Similarly, the teacher from Northumberland suggested that the king was not only doing his best to ‘preserve the stability of the Crown’, but also of ‘the Empire and therefore the greater part of the world in these days of general lack of sound guiding principles [sic]’.¹¹⁹ Positive appreciations of the nation’s imperial ties as contained in personal testimonies like these indicate that the empire might have had a greater hold over British minds in this period than some historians have acknowledged.¹²⁰

Occasionally, this pacific interpretation – which suggested that monarchy, liberty, imperialism and international peace were bound up together – coalesced with more bellicose readings of the military power of empire. For example, one of the Mass Observation mobile squad reporters who stood in the crowds on the procession route in London recorded a conversation she had overheard between a ‘middle-class’ man and woman, which included ‘how right it was to have the Coronation at this time – foreigners would return home and say how impressed they were with England; what a move for peace this was; that the increase in armaments was an excellent thing, how stirring it was to see all the might of British arms’.¹²¹ The topics the pair discussed and the transitions in their conversation revealed that conceptions of peace could co-exist with a belief in British military strength.¹²² The conflation of Britain’s peacekeeping role with imperial military power was also noted by a respondent who was a self-professed socialist and had, at the insistence of his friends at Mass Observation, taken up the opportunity to spend the day watching the procession from a stand on Oxford Street among a group of ‘middle and upper class people’ whom he termed ‘most loyal and patriotic’. He described how a ‘very large Cornishman’, who was part of the group with whom he sat, exclaimed excitedly as the Household Guards marched passed: ‘Look at the way they hold their rifles. Look at ’em! Now we’re showing that not only Hitler can have soldiers. We’ll show ’em. We’ll show the World’.¹²³ The Cornishman was drunk but his outburst claiming the British would not be militarily upstaged by the Third Reich resonated with other views recorded by the Mass Observation panel on the way the coronation boosted the nation’s confidence at a time when it seemed threatened by dictatorship.¹²⁴ While these opinions suggest that British militarism was framed through public discourse on peacekeeping and defence during these years, some of the Mass Observation panel were alarmed, one respondent recording that ‘the military element is altogether too prominent; it has the psychological effect of dressing war preparations in fancy dress and making it look attractive’.¹²⁵

One final way that perceptions of British liberty and stability were expressed on coronation day was through descriptions of the orderly character of the crowds that assembled in central London. Since the mid nineteenth century, newspapers had focused on massed crowds at royal events as a way of conveying narratives of a popular royal consensus to media audiences.¹²⁶ The 1937 coronation was no different: between the wars the mass electorate was represented to contrast with both the rowdiness of the Edwardian years and the unruly political cultures of other nations in order to create a vision of a ‘peaceful’ and ‘phlegmatic’ citizenry.¹²⁷ In this vein, on the day of George VI’s crowning The Times reported that the crowds that gathered in London for the celebrations were ‘happy crowds’: ‘[T]he English crowd is known to be always good-tempered and humorous, ready to snatch at any chance for a laugh and a cheer’.¹²⁸ Mass Observation reports suggest that members of the public internalized this language of a people happily united around the monarchy. Furthermore, the panel often presented British national cohesion in direct contrast with the discordance that characterized contemporary European politics. For example, one of the mobile squad who conversed with a man from Huntingdonshire and another from Wales noted that they all agreed that, compared to the British, the French were a ‘very excitable’ people, having been stirred up by the doctrine of republicanism.¹²⁹ Similarly, the Cornishman who watched the procession from a stand in Oxford Street was observed speaking to a Canadian woman and, gesturing ‘to those massed at the edges of the processional route’, said: ‘Look at the crowd outside there. Look how patient and good-humoured they are. Some of them have been waiting all night, and yet they can still laugh. Why, in Russia or France there’d be no organisation; there might be disorders and fighting if they had to wait like that’.¹³⁰ This kind of opinion was also recorded in reports which noted relief that no ‘fiascos [had] tak[en] place’ or ‘bombs … been thrown’.¹³¹

Historians have suggested that the 1930s were characterized by British anxieties about the way psychological propaganda had been used in Germany to mobilize a nation in support of Hitler’s Nazi regime.¹³² Critics of fascism, like the editor of the New Statesman and Nation, Kingsley Martin, had popularized psychological ways of thinking about ‘the masses’ as a political formation that lacked individual consciousness.¹³³ Given that Mass Observation’s coronation project had recruited volunteer writers through advertisements in the New Statesman, it is perhaps unsurprising that a number of the Mass Observation panel drew on a psychological lexicon to describe the behaviour of the crowds that gathered on coronation day. In using these terms, respondents were often defining their own sense of middle-class individualism against a negative image of the ‘unthinking’ masses.¹³⁴ However, the way respondents focused on the emotions of the crowds also indicates that the mid 1930s were defined by a heightened sensitivity to the way ‘feelings’ shaped public life. Notably, the new understandings of mass behaviour that were taking root in Britain anticipated the elite obsession with the analysis of civilian morale that shaped how society was reconceptualized during the fraught years of the Blitz.¹³⁵

While some members of the Mass Observation panel expressed reservations about the potentially destabilizing effects the masses could inflict on British society if their emotions were misdirected, most supported the idea that the coronation presented a safe and vital outlet for popular fervour, uniting the nation around the focal point of the monarchy. A teacher and farmer from Sussex described what she deemed to be the coronation’s role in channelling the energies of the masses:

This personal testimony reveals the high esteem in which the respondent held George V because of his dutiful qualities and shows that, despite her personal misgivings about the unequal social hierarchy the monarchy represented, the institution could be viewed as a safeguard against dictatorship and as a symbol of political freedom. Her criticism of the way ‘mass emotion’ had been exploited in Germany to foster anti-Semitism suggests that she perceived the crown, with its ‘high ideal of service’, as a preferable channel for mass veneration. A teenage girl from Chelsea agreed, noting that ‘people must have some kind of outlet for their emotions … The English, in particular, are so bottled up in this respect, that it no doubt does them some good to have an excuse to cheer, celebrate and shout once in a while’. For her the monarchy provided a ‘fairly harmless safety valve, instead of following the example of Italy or Germany’.¹³⁷

Several other Mass Observation respondents echoed the teenager’s ‘safety valve’ analogy and her belief that the coronation provided a vent for mass emotion which, as a ‘very dangerous human characteristic’, might otherwise be exploited by tyrannical politicians ‘for their own advantage’.¹³⁸ Reports like these seem to indicate that the British and European political cultures of the mid 1930s, with their unique fusion of mass-mediated popular spectacle and (up until George VI) charismatic leadership, created a new sensitivity among some members of the public to the way emotion worked to legitimize political regimes. Mass Observation described a British mass society that centred on the monarchy as a democratic focal point. On the one hand, they drew on an imagery that belittled the masses by implying that they were emotionally susceptible to the draw of royal festivities. However, their descriptions also conveyed the fact that British political culture was influenced by fears about dictatorship, with respondents accepting the monarchy as a preferable system to totalitarianism. Many saw the crown as a stabilizing force, drawing together narratives of continuity, political evolution, social cohesion and peace at a time of escalating chaos elsewhere. It seems likely that in their beliefs the Mass Observation panel were influenced by the media and politicians who had, with one voice, extolled the virtues of constitutional monarchy as the defender of democracy and liberty in order to cement the crown’s position at the heart of the nation and empire; and in order to re-educate subjects of the crown in the meaning of kingship following the turbulence created by the abdication crisis.

‘Everyone likes her much more than the others’

News editors worked in tandem with royal and religious officials to perfect the performance of unity and consensus that played out on 12 May 1937. The BBC and newsreel companies were integral to the projection of the occasion, with it being the first time that radio and film crews were granted access to Westminster abbey to record a coronation service and, in the case of wireless, to broadcast the ceremony live to the nation and the world. Four elements of the coverage were of particular concern to the stage-managers. First, and in keeping with the prevailing emphasis on constitutional evolution, organizers developed a variety of strategies to convey to media audiences the impression that Britain and the empire were unified around the figurehead of the new king. Second, the coronation service was expertly choreographed to emphasize its religiosity and dignity to listeners and viewers. Third, officials worked with the media to project the ceremony in ways that fostered emotional identification between members of the public and George VI. Fourth, and last, the king’s broadcast on the evening of his coronation was designed to highlight continuity with his father’s reign. Nevertheless, despite the best efforts of courtiers, clergy and loyal media outlets to enhance the public image of the monarch through the careful planning and execution of coronation day, Mass Observation reports suggest that public responses to the event were mixed – with the king a particular cause for concern. Fortunately for him, his mother, Queen Mary, was close at hand to provide a reassuring emotional coherence with the past.

More than any previous royal occasion in Britain, the 1937 coronation was defined by the theme of inclusiveness. The emphasis on national and imperial participation complemented the messages of politicians and reporters on the democratic qualities of constitutional kingship and was exemplified in the way the working classes played a more visible part in the celebrations. The royal household selected four people from industrial communities across the country to attend the coronation as representatives of their class. Gaumont British News produced a story on the ‘four guests whom the King has specially invited to the Abbey’.¹³⁹ After opening scenes of decorations going up along the Mall in central London, the film switched to the contrasting landscape of Bolsover colliery near Chesterfield, where ‘pit boy’ Leslie Pollard was pictured grinning, having ‘been honoured’ by an invitation to the ceremony. The newsreel then moved on to the three other guests: first, to a woman in a Glasgow textile factory who had helped to weave the carpet for the coronation service; then to a man based at a steelworks in South Wales who had been one of the first boys to attend the duke of York’s camps; and, finally, to a woman in Birmingham who, in an innovative, direct message to cinema viewers, stated how ‘very proud and very happy’ she was ‘to be representing Birmingham and to have been chosen from such a large number of working people’.

The idea communicated through the newsreel – that the king valued all classes of his subjects, including those on the Celtic fringes – was conveyed through the government’s allocation of coronation honours, too. On 11 May the Daily Herald’s front-page headline proclaimed that ‘All Classes Honoured in Coronation List’.¹⁴⁰ The accompanying report explained that, as well as famous individuals from ‘stage, sport and literature’, the honours rolls included ‘railmen, clerks, housemaids [and] ship workers’ from around the country. The Herald was among several newspapers to draw special attention to the fact that two bus men had been awarded the Order of the British Empire as well.¹⁴¹ Since 1917 George V had bestowed OBEs on ordinary people in recognition of public service to the nation and empire and, as historians have noted, it was the order of chivalry of democracy signalling the crown’s realization that, if it was to retain the support of the public and working-class voters in particular, it needed to reach out to them in new ways.¹⁴² At the height of the 1937 London bus strike, the awarding of the OBE to a conductor and a driver could have appeared very calculated, but there was no criticism of this sort in the mainstream press. The propaganda value of the coronation as a socially integrative event did not escape comment entirely, though. Writing for the Herald, Lord Ponsonby remarked that he thought the invitation of the four working-class people to the coronation service ‘a patronising sop’.¹⁴³ One Mass Observation respondent also seems to have discerned something superficial in their inclusion, sarcastically remarking on the way the BBC radio commentator characterized the four as ‘honest and obedient’ during the ceremony.¹⁴⁴

The same Gaumont British newsreel that filmed the working-class guests ended in a vox-pop interview with an eighty-two-year-old woman from the East End of London. Having presented scenes of local inhabitants decorating a courtyard, the film cut to the woman, who informed viewers that she was the oldest resident there and had seen Queen Victoria’s jubilee and Edward VII’s and George V’s coronations. Placing a party hat on her head, she then told viewers that she hoped to enjoy herself at the new king’s coronation with ‘knees up mother brown’.¹⁴⁵ The mention of this famous song, with its strong associations with London’s working-class drinking culture, helped to characterize the speaker and her neighbourhood. As with the BBC’s interview with the ‘Cockney woman’ at the 1934 royal wedding, this newsreel established a new precedent by interviewing working-class people for the first time, exposing their voices and opinions in order to emphasize the scale of national involvement in a royal event. Thus, the celebration of monarchy again facilitated new (if perfunctory) modes of engagement in public life among the working-class population, witnessing the democratization of the media sphere as part of a nation-building exercise.

The traditional political representatives of the British working classes also played more visible parts in the coronation. The minutes of the committee responsible for planning the occasion show how ‘Organised Labour’ – consisting of trade unions and members of co-operative and friendly societies – were allocated 10,000 seats along the procession route at a reduced price to enable their delegates to participate in the event.¹⁴⁶ Since the rise of what courtiers had perceived as radical socialism in 1917, the monarchy had worked hard to strengthen its ties to left-wing political groups: again, many of the first recipients of the OBE had been trade-union leaders and Labour MPs as part of a deliberate move intended to counter republican sentiments among these groups.¹⁴⁷ In 1937 the inclusion of ‘Organised Labour’ can again be interpreted as tactical flattery on the part of officials to ensure that the grass roots organizations that held political influence among the working classes felt represented as part of Britain’s royal democracy. Notably, the official emphasis on unity and inclusiveness extended to the empire too, as it was proposed that the Dominions should have 20,000 seats at their disposal, a presence which would help to reinforce the imperial character of the celebrations.¹⁴⁸

In order to capture the sounds made by the crowds that mustered in London on 12 May, the BBC deployed the same ‘atmosphere microphones’ that it had used along the processional routes at the 1934 royal wedding and 1935 silver jubilee. The sound equipment was meant to help to immerse listeners in London’s coronation festivities, with producers explicitly instructing commentators to ‘let cheering speak for itself whenever possible’.¹⁴⁹ A number of Mass Observation respondents recorded that they, or those around them, were especially moved by the sounds of cheering crowds broadcast by the BBC as part of its coverage.¹⁵⁰ For some listeners, the cheering enhanced their sense of involvement by intensifying their excitement and enabling them to feel part of what they perceived as an important national occasion. One respondent listened to the radio with her mother in Sussex and they agreed that it was the BBC’s ‘best broadcast yet’, conveying the ‘scene and colour of the procession’ in such a way that they enjoyed ‘a bit of the thrill with the crowds’.¹⁵¹ A woman who listened in from Forest Hill in London similarly described the pull of the noises that came from her radio set: ‘I was surprised how much I responded to the atmosphere of the crowd, the cheering, etc. I felt a definite pride and thrill in belonging to the Empire which in ordinary life, with my political bias, is just the opposite of my true feeling … Yet I felt a definite sense of relief that I could experience this emotion and be in and of the crowd’.¹⁵² In portrayals like this one, the cheering crowds seem to have enlivened the writers’ feelings by stimulating in them a heightened awareness of a British-imperial community and a desire to be part of that community. Although the aforementioned female respondents were both self-professed socialists and cynical about the monarchy’s allure, when listening to the broadcast they experienced a kind of emotional integration around the focal point of the crown.

National simultaneity – the sharing of time among a people – has played a key role in the creation of modern national identities.¹⁵³ In this respect the BBC’s coronation broadcast helped to generate a sense of unity between listeners and the events unfolding in central London through its focus on the people who assembled as part of the crowds on the processional route. The broadcaster also achieved this unifying effect through its use of an inclusive language of ‘Britishness’ to appeal to listeners and through its rolling coverage of the progress of the royal protagonists to and from Westminster abbey. In the first instance, BBC editorial files reveal that producers carefully selected the commentary team to ensure that English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh voices all contributed to the broadcast.¹⁵⁴ Producers also instructed commentators that they should not ‘use “English” when [they] could use “British”’ and ‘always [to] keep in mind a listener who is of reasonable intelligence, who has no great education and who has never been to London’ so that the broadcast would have a wide popular appeal.¹⁵⁵ Second, and for the first time ever, courtiers granted the BBC access to report from the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, which enabled commentators to present an eyewitness account of George VI’s movements from the moment he left his London residence to the moment he returned five hours later.¹⁵⁶ Through a sequence of expertly managed ‘handovers’ between the commentary team, the BBC reported the king’s journey through central London’s streets right up to his disembarkation from the gold state coach at the doors of the abbey.¹⁵⁷ This early example of rolling media coverage increased the temporal concurrence experienced by radio listeners through the precise mapping of the movements of the royal family.

Royal and religious officials planned the 1937 coronation ceremony as a modern mass media event. This can, in part, be attributed to the influence of Edward VIII, who had wanted his coronation to be projected to the nation and the empire via the new channels of mass communication. The forward-thinking king’s reign had witnessed a series of innovations in the relationship between the media and the monarchy – most notably the updating of the so-called ‘ancient tradition’ whereby a new sovereign addressed a special written message to his or her people. With the death of his father, Edward instead took to the airwaves to speak directly to his subjects in what he termed a ‘more personal message’.¹⁵⁸ Similarly, he consented to the broadcasting of his coronation – a decision widely feted by the press at the time – but this meant that when his shy brother unexpectedly succeeded him the new monarch had little choice but to acquiesce to the public’s expectations.¹⁵⁹

Cosmo Lang met with the new monarch ten days after Edward’s abdication in order to explain the nature of the coronation ceremony and the role mass media would play in it. The archbishop exercised tight control over the organizations that were granted access to the service and he was particularly concerned with maintaining the dignity of the occasion. The BBC had to assure him that ‘there would be no obtrusion of microphones. They would be out of sight’. The broadcaster also planned to position an ‘observer’ in the abbey’s triforium whose job it would be to explain the ceremonial to listeners as it unfolded. The BBC’s director of religion, Frederic Iremonger, who was also an honorary chaplain to the king, took on this role. Whereas the corporation had been prevented from broadcasting ‘observations’ from inside the abbey three years earlier at George and Marina’s wedding, Iremonger’s inclusion in the ceremony should be understood as an attempt by the BBC to make a complicated service meaningful to listeners through instructive commentary. Lang’s only conditions were that he be permitted to vet Iremonger’s script, that the director of religion must not be visible to those in the abbey and that ‘no sound of his comments would be heard’ inside the church walls.¹⁶⁰

Iremonger was a celebrated figure at the BBC, having improved the quality of its religious output, and he seems to have understood the possibilities created by radio for strengthening listeners’ religious feelings.¹⁶¹ He wrote to Lang six weeks before the coronation to suggest that the ‘sound-gap’ created when the king and queen took communion as part of the ceremony could lead to problems: ‘[A] certain spiritual and emotional level will have been reached, which, if it is then lost, may never be recovered by listeners’. Iremonger suggested that the energy created by the broadcast could be sustained if the gap were covered by choral music: ‘I am convinced that it would keep the reverent attention of the millions who will be listening all over the world, as nothing else would’.¹⁶² The archbishop thought Iremonger’s suggestion a good one and it was arranged for special ‘wireless singers’ to be accommodated in the music room of Westminster abbey for this purpose.¹⁶³

For Lang it was imperative that, after the trauma of the abdication, the crowning of George VI should not appear at all shambolic or half-hearted. The archbishop’s chaplain, Alexander Sargent, kept a coronation diary, which reveals disorganized rehearsals led by the earl marshal (the duke of Norfolk) and garter king of arms, as well as an increasingly frustrated Lang, who ultimately took charge of the occasion in order to preserve ‘the atmosphere of reverence’.¹⁶⁴ One of the archbishop’s interventions included instructing the dean of Westminster, William Foxley Norris, that the verbal acclamations shouted by the peers and bishops during the ceremony ‘should be more hearty and vigorous than they were at the Rehearsal’. He typed up and distributed a note to the bishops encouraging them to take ‘a lead in the Acclamation at the Recognition, after the Crowning, and after the Homage … to secure the greater reality of the Service’. ¹⁶⁵ Lang demonstrated a similar awareness of the BBC audience’s needs when, during a coronation committee meeting, he argued against a proposal tabled by the earl marshal on behalf of the ever-religious Lucy Baldwin, wife of the prime minister, ‘that either at the moment when the Crown is placed on the King’s head … or when he leaves the Abbey, the bells of all Churches in the country be rung’. The archbishop responded by pointing out: ‘[T]he ringing of Church Bells in London would greatly disturb the effective reception on the stands of the broadcast of the Service. Moreover, he knew that in many Cathedrals, Churches and Chapels throughout the United Kingdom people were arranging to assemble to listen to the broadcast service’.¹⁶⁶ Here was an archbishop who understood how radio had transformed the soundscape of the public sphere. He prioritized the use of mass media over more traditional customs in order to stage royal ritual for those listening on London’s streets by way of loud speakers and for those who congregated to listen in religious buildings across Britain. Thus, the committee duly agreed not to approve any scheme for the ringing of church bells at the moment of the crowning or on the departure of the king from the abbey.

The international transmission of the broadcast also threw up a number of constitutional issues. Most notably, the high commissioner of Canada, Vincent Massey, had suggested to Lang in August 1936 that the Dominions be given a more prominent function in the coronation ceremony in order to recognize the evolution that had taken place between Britain and the self-governing parts of the empire.¹⁶⁷ In this respect, the broadcast of the service provided a new opportunity to reaffirm the symbolic bonds between George VI and his subjects overseas. The result was a drawn-out series of meetings between Lang, imperial representatives, the secretary of state for Dominion affairs, Malcolm MacDonald, and constitutional experts, during which they hammered out a compromise acceptable to all the nations involved. After much deliberation (General Hertzog of South Africa proving a particularly difficult person to please) it was agreed that the coronation oath would be updated to include special references to the Dominions.¹⁶⁸ Baldwin’s cabinet signed off on the changes and Lang would now invite the king to ‘solemnly promise and swear to govern the peoples of Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa, of your Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, and of your Empire of India, according to their respective Laws and Customs’.¹⁶⁹ The revised formula of the oath both recognized the different stages of independence achieved by the Dominions and India and met with Lang’s approval by ensuring that secular politics were kept at the margins of the service. While a vocal proponent of the monarch’s role in imperial affairs, the archbishop impressed upon others the sanctity of the ceremonial and the need to preserve its religiosity by limiting references to the world outside the abbey.¹⁷⁰

Lang’s decision-making was also informed by the knowledge that the coronation was going to be filmed. As with the 1934 royal wedding, the receiver general of Westminster abbey, Sir Edward Knapp-Fisher, and Dean Foxley Norris advised on the suitability and feasibility of the newsreels’ proposals. Both men had initially objected to the filming of the ceremony on the grounds that there would be insufficient space for cameramen and their apparatus and Lang agreed that it ‘would be inconsistent with the dignity and reverence of the Service’.¹⁷¹ However, the archbishop changed his mind – probably because he saw great potential in involving in the ceremony a wider British and imperial audience who might have otherwise felt excluded. After all, Lang was strongly of the opinion that the coronation should engender support for George VI among his peoples. The archbishop thus took a leading role in arranging how the newsreel cameramen filmed the ceremony and, in his first meeting with the new king and queen, it was agreed that their anointing and communion would not be filmed or photographed in order to preserve the religiosity of these moments, but that all other parts of the service would be recorded.¹⁷² Then, acting as intermediary, Lang met with representatives from Britain’s newsreel companies including Neville Kearney, who was head of the film industries department, the general manager of British Movietone News, Sir Ernest Gordon Craig, and the managing director of Pathé Gazette, W. J. Gell (notably, Craig and Gell played key roles in the formation of the first newsreel trade body, the Newsreel Association, in October 1937).¹⁷³ The archbishop outlined what could and could not be filmed and stipulated to the newsreel bosses that he and the earl marshal be allowed to vet the newsreel footage before its public release. This was all agreed to and, as we shall see, Lang played an important role in the censoring of the films.

With the media plans in place, the archbishop took a number of final precautions to ensure that nothing untoward happened during the ceremony that might jeopardize either the BBC broadcast or newsreel recordings. Lang helped to arrange for the holy oil to be wiped from George VI’s head with a napkin following the anointing, lest he reappear in front of the newsreel cameras with a shining brow.¹⁷⁴ Similarly, care was taken to accommodate the king’s concerns about the weight of the crown and his fear that it might ‘fall off when he walk[ed]’.¹⁷⁵ Finally, Lang had a small bible hastily bound following a coronation rehearsal during which the septuagenarian bishop of Norwich – who was tasked with carrying the holy book during the procession – struggled to lift the original, much larger volume that had been specially made for the occasion.¹⁷⁶ As high priest of modern royal ceremonial, the archbishop of Canterbury was thus intimately involved in the preparations for the one event that he, like the new king, deemed the most important of his entire life.¹⁷⁷

*

Lang would have been heartened by some of the comments recorded by Mass Observation respondents about the broadcast of the coronation service. Several remarked on the dignity with which the ceremony was carried out or the way its sacred character had left a deep impression on them or others. For example, a man from Beer noted the reaction of a builder with whom he had discussed the service: ‘It had moved him tremendously. His emotions were stirred by the ancient traditions, the setting, the music (which he was proud to think was all English except the Handel) and the religious connections of it all’.¹⁷⁸ A woman from North Shields who listened in with her parents similarly recorded that ‘my interest [in the broadcast] was decidedly quickened as the service proceeded … I found myself surprisingly moved, until I felt I wanted to cry. That certainly surprised me as I am not easily emotionally moved by plays or novels. It might have been the music or the profound solemnity and significance of the service’.¹⁷⁹ One might interpret reports like these to argue that Lang’s and other officials’ assiduous preparations helped to ensure the sacred meaning of the coronation was communicated to listeners. Those friends and associates who wrote to congratulate the archbishop in the days and weeks after the event were also, perhaps predictably, effusive in their praise. Letters invariably remarked on the way Lang’s words as celebrant had conveyed the ‘deep significance of the ceremony’ and left a ‘deep spiritual impression’ on listeners.¹⁸⁰ One of the leading scholarly authorities on historic coronations, Leopold G. Wickham Legge, judged that the atmosphere of the 1937 service was ‘completely different’ to that of Edward VII in 1901 because of its ‘religious side’ and the way it ‘touched’ the congregation as well as the unseen participants listening outside the Abbey.¹⁸¹ Some members of the Mass Observation panel similarly noted the religious dimensions of the ceremony. A twenty-six-year-old woman from Bermondsey, who was a secretary to the London city council’s children’s care committee, suggested that the ritual had invested the new king with the spiritual power required to fulfil his role: ‘The King has a very difficult task to perform. In his own strength he cannot perform it. So, by the anointing he is given special grace, to make use of if he will, just as in the sacraments of Holy Matrimony and Ordination special grace is given for special difficulties’.¹⁸² Notably, this respondent went on to criticize the ‘display of wealth in the Abbey’ as ‘sickening’ and out-of-step with ‘the poverty in the distressed areas, and in [her] part of London’. While these negative sentiments reflected the writer’s self-professed ‘left wing’ political views, her report shows how it was possible to identify positively with the sacred character of the king while simultaneously condemning the resplendent qualities of royal ceremonial.

The secretary’s personal testimony is significant for a second reason. She was one of the many Mass Observation respondents who alluded in some way to the burdens of kingship. This idea, popularized in the final years of George V’s reign, took on fuller form still in the figure of the new monarch. As noted in relation to the contrasting public image of the former king, Edward VIII, George VI was generally perceived by members of the public as weaker and less dynamic than his elder brother. The persistent rumour that circulated in the weeks before the coronation – that the king was ill and physically not up to the job of ruling – seems to have informed how many experienced his crowning. A large section of the Mass Observation panel remarked that the service was an ‘ordeal’ for its principal actor, that he would be ‘tired out’ by the experience, or that he might succumb to an ‘epileptic fit’ before it ended.¹⁸³ Sometimes concerns about the fatigue of the monarch extended to his consort, too: a farmer from King’s Lynn in Norfolk said to a friend while they listened in together that he ‘was sorry for the King and Queen having to go through all that ceremonial’.¹⁸⁴ Meanwhile, an eighteen-year-old woman from the Isle of Man noted that ‘several people have said “I’m glad I’m not the King and Queen to have to go through such a ceremony without a break”’.¹⁸⁵ Notably, these reports, which expressed either sympathy or concern for royalty, were supplemented by descriptions from Mass Observation respondents who joined the crowds in London to cheer the gold state coach on its way to the abbey and discerned from the look on its occupant’s face that he was ‘uneasy’ or ‘nervous’.¹⁸⁶

Descriptions of the difficulties faced by George VI echoed Lang’s earlier broadcasts on the king’s stammer and the need to support him in his burdensome role. Indeed, one wonders to what extent the archbishop consciously publicized the monarch’s vulnerability knowing that it would act as a focus for public emotional identification. The media certainly helped to popularize the discourse on the burdens of the coronation. The Sunday Express was typical in drawing attention to the way the event would ‘Play to a World Audience’ with the ‘modern inventions’ of new mass media ‘intensify[ing] a thousandfold the strain of the day for the figures around whom the pageantry is massed’. The article notably finished by stating that these were ‘the penalties of those set high above their fellow men’.¹⁸⁷ Similarly, during and after the coronation service, the BBC commentators Howard Marshall and Frederic Iremonger presented their listeners with descriptions of a ceremony that was an uninviting and lonely experience for its lead protagonists. As George VI underwent the recognition (in which he was presented by the archbishop to the four corners of the coronation theatre), the BBC’s director of religion narrated how ‘standing alone he shows himself to the people’ and, just before the special ‘wireless singers’ began singing over the section during which the king and queen took holy communion, Iremonger delivered a short prayer across the airwaves in which he beseeched God to help the royal couple stay strong ‘as they spend their lives for their people’.¹⁸⁸ Then, once the ceremony had ended, Marshall’s concluding words augmented the vulnerable public image of George VI when he described the unique ‘loneliness that surrounds a king’.¹⁸⁹ In this vein, the Daily Mirror leader published the day after the coronation sustained the emphasis on the burdened monarch when it stressed that he had ‘anxieties to face and delicate tasks to perform’ and deserved ‘all our sympathy’. Then, invoking the title of a song that had been played at the coronation, the Mirror hinted at both the king’s suspected frailty and the public desire for robust leadership that had emerged in the crisis years of the late 1930s when it exhorted him to ‘be strong and play the man!’.¹⁹⁰

The disquiet expressed about the new king’s physical vulnerability and inability to carry out his public role runs counter to other historical interpretations that have suggested he embodied a ‘normative masculinity’ rooted in physical strength and endurance in these years.¹⁹¹ However, what is clear is that the predominant emotion recorded by the Mass Observation panel for the king on coronation day was sympathy and, taken together with the anxiety about his abilities, these feelings can be read as evidence of the impact of the messages peddled by the media and officials like Lang regarding his personal difficulties.¹⁹² This type of emotion also seems to have been specific to the large-scale royal events of the mid 1930s: in its length and elaborate ceremonial the coronation set a new precedent in terms of the pressure it exerted on its protagonist to perform as part of a mass-mediated spectacle. The image of the king who suffered under the weight of his responsibilities thus took on literal form in the figure of George VI as part of an ostensibly torturous coronation service that evoked from media audiences powerful affective responses. It is significant that the archbishop and royal household denied the BBC permission to record and transmit the ceremony live to viewers via television, knowing full well that the new medium was in its infancy and would only place added stress on the monarch.¹⁹³ Instead, the BBC’s television crews were instructed that they could record sections of the procession outside the abbey and, for the first time ever, a small number of ‘tele-viewers’ – approximately 10,000 in London and its surrounding regions – were able to participate in a royal event through television screens.

According to Mass Observation reports, George VI’s speech to Britain and the empire on the evening of the coronation met with a mixed response as well, although expressions of sympathy and uncertainty again predominated. The broadcast was forced on the new monarch because of another promise made by his elder brother while he was still on the throne.¹⁹⁴ Files from the Royal Archives reveal that the new king undertook secret intensive rehearsals with the help of BBC technicians and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue.¹⁹⁵ These files also show that concerns about George VI’s ability to deliver the message were not confined to Logue and the monarch, but shared by courtiers and the BBC’s John Reith. Nevertheless, in helping the king to prepare for the broadcast, the director-general proved himself as much the expert high priest of royal public relations as Cosmo Lang. For example, Reith arranged for BBC engineers to prepare a raised platform from which the monarch could speak into the microphone while standing: he preferred not to sit when delivering messages.¹⁹⁶ This new set-up was, of course, kept a closely guarded secret from the public lest it become another cause for concern and, in fact, the BBC’s controller of public relations, Stephen Tallents, arranged for George VI to be photographed sat at his desk in front of a microphone in February in a pose similar to that adopted by his father when he had been photographed ‘at the mic’ three years previously.¹⁹⁷ This was to be the official photograph for the coronation speech and, while the scene differed from the reality, it provided a reassuring image of continuity with the reign of George V and was sent to newspapers across Britain and the empire in advance of the event so that they could publish it the morning after the king’s broadcast.¹⁹⁸

The chicanery did not stop there. Reith arranged for a pre-recording of George VI’s speech to be made from the rehearsal sessions which would be broadcast via the BBC’s Empire Service throughout the night of 12 May and morning of 13 May in the event that the recording of the actual version turned out to be poor quality because of the monarch’s stammer. Reith suggested that the pre-recording could be ‘cut’ to create a ‘perfect whole’ with all ‘blemishes’ and ‘hesitations’ edited out.¹⁹⁹ Logue saw no harm in a ‘composite record’ being created ‘just in case of accidents, loss of voice, etc’ and it was agreed that once the composite was made all other recordings from the rehearsals would be ‘destroyed’ to ensure there was ‘no chance of leakage’ – the implication being that some unscrupulous journalist might get hold of a recording and reveal to the world the extent of the king’s impediment.²⁰⁰

As with many royal speeches from these years, it is difficult to identify exactly who wrote the king’s coronation broadcast, although files in the Royal Archives point to poet laureate John Masefield, who was a friend of George VI.²⁰¹ We might conjecture that Lang was too busy with his own coronation preparations to commit to the project and that Masefield, who also wrote the opening prayer for the official souvenir programme published to commemorate the 1937 coronation, was deemed a fitting substitute, given that he was well-versed in the royal public language of the period.²⁰² It is worth briefly noting that this was the first time an official souvenir had been published to celebrate the crowning of a British sovereign (Figure 3.5). In 1935 the palace instituted a new administrative organization – King George’s Jubilee Trust – set up in part to control the funding of royal charities.²⁰³ Another key role of the trust was the preparation and publication of souvenirs, the first being produced to commemorate George V’s silver jubilee.²⁰⁴ The souvenirs from the 1930s and 1940s contained the same set of messages associated with the royal speeches of these years, with an emphasis on the duty and burdens of kingship, the sacrifice made by the sovereign in serving his peoples, the religiosity of the family monarchy and the strength and unity of nation and empire. In this respect we should view King George’s Jubilee Trust as the new propaganda arm of the royal household, tasked with promoting royal democratic ideology to help to crystallize the meanings associated with the crown at a time of great change.

Figure 3.5. King George’s Jubilee Trust, The Coronation of Their Majesties King George VI & Queen Elizabeth: Official Souvenir Programme (London, 1937).

Like the broadcasts delivered by his father, George VI’s coronation message was preceded by a special programme of salutations from imperial representatives, titled ‘The Empire’s Homage’, which again symbolized the unity of Britain and the empire.²⁰⁵ Then, after an extended silence, during which listeners heard some muffled whispering, the monarch began his speech with a recognizably intimate greeting: ‘It is with a very full heart that I speak to you tonight. Never before has a newly-crowned King been able to talk to all his peoples in their own homes on the day of his Coronation’. George VI delivered the speech in a slow-paced monotone that was occasionally interrupted by his pausing to take breath, but it contained all the hallmarks of the royal public language that had been refined by courtiers, the archbishop of Canterbury and other writers over the previous five years. He spoke of the strength and progress of the British Commonwealth, delivered a personal greeting to those subjects ‘living under the shadow of sickness or distress’, expressed gratitude to listeners ‘for your love and loyalty to the queen and myself ’, reaffirmed his dedication to serve his people and emphasized the ‘grave and constant responsibility’ of kingship. Then, to finish, he optimistically remarked on the important role that the empire would play in maintaining peace and drew the broadcast to a close with a familiar sign off: ‘I thank you from my heart, and may God bless you all’.²⁰⁶

The media coverage of the speech was very positive, with the press publicizing a vision of the king sat at his desk speaking candidly to his peoples just as his father had done before him.²⁰⁷ Mass Observation reveals a more complex public response, though. A teenager from Chelsea ‘felt sorry for the man, and vaguely uncomfortable; I sat there on tenterhooks, expecting him to stutter or dry up at any minute. It moved so hesitatingly and slowly’.²⁰⁸ A young man from Ilkley in Yorkshire logged similar comments that he overheard while walking home: ‘[W]ell he got through pretty well’ and ‘I was glad when he finished. It made me nervous’.²⁰⁹ The discomfort some people seem to have experienced while listening to the king’s speech meant that they noted a sense of relief once he ‘got through it’.²¹⁰ Occasionally, the Mass Observation panel recorded more encouraging appraisals of the broadcast – although these were in the minority. For example, a speech therapist from Swansea enquired of her mother’s charwoman what she had thought of the message and the older woman replied:

The sympathetic tone of the charwoman’s account reveals the difficulty people had in putting forward a positive interpretation of the king’s abilities. It was ‘only in view of the strain of the day’ that he ‘did very well’. It is also clear that many who listened to George VI’s broadcast were preoccupied with the fact he managed successfully to deliver his speech, rather than concentrating on the meaning of the words he had spoken. In this respect the charwoman was unusual for noting that the king had pledged to ‘do his best’ in the service of his peoples.²¹²

Mass Observation respondents who attended cinemas on the evening of the coronation to listen to the king’s message sometimes recorded more positive experiences. One schoolmaster from west London who accompanied his family to a cinema in Hammersmith documented the fact that ‘the lights lowered discriminately, and created an atmosphere of intimacy. Everyone listened intently. At the end, we stood as the National Anthem came through, being played and sung, a little too lengthily. Then the film programme was resumed’.²¹³ Other respondents also recorded that fellow cinema audience members listened with interest to George VI’s speech.²¹⁴ The comments of the schoolmaster may help to explain the more attentive reactions in cinemas: the lights in the Hammersmith cinema were dimmed to conjure a sense of immersion and to direct the audience’s attention to the aural focal point of George VI’s voice. Equally, though, the silent social etiquette of cinemas and the need to behave publicly in a way that was deemed respectful of royalty seem to have combined with the spatial arrangement of auditoria to achieve a momentary unifying effect. This contrasted sharply with the experiences recorded by those who spent coronation day in other communal environments, like pubs and cafés, where other forms of social behaviour were permitted and where the attention of those present was not spatially directed towards the king’s voice. They often noted that the people around them were apathetic to the events unfolding in central London: the coronation broadcast played as ‘background noise’ and most people paid little or no attention to the radio, engaging in regular conversation instead.²¹⁵ These accounts were also notable for descriptions of half-hearted attempts to join in with the radio coverage of the national anthem, with several respondents recording that they or those around them felt coerced into singing ‘the king’ (as it was also known) by minorities of stalwart patriots.²¹⁶

Occasionally, the Mass Observation panel noted comments which conveyed that those who listened detected a similarity between the king’s voice and that of George V. One striking comment was that George VI’s voice sounded ‘homely, like his father’s’.²¹⁷ However, in light of the other expressions of anxiety that the new monarch’s speech induced in respondents and those around them, it seems likely that these optimistic reviews stemmed either from the tone of language that characterized the message or from wishful thinking and a longing to prove the media’s likening of son to father true. On comparing the kings’ manner of radio address, it is immediately evident that George VI sounded very different to his father: while the new sovereign spoke with the same upper-class accent as George V, he delivered his coronation broadcast in a slow and disjointed manner which lacked the measured emotional expression of his father’s messages.²¹⁸

*

There was one constant that connected the abdication of Edward VIII to the coronation of his brother George VI half a year later: the sorrowful figure of the kings’ mother, Queen Mary. Since the death of her husband, the old queen’s emotions had been carefully publicized in order to evoke public sympathy for her and support for the House of Windsor more generally. Lang was the architect of the queen’s ‘Message to the Nation and Empire’, which was released by the palace and published by the press after George V’s funeral. Bearing all the usual hallmarks of the archbishop of Canterbury’s hand, the queen expressed her ‘deepest gratitude’ from ‘my heart’ for the compassion shown to her by her subjects and remarked that she and they ‘shared’ a ‘personal sorrow’. She then reinforced the empathetic bond that linked her to her audience with reference to her grief and the importance of the public’s support: ‘God bless you, my dear people, for all the wonderful love and sympathy with which you have sustained me’.²¹⁹

Queen Mary had remained more remote from public life than her husband, but this message after his death brought her into a closer personal relationship with British subjects. Scholars have tended to present the queen as an aloof and imperious relic of the Victorian period: old-fashioned and possessing highly conservative opinions.²²⁰ However, while she certainly embodied the monarchy’s past, she was also a potent symbol of its present and future and provided a strong physical and emotional link between the figures of her husband and the new king. As consort to George V, Queen Mary had played a visible, caring role on royal tours of industrial communities in the years before, during and after the First World War.²²¹ Equally, her husband’s broadcasts had positioned her as an important focal point for popular emotional identification.²²² It is, therefore, somewhat unsurprising that, while public displays of affection and loyalty for George VI were muted, Queen Mary’s presence elicited genuine enthusiasm among the public on coronation day.

Significantly, we should also attribute the adulation that Queen Mary met with on 12 May 1937 to an astute public relations campaign on the part of the royal household, the media and the old queen herself following the dramatic events of December 1936. The experiment of an official proclamation that illuminated the queen dowager’s emotions was repeated twice more, the first of these occasions coming the morning after Edward delivered his abdication broadcast. On their front pages, under headlines that drew attention to the ‘Distress That Fills A Mother’s Heart’, the press reproduced another message from Queen Mary that was again addressed ‘to the People of the Nation and the Empire’.²²³ She described once more the ‘great sorrow’ that had overwhelmed her after the death of her husband and how ‘the sympathy and affection’ that had ‘sustained [her]’ then were ‘once again [her] strength and stay’. She told of ‘the distress’ that filled ‘a mother’s heart’ because of her eldest son’s abdication and then commended to readers George VI – ‘summoned so unexpectedly and in circumstances so painful’. Queen Mary then commended the new queen consort, too, before commenting that the public had ‘already taken her children (Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose) to [their] hearts’. The message augmented a loud chorus of voices in the media that had focused on the pain suffered by Queen Mary in 1936.²²⁴ Moreover, these reports appear to have had some impact on the public, with one of the many readers’ letters addressed to the Daily Mirror in the days after the abdication including the words, ‘[L]et us offer our sympathy to our beloved Queen Mary, whose burdens during the past year have been heavy indeed’.²²⁵

The second intervention relating to Queen Mary’s emotions came from her youngest son, the duke of Kent, the day before the coronation. Addressing an audience at the service of intercession for George VI and his consort at Queen’s hall in London, the duke declared that ‘many will be thinking of the King and Queen but they will also be thinking of my mother. As a boy I can remember the Coronation of my father. She will have deeper and more personal memories of that day’. The duke’s comments invoked visions of Queen Mary’s own coronation in 1911 as well as the grief and anguish she had suffered over the past eighteen months. Newspapers subsequently acclaimed the duke’s words as ‘deeply moving’ and highlighted to readers that he had asked those gathered at Queen’s hall to ‘think of my mother’.²²⁶

Thus, the palace and media’s promotion of Queen Mary’s popular image prior to 12 May helped to prepare members of the public to identify with her on coronation day. She represented the tangible link between George V and her second son; and her embodiment of continuity was also conveyed in press reports that linked her to her granddaughters. On 6 May she made what the Mirror referred to as a ‘surprise visit’ to Westminster abbey ‘to watch coronation rehearsals in which Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret took part’. The report claimed that 2,000 spectators had cheered her arrival and that ‘memories of her own coronation twenty-six years ago must have crowded upon [her]’ during the rehearsal.²²⁷ The queen’s grandmotherly persona also drew attention to the permanence of monarchy through generational family ties and was integral to the palace’s planning of the coronation procession, in which she rode alongside the two young princesses on the return leg to Buckingham Palace after their father’s crowning. The media presented this as a special journey: the Sunday Express told readers that ‘the luckiest moment of all was enjoyed by just a few hundred people in Northumberland Avenue’ when there was a brief pause and the carriage that carried Queen Mary and the princesses came to a standstill: ‘[F]or a minute or two it was clear they became just grandmother and grandchildren’.²²⁸ The newspaper amplified the scene of domestic normality when it noted how ‘little Margaret Rose – “just like your child or mine” – could not resist giving way to her excitement and fidgeting’.

It was also revealed to the public that Queen Mary had succumbed to tears during the coronation ceremony. A British Movietone News cameraman had captured scenes of her weeping in his footage inside the Abbey. On the strict instructions of Lang and the earl marshal, who oversaw the censorship of the film, these scenes were suppressed from the final edit, with the archbishop claiming they ‘intruded upon [the queen’s] most natural emotions’.²²⁹ Nevertheless, journalists learnt about the incident and reported that Queen Mary had cried during the service, which possibly helped to generate sympathy for her among Mass Observation respondents who wrote about the coronation.²³⁰ In fact, the old queen’s presence at the coronation broke with royal protocol: as dowager queen (queen mother) she was not, according to tradition, meant to attend the crowning ceremony of her husband’s successor. However, her biographer has suggested that she decided to break with convention and attend in order to increase the ‘sense of solidarity with which the whole Royal Family was facing the new reign’.²³¹ It proved a shrewd modification to the programme because Mass Observation personal testimonies reveal that she was by far the most positively commented-on member of the House of Windsor to partake in the event. Notably, the new queen consort, Elizabeth, and her children were the recipients of far fewer positive comments.²³²

The unique enthusiasm that greeted Queen Mary on 12 May deserves closer historical attention. In the first instance, the response of the crowds gathered on the processional route was exceptional. A nurse and self-professed royalist from London recorded the crowd’s jubilant acknowledgement of the old queen:

As well as illuminating the high esteem in which Prince George and Princess Marina were popularly held, the nurse implied that the public shared a strong emotional bond with ‘our beloved Queen Mary’, noting that she was welcomed with ‘real genuine’ enthusiasm by the crowds. Other respondents similarly reported the unusual warmth of the greeting extended to the old queen. A female typist noted that she encountered a ‘lift girl’ who had spectated from the procession route and who told her, ‘I think [Queen Mary] got most cheers of all, everyone likes her much more than the others’.²³⁴ Some respondents who tuned in to listen to the coronation broadcast later recalled that they were deeply moved when they learnt that the old queen had appeared as part of the parade. A woman in her thirties from Forest Hill, London, wrote that her eyes had filled with tears as she heard the crowds, ‘especially when Queen Mary appeared on the scene’. She then explained her reaction: ‘I saw her recently quite close-to, and was rather repelled. She seemed just a disagreeable old lady, very bad on her feet. Nevertheless, as Queen Mother, with her children and grandchildren around her, her regal bearing, and some sort of “see-it-through” air about her, she moves me’.²³⁵ The emphasis the respondent placed on Queen Mary’s ordinary qualities, along with her motherly and grandmotherly image, reveals the impact the media’s generational family-centred narrative had had on members of the public: she was the matriarchal head of the dynasty who had suffered great personal loss. In this vein, a teenage boy was overhead by one Mass Observation respondent telling his friends that ‘Queen Mary is the nicest of the lot. She’s had so many sorrows to bear’.²³⁶

Taken together, these comments indicate that Queen Mary’s family-centred image engendered public support for her. Notably, other respondents suggested that her matriarchal presence bequeathed authority on the new king. One woman from Olton in Warwickshire, who listened to the coronation broadcast with her mother, recorded that, at the climactic balcony appearance at the end of the day, ‘the crowd cheered when Queen Mary seemed to “present” the Royal Family to the people’.²³⁷ This respondent invested this moment with ritualized significance: it was through the old queen’s assent and ‘presentation’ that legitimacy was conferred on George VI and his family. Indeed, the BBC staged this moment as a crucial act of recognition between the new royal family and the assembled multitudes in order to convey a reassuring image to audience members. A number of the Mass Observation panel noted that they had listened eagerly as the large crowds that gathered outside the palace called for the king to appear on the balcony.²³⁸ Some respondents stated they had worried that George VI would not appear at all and were overcome with a sense of relief when he and his family finally did walk out onto the balcony.²³⁹ The sound of cheering with which the king met as he stood looking out across the thousands of faces that had massed outside the gates of his home was designed to act as an audible chorus of assent to his rule. The final scripted words of the BBC’s broadcast stressed the importance of the balcony scene as an act of recognition between monarch and subjects: ‘[T]he long windows have been closed and still the crowd is cheering. We’ll let those cheers be the last thing you hear as we leave Buckingham Palace, at the end of the Coronation ceremonies’. After these closing words the volume of the cheering was raised for fifteen seconds, after which the programme faded to silence.²⁴⁰ This moment was thus stage-managed by the BBC to symbolically install the king and his family at the centre of society through what sounded like popular support.²⁴¹

Newsreel and press photographers also presented the royal balcony appearance as the climax of the coronation celebrations. As with the visual images of the balcony set-piece after the 1934 royal wedding, editors of both media intentionally juxtaposed images of ‘the masses’ alongside scenes of the royal party waving from the balcony, with Queen Mary at the centre of the group, in order to create a visual dialogue in gesture between the royal family and their people (Figure 3.6).²⁴² One Mass Observation respondent journeyed into London on coronation evening to stand with the throng of people waiting expectantly at the palace gates for the royal family to reappear. The respondent described the very loud reception with which George VI met when he emerged, as well as the ‘amazing way [that] the moment the King put up his hand in recognition of the applause the shouting suddenly became twice as enthusiastic and loud’.²⁴³ This excerpt is testament to the power of the innovative gesture of the wave that Princess Marina had introduced just three years before in generating public enthusiasm for royalty. Most newspapers also chose to publish the picture of the five family members on the balcony, with the Daily Express and Sketch presenting it as a large front-page image.²⁴⁴ This photograph was the central visual icon following weeks of coverage that had amplified the narrative of continuity through the figure of the old queen and her second son. Not only did she represent the permanence and tradition of monarchy – values briefly threatened by Edward VIII’s reign – but also, as matriarch of the House of Windsor, she exemplified the idea that the essence of British kingship lay in a familiar domesticity performed by recognizable royal celebrities.

Figure 3.6. A balcony photograph with Queen Mary encouraging her granddaughters to wave to the crowds gathered below. Fox Photos © Getty Images .

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that members of the public expressed concerns about the leadership qualities of George VI at the time of his coronation. These anxieties not only related to the sense of loss felt by some after Edward VIII’s abdication but also reflected a deeper disquiet about the new king’s ability to lead the nation at a time when many people desired a dynamic figure as their head of state to rival the dictators in Europe. Despite the best efforts of officials and journalists to refashion George VI’s public image so that it mirrored that of his father, concerns persisted because he could neither emulate the worldly, comforting persona of George V nor embody the masculine vigour and charisma of his brother, whose romantic ambitions continued to be celebrated by vocal sections of the British press to the real consternation of palace courtiers and Cosmo Lang. Indeed, the new monarch’s less dynamic personality led members of the public to channel their emotions instead towards the forlorn figure of his mother, who provided a reassuring link with the past on coronation day; and witnessed politicians and news editors on all sides of the political spectrum celebrating the king’s crowning as an event that symbolized Britain and the empire’s unity and constitutional evolution. The image of unity was sustained through the media’s choreography of coronation day and the narrative of a nation comprising all classes and political groups uniquely joined around the House of Windsor. While this version of events distracted from the fissures created by the abdication crisis and ongoing tensions within imperial politics, it does seem to have appealed to sections of the population who internalized the messages on the vitality of British democracy and the strength of the empire, especially given the growing fears about the strong emotional appeals of fascism on the Continent.

Concerns about the new king’s character notably persisted after the coronation. Mass Observation reports reveal that George VI’s first Christmas broadcast in December 1937 met with mixed reactions from listeners, with a majority of respondents again focusing on his stammer rather than the meaning of the words he actually said.²⁴⁵ As we shall see in the next chapter, the monarch never managed completely to rid himself of the public belief that he lacked the physicality or strength of character to lead Britain and the empire against the forces of Nazism. Nevertheless, it was partly because of this lack of vigour that the king’s public image came to be defined by a new tension that has remained at the heart of the House of Windsor’s public relations strategy ever since his accession. George VI’s coronation demonstrated on an unprecedented scale the new kinds of pressure exerted on royal persons by modern mass media. To some extent this perception was promoted by the archbishop of Canterbury, who regularly emphasized to the public the difficulties the king and queen faced. As has also been shown here, alongside the public anxieties expressed about the new king’s leadership was a sympathy for him which sprung from the way his royal duty demanded that he face up to his new position despite his own misgivings and physical inadequacies. This tension – in which the imposition of duty worked against a royal individual’s private desires – was, of course, the stimulus behind Edward VIII’s abdication. But, more significantly, it was embodied by George VI and, although it had first been articulated by his father in his broadcasts, the public language on the burdens of royal service became increasingly central to the crown’s media strategy after 1937 and generated support for the ostensibly beleaguered figure of the new king.

As the journalist Kingsley Martin noted in the aftermath of the coronation, emotional sympathy could translate into admiration for the dutiful qualities of the monarch. In making this point, he quoted a ‘north-countryman’ to whom he had spoken: ‘If it had been Edward the nation would have gone mad. As it is, we would still prefer to cheer Edward, but we know that we’ve got to cheer George. After all, it’s Edward’s fault he’s not on the throne, and George didn’t ask to get there. He’s only doing his duty, and it’s up to us to show that we appreciate it’.²⁴⁶ Crucially, George VI became renowned for his self-denying, dutiful virtues right at the moment when new concepts of self-fulfilment – specifically within personal relationships and the domestic setting of the home – were taking off in British society.²⁴⁷ This tension has persisted at the heart of the modern monarchy, but its genesis can be located in the social and political transformations of the mid 1930s. Notably, at the end of the decade, in a semi-official book entitled Destiny Called to Them, which celebrated the personalities of the new royal family and was written by the journalist and Conservative politician, Sir Arthur Beverley Baxter, the concept of the burdens of monarchy was immortalized as part of a now famous phrase attributed to George VI while he was still an undergraduate student at Cambridge. According to Baxter, the young Prince Albert was caught smoking while in university dress and ‘an officious mentor pointed out how his offence was aggravated by his being a member of the Royal family’. To this the young prince had ‘bitterly’ replied that ‘we’re not a family … we’re a firm’.²⁴⁸ Whether or not this anecdote was apocryphal, the implication was clear: to be royal was not to be envied. Royal status required of the individual that he or she set an example to others; indiscretion could not be tolerated. Royal life imposed duty where domesticity should have been: personal happiness and self-fulfilment came second to public service and self-sacrifice.

___________

1 ‘Archbishop Cosmo Lang’s broadcast on Edward VIII’s abdication’, Sunday 13 Dec. 1936 (LPL, Lang 27, fos. 209–16), quoted in R. Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London, 2012), p. 244.

2 F. Mort, ‘On tour with the prince: monarchy, imperial politics and publicity in the prince of Wales’s dominion tours 1919–20’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xxix (2018), 25–57; H. Jones, ‘A prince in the trenches? Edward VIII and the First World War’, in Sons and Heirs: Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. F. L. Müller and H. Mehrkens (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 229–46; L. N. Mayhall, ‘The prince of Wales versus Clark Gable: anglophone celebrity and citizenship between the wars’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., iv (2007), 529–43.

3 S. Bradford, King George VI (London, 2011), p. 213.

4 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 24–5, ‘King Edward VIII: Coronation Service’, 21 July 1936.

5 Although R. Beaken took a strong moral stance against Edward VIII’s behaviour, his biographical analysis of Lang’s key role in the events leading up to the abdication is excellent, particularly with regard to the archbishop’s support of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (meeting with him on 7 occasions) as the disagreement between king and premier intensified (Beaken, Cosmo Lang, pp. 86–142).

6 F. Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate: letters, public opinion and monarchy in the 1936 abdication crisis’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xxv (2014), 30–62; P. Williamson, ‘The monarchy and public values, 1900–1953’, in The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present, ed. A. Olechnowicz (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 223–57; P. Ziegler, ‘Edward VIII: the modern monarch?’, Court Historian, viii (2003), 73–83, at pp. 79–82; S. Williams, The People’s King: the True Story of the Abdication (London, 2003), p. 1.

7 Quoted in P. Ziegler, King Edward VIII (London, 2012), p. 331.

8 E.g., G. Eden, ‘Was Primate’s Attack Unfair?’, Daily Express, 15 Dec. 1936, p. 1. Writing in the wake of these events, the writer C. Mackenzie noted that Lang’s broadcast ‘dealt a disastrous blow to religious feeling throughout the country and destroyed in advance any possible effect of the Archbishop’s “recall to religion” a fortnight later’ (C. Mackenzie, The Windsor Tapestry: Being a Study of the Life, Heritage and Abdication of H.R.H. the Duke of Windsor, K.G. (London, 1938), p. 550).

9 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 415–17, Dr. Bouquet to A. C. Don, 11 Dec. 1936. See also the diary of Alexander Sargent, who was another of Lang’s chaplains: LPL, MS3208, ‘King Edward’s Abdication’, 11 Dec. 1936, esp. fos. 207–8; BOD, MS. Dawson 40, fo. 183, 15 Dec. 1936.

10 ‘Archbishop Cosmo Lang’s broadcast on Edward VIII’s abdication’, Sunday 13 Dec. 1936 (LPL, Lang 27, fos. 209–16), quoted in Beaken, Cosmo Lang, pp. 245–6.

11 Whereas the abdication story is well-rehearsed, the 6-month period after Edward’s impromptu departure and George VI’s succession has not received sustained historical analysis before.

12 See chs. 1 and 2.

13 J. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (London, 1958), pp. 296–7, 300–1, 311–4; Bradford, George VI, pp. 270–2, 280–3; P. Ziegler, George VI: the Dutiful King (London, 2014), pp. 40–6.

14 For this chapter a complete re-examination has been undertaken of the 132 surviving reports on the 1937 coronation collected by Mass Observation that now form part of the online digital MO archive. The digitized reports are unsystematically numbered in the archive as ‘day survey’ files from ‘019’ to ‘576’. There is another ‘unidentified’ day survey file that contains approximately 30 of the reports. These 132 reports can be located through the online keyword search ‘1937 coronation’. Three different kinds of reports were collected by Mass Observation in 1937. The first were solicited from a panel of 47 volunteers who agreed in early 1937 to make a note of their activities and observations on the 12th of each month in order to create a context against which their descriptions of the coronation celebrations on 12 May could be situated. These were labelled the ‘CO’ section and are referred to here in this chapter using their original CO number (1 to 47). The second were reports solicited by MO after the event through leaflets and advertisements placed in the New Statesman enquiring: ‘Where were you on May 12th? Mass Observation wants your story’. This campaign yielded approximately 100 further reports from members of the public and these files were given the label ‘CL’. While some CL files can be located in the numbered day surveys from the key word search results, most can be found in the ‘unidentified’ day survey file and, illogically, in day survey file ‘175’. They are referred to here using their original CL number. The third kind of report collected by MO were those prepared by a specially tasked ‘mobile squad’ of 13 ‘observers’ in London, who took shifts in recording events in the capital as they unfolded on coronation day. Labelled ‘CM’, the mobile squad mainly comprised students from the University of Oxford, but also included MO co-founder Humphrey Jennings. These reports are referred to here using their original CM number. For further information on the three different types of file, see the MO publication based on the coronation reports, May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by Over Two Hundred Observers, ed. H. Jennings et al. (London, 1987 [1937]), pp. 89–91. Note that the number of 200 observers is misleading, as indicated by the index to the respondents’ reports (pp. 439–40); and that the outline of the number of reports received and archived by MO (pp. 89–91) is also incorrect. There are, in fact, a miscellany of additional reports that were probably received later (mainly in the CL section) and were not included in May the Twelfth. Additionally, there are 27 further reports referred to in May the Twelfth that have since been lost and are not available through the digital archive. Where personal testimony from these additional reports is used in this chapter, it is referred to using May the Twelfth.

15 J. Parry, ‘Whig monarchy, whig nation: crown politics and representativeness, 1800– 2000’, in Olechnowicz, The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 47–75, at pp. 66–7; M. Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters: the Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (Chicago, Ill., 2016), p. 225.

16 JRL, MG/B/B220/697, J. Bone to W. Crozier, 9 Dec. 1936.

17 D. Morrah, Princess Elizabeth: the Illustrated Story of Twenty-One Years in the Life of the Heir Presumptive (London, 1947), p. 62; L. Pickett, et al., The War of the Windsors: a Century of Unconstitutional Monarchy (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 126; M. Thornton, Royal Feud: the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor (London, 1985), pp. 126–7.

18 D. Cannadine, History in Our Time (Yale, 1998), pp. 59–60.

19 Queen Elizabeth to O. Sitwell, 19 Feb. 1937, quoted in W. Shawcross, Counting One’s Blessings: the Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (Basingstoke, 2012), p. 237.

20 Bradford, George VI, pp. 270–86; Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, pp. 310–4; P. Ziegler, Crown and People (London, 1978), pp. 48 and 68.

21 E.g., A. Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978 (Oxford, 2009), p. 242.

22 For the 2 unusually positive reactions to George’s actions on coronation day see respondents MOA, CL39 and CL63, both of whom were exceptional in their fervent patriotism and support for the new king. For the other four relatively positive portrayals, see CL12, CL25, CL40 and CL56.

23 Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, p. 60.

24 In his analysis of the 1937 Mass Observation study of the coronation, P. Ziegler did not fully acknowledge how the approbation that MO respondents recorded for Edward VIII compared with the lack of enthusiasm registered for George VI (Ziegler, Crown and People, pp. 52 and 60). Ziegler stated that ‘among those who actually watched the procession such remarks as the passing of George VI provoked were generally flattering – “There’s the right man for the job”’ (p. 60 ). This is the only example Ziegler gave that presented the new king in a positive light and was, in fact, just 1 of 6 comments recorded in the MO coronation reports or May the Twelfth that characterized the new monarch positively.

25 The king’s biographers have agreed that Lang’s broadcast had a detrimental effect on George VI’s public image (Bradford, George VI, p. 272; Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, pp. 309–10).

26 ‘Stammering’, The Lancet, ccxxvii, no. 5865 (25 Jan. 1936), 208–9; ‘Stammering not a speech defect’, The Lancet, ccxxvii, no. 5869 (22 Feb. 1936), 449.

27 M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006), ch. 1.

28 E.g., the following articles: ‘Family Life at the Palace Again’, Daily Mail, 12 Dec. 1936, p. 8; ‘The New King’, The Times, 11 Dec. 1936, p. 17; ‘The Homely Family who will Lead the Empire’, Daily Mirror, 11 Dec. 1936, pp. 16–7.

29 Quoted in Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 331.

30 Beaken, Cosmo Lang, pp. 245–6.

31 L. King, Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 5–7; C. Langhamer, The English in Love: the Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013). pp. 6–7; J. Lewis, ‘Marriage’, in Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Harlow, 2001), pp. 69–85.

32 Daily Mirror, 11 Dec. 1936, pp. 16–7; Daily Mail, 11 Dec. 1936, p. 9; Reynolds News, 9 May 1937, p. 24.

33 Daily Mirror, 11 Dec. 1936, pp. 16–7.

34 JRL, MG/223/24/13, W. Crozier to J. Bone, 16 Feb. 1937.

35 Manchester Guardian, 3 May 1937, p. 18; Sunday Express, 9 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 13 May 1937, p. 4; Daily Sketch, 13 May 1935, p. 5.

36 Sunday Express, 9 May 1937, p. 9; A. Bingham and M. Conboy, Tabloid Century: the Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford, 2015), pp. 97–130.

37 Sunday Pictorial, 9 May 1937, p. 2.

38 We can also account for the press’s candid descriptions of George VI’s emotional life with reference to Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast. The ex-king’s public confession of love for Wallis Simpson had encouraged journalists to adopt a more intimate language in describing royal emotions and established a new precedent that continued to shape how the royal family’s domesticity was publicly projected.

39 MOA, CL12; also CL25 and CL40.

40 E.g., Daily Sketch, 5 May 1937, p. 17; Sunday Express, 11 Apr. 1937, p. 23.

41 ‘A Retrospect on the King’s Life’, British Movietone News, 29 March 1937.

42 Daily Mail, 14 Dec. 1936, p. 9.

43 Sunday Express, 11 Apr. 1937, p. 23; Daily Mail, 15 Dec. 1936, p. 11.

44 BOD, MS. Dawson 41, fo. 71.

45 The Times, 8 May 1937, p. 14. Also see Daily Mirror, 8 May 1937, p. 3; Daily Mail, 8 May 1937, p. 5.

46 Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1937, p. 11.

47 Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1937, p. 11.

48 BOD, MS. Dawson 79, fos. 80–1, A. Lascelles to G. Dawson, 13 Dec. 1937.

49 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, pp. 241–50.

50 E.g., Daily Mirror, 5 Dec. 1936, pp. 5–6; Daily Express, 5 Dec. 1936, p. 10; Daily Mirror, 29 March 1937, p. 28; Daily Mirror, 8 Apr. 1937, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 10 Apr. 1937 p. 1; Daily Express, 29 March, p. 1; Daily Express, 12 Apr. 1937, p. 1. Beaverbrook was a strong supporter of Edward and a critic of Baldwin during the abdication crisis and both of his Express titles accused the prime minister of forcing a popular king off the throne (Bingham, Family Newspapers?,p.242).

51 BOD, MS. Dawson 79, fo. 126b, G. Dawson to R. Barrington-Ward, 29 March 1937. Lady Violet Milner was editor of the National Review. See ‘Milner [ née Maxse], Violet Georgina, Viscountess Milner’, in ONDB, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35039> [accessed 3 March 2018].

52 Sunday Express, 28 March 1937, pp. 8–9.

53 BOD, MS. Dawson 41, fo. 70, 6 May 1937. That Hardinge was present at The Times’s lunch party shows just how close royal courtiers and the media elite were in these years.

54 Daily Mirror, 4 May 1937, p. 1.

55 Daily Mirror, 4 May 1937, p. 1.

56 E.g., Daily Mirror, 8 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Express, 8 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 8 May, p. 5; and Daily Express, 8 May, p. 20.

57 Daily Herald, 8 May 1937, p. 1.

58 See LPL, Lang 156. Notably, Lang and Fulham were unsuccessful: the duke and Mrs Simpson married with a religious ceremony on 3 June 1937 (Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 363).

59 LPL, Lang 318, fos. 136–7, C. Wigram to C. G. Lang, 5 Apr. 1937; see also Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 354–5.

60 LPL, Lang 318, fos. 139–40, C. G. Lang to C. Wigram, 8 Apr. 1937.

61 Daily Mirror, 9 Apr. 1937, p. 1.

62 LPL, Lang 318, fo. 141, C. Wigram to C. G. Lang, 10 Apr. 1937.

63 Daily Express, 24 May 1937, p. 10.

64 Daily Sketch, 7 May 1937, p. 6.

65 MOA, CO18b. There were a small number of general criticisms aimed at the duke of Windsor. See MOA, CO38, CO41 and CL16.

66 E.g., MOA, CM4, CO12, CO19, CO23, CO28, CO31, CO32, CO37, CO41, CO43, CO47, CL15, CL24, CL25, CL30, CL40, CL47, CL56.

67 MOA, CM6.

68 T. Harrisson, ‘What is public opinion?’, Political Quart., xi (1940), 368–83.

69 MOA, CO35.

70 MOA, CO24 (only in Jennings et al., May the Twelfth, p. 307).

71 E.g., MOA, CM2, CO12, CO19b, CO24, CL47.

72 MOA, CO24 (only in Jennings et al., May the Twelfth, p. 307).

73 MOA, CL40.

74 MOA, CL56.

75 MOA, CO1.

76 MOA, CO23, CO15, CO18, CO22, CL56.

77 Bradford, George VI, pp. 270–5; Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, pp. 308–10.

78 BOD, MS. Dawson 79, fos. 126b–c, G. Dawson to R. Barrington-Ward, 31 March 1937; Daily Mirror, 31 March 1937, p. 1.

79 Daily Mirror, 7 May 1937, p. 36; Daily Express, 7 May 1937, p. 1.

80 Bradford, George VI, p. 273; Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, p. 309.

81 Daily Mirror, 7 May 1937, p. 36.

82 Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p. 242.

83 LPL, MS3208, ‘King Edward’s Abdication’, 11 Dec. 1936, fos. 193–7; Beaken, Cosmo Lang, pp. 77 and 97.

84 The Times, 3 May 1937, p. 9.

85 LPL, Lang 22, fo. 372, C. Bardsley to C. G. Lang, 16 Apr. 1937.

86 One of the 3 main distributors claimed to have sold 1.5 million copies of the forms of service, which included servicing one tenth of all the parishes in England (LPL, Lang 22, fos. 308–9, W. K. Lowther Clarke to A. C. Don, 31 May 1937 and reply).

87 BBCWA, R30/444/1, Confidential Memo: Coronation Week Programmes Committee.

88 BBCWA, R30/444/1, Confidential Memo: Coronation Week Programmes Committee. For a reproduction of Lang’s address, see The Listener, 12 May 1937, pp. 903–4 and 938.

89 P. Mandler, The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (London, 2006), pp. 149–51.

90 B. Schwarz, ‘The language of constitutionalism: Baldwinite conservatism’, in Formations of Nation and People, ed. Formations Editorial Collective (London, 1984), pp. 1–18, at pp. 11–6; P. Williamson, ‘The doctrinal politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Michael Cowling, ed. M. Bentley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 181–208, at pp. 190–1.

91 Mandler, The English National Character, pp. 151–2.

92 S. Baldwin, ‘On the death of King George V’, 21 Jan. 1936, in S. Baldwin, Service of Our Lives: Last Speeches as Prime Minister (London, 1938), pp. 11–20, at p. 20; for a full copy of the speech see ‘A Life of Service: The Prime Minister’s Tribute’, The Times, 28 Jan. 1936, p. 25.

93 Mort, ‘Love in a cold climate’, pp. 58–62.

94 On the 1935 silver jubilee, see Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, p. 237.

95 JRL, MG/223/24/103, W. Crozier to J. L. Hammond, 19 March 1937.

96 JRL, MG/223/24/140, W. Crozier to J. L. Hammond, 29 March 1937.

97 K. Martin, The Magic of Monarchy (London, 1937).

98 Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1937, p. 10.

99 Daily Express, 12 May 1937, p. 10.

100 News Chronicle, 11 May 1937, p. 8 (and the following quotations).

101 Daily Herald, 10 May 1937, p. 10.

102 Daily Herald, 8 May 1937, p. 1.

103 As historian Ben Pimlott noted: ‘The Empire was unblinkingly described as if it were a democratic, almost a voluntary, association’ (B. Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (London, 2002), p. 43).

104 Daily Worker, 8 May 1937, p. 4; Daily Worker, 12 May 1937, pp. 4–5.

105 Daily Worker, 10 May 1937, p. 1; 11 May 1937, p. 1.

106 Daily Worker, 12 May 1937, p. 1.

107 Daily Worker, 12 May 1937, p. 3.

108 On Shaw’s column, see MOA, CO19b, CO36, CL64. For panel members who sold the Daily Worker, see MOA, CO20, CL64.

109 Daily Worker, 13 May 1937, p. 1. Anecdotal evidence recorded by MO ‘mobile squad’ member CM7 supports this assertion.

110 Daily Mirror, 13 May 1937, p. 8; Daily Mail, 13 May 1937, p. 2.

111 S. Baldwin, ‘Responsibilities of Empire’, The Listener, xvii, 21 Apr. 1937, pp. 735–6. The original broadcast took place on 16 Apr. 1937. See also W. Churchill, ‘Freedom and Progress for All’, The Listener, xvii, 5 May 1937, pp. 849–50 and 887; D. Lloyd George, ‘Peace Rests with the Empire’, The Listener, xvii, 9 June. 1937, pp. 1121–2 and 1158.

112 Lord Snell of Plumstead, ‘Bulwark of World Peace’, The Listener, xvii, 28 Apr. 1937, pp. 795–6.

113 MOA, CO1.

114 Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1937, p. 12.

115 MOA, CM6, CO16, CL15, CL22, CL39.

116 MOA, CL63.

117 MOA, CL99.

118 I.e., the Baldwin speech delivered on 16 Apr. and published in The Listener 5 days later (S. Baldwin, ‘Responsibilities of Empire’, The Listener, xvii, 21 Apr. 1937, pp. 735–6.

119 MOA, CL65 and CL63; also CM6, CL33, CL34, CL40.

120 B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 255–82; S. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 14–7.

121 MOA, CM6.

122 For a similar example, see M. Jones, ‘“The surest safeguard of peace”: technology, the navy and the nation in boys’ papers c.1905–1907’, in The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age, ed. R. J. Blyth, A. Lambert and J. Rüger (Farnham, 2011), pp. 109–31.

123 MOA, CO19b.

124 MOA, CO6, CO42, CL15, CL16, CL22, CL103.

125 MOA, CO16. See also CO18, CO19b, CL16, CL22, CL69; D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 270–7.

126 On the 19th-century popularization of crowd-centred imagery, see J. Plunkett Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003), pp. 17, 43, and 60–7.

127 H. McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918–45 (Manchester, 2011), pp. 28–35; J. Lawrence, ‘The transformation of British public politics after the First World War’, Past & Present, cxc (2006), 185–216, at pp. 212–6.

128 The Times, 12 May 1937, p. 13.

129 MOA, CM8.

130 MOA, CO19b.

131 MOA, CO6, CO23, CO27, CL16.

132 S. Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: the Idea and Images of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (New York, 2013), pp. 16–20, 51–4, 171–4. Jonsson has noted that mass psychology was associated with the political discourse of fascism and that it also provided left-wing intellectuals with the ‘instruments’ to interpret fascist ideology: a language of ‘the masses’ was used to understand the social disorder and violent events that disrupted interwar Europe. See also C. Borch, The Politics of Crowds: an Alternative History of Sociology (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 165–233.

133 E.g., K. Martin, Fascism, Democracy and the Press (London, 1938), pp. 9–10.

134 N. Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 2; also J. Hinton, ‘Self reflections in the mass’, History Workshop Jour., lxxv (2013), 251–9, at p. 257.

135 R. M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London, 1976), ch. 1.

136 MOA, CO16.

137 MOA, CO23.

138 MOA, CL1, CM2, CM10, CO29, CO38, CO41, CL8, CL15, CL22, CL46, CL66, CL101, CL107.

139 ‘Coronation Preparations’, Gaumont British News, 8 Apr. 1937.

140 Daily Herald, 11 May 1937, p. 1.

141 Daily Herald, 11 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 11 May 1937, p. 3; Daily Mail, 11 May 1937, p. 10; New Chronicle, 11 May 1937, p. 8.

142 D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1990), p. 301; F. Prochaska, ‘George V and republicanism, 1917–1919’, Twentieth Century British Hist., x (1999), 27–51, at p. 40.

143 Daily Herald, 10 May 1937, p. 10.

144 MOA, CO3.

145 ‘Coronation Preparations’, Gaumont British News, 8 Apr. 1937.

146 LPL, Lang 23, fos. 199–200, ‘Coronation Joint Committee – Conclusions’, 25 Jan. 1937.

147 Prochaska, ‘George V’, pp. 40 and 49.

148 LPL, Lang 23, fo. 200, ‘Coronation Joint Committee – Conclusions’, 25 Jan. 1937.

149 BBCWA, R30/443/4, World-Radio, 7 May 1937; Schedule for Coronation Broadcast, 8 Apr. 1937, p. 9.

150 MOA, CO14, CO16, CO23, CO33, CO41, CO43, CL7, CL8, CL11, CL34, CL64, CL101.

151 MOA, CO16.

152 MOA, CO41; also quoted in A. Olechnowicz, ‘“A jealous hatred”: royal popularity and social inequality’, in Olechnowicz, The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 280–314, at p. 303.

153 T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (London, 1996), pp. 28 and 201. See also B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1986), pp. 22–36.

154 BBCWA, R30/443/3, various memoranda, including Internal Circulating Memo, 1 March 1937, from S. J. de Lotbinière.

155 BBCWA, R30/443/4, Schedule for Coronation Broadcast, 8 Apr. 1937, p. 9; BBCWA, R30/443/5, Schedule for Coronation Broadcast, 5 May 1937, p. 12. Newsreels also ensured that the ‘British’ character of George VI’s coronation was conveyed to viewers by presenting them with scenes of the preparations taking place around the UK. The same applied to the BBC and newsreels’ exhaustive coverage of the coronation tour of the Celtic fringes after the event (‘The Stage is Set 1937’, Pathé Super Sound Gazette, 10 May 1937).

156 BBCWA, R30/443/2, S. J. de Lotbinière to Sir Hill-Child, master of the household, 4 Feb. 1937 and reply from Hill-Child to de Lotbinière on 5 Feb. 1937.

157 BBCWA, R30/443/2, S. J. de Lotbinière to J. Edgar, 16 Jan. 1937; BBCWA, R30/443/4, Schedule for Coronation Broadcast, 8 Apr. 1937; BBCWA, R30/443/5, Schedule for Coronation Broadcast, 5 May 1937.

158 ‘The King’s Broadcast’, British Movietone News, 2 March 1936.

159 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 168–9, ‘King George VI: Coronation Service’, 21 Dec. 1936.

160 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 209–12, ‘Coronation Service: Broadcasting’, 13 Jan. 1937.

161 A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (5 vols. Oxford, 1965–95), ii. 217 and 226–7.

162 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 38–9, F. A. Iremonger to C. G. Lang, 30 March 1937.

163 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 41–3, C. G. Lang to F. A. Iremonger, 1 Apr. 1937 and reply 2 Apr. 1937.

164 LPL, MS3208, fos. 209–20, ‘The Coronation May 1937’.

165 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 83–4, C. G. Lang to W. F. Norris, 11 May 1937.

166 LPL, Lang 23, fo. 202, ‘Coronation Joint Committee – Conclusions’, 25 Jan. 1937.

167 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 34–45, ‘Coronation and the Dominions’ – various memoranda.

168 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 215–20 and 258–60, ‘The Form of the Coronation Oath’, undated.

169 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 324–6, ‘The Coronation Oath’, 10 Feb. 1937.

170 Lang had initially been extremely reluctant to countenance any change to the coronation service in order to incorporate some reference to the dominions, given that it was a ‘religious service not involving constitutional points’ (LPL, Lang 21, fos. 34–5, ‘Coronation and the Dominions’).

171 LPL, Lang 21, fo. 80, C. G. Lang to W. F. Norris, 7 Oct. 1936.

172 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 168–9, ‘King George VI: Coronation Service’, 21 Dec. 1936.

173 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 60–1, ‘Coronation Service: Films’.

174 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 48–9 and 59, G. W. Wollaston to C. G. Lang, 8 Apr. 1937 and 20 Apr. 1937.

175 LPL, MS3208, fos. 219–20, ‘The Coronation May 1937’.

176 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 74–6, C. G. Lang to H. Milford, 7 May 1937.

177 LPL, Lang 223, fos. 234–56, ‘Notes on the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’. Lang’s notes provide an excellent, if partisan, account of his coronation preparations and his experience presiding over the ceremonial.

178 MOA, COI; see also CO36 for similar comments.

179 MOA, CL56.

180 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 88–125. See, e.g., letters from the archbishop of York to C. G. Lang, 22 May 1937; M. E. Carnegie to C. G. Lang, 16 May 1937; C. Strathmore to C. G. Lang, 1 June 1937.

181 LPL, Lang 22, fos. 123–4, L. G. Wickham Legge to C. G. Lang, 31 May 1937. Wickham Legge was notably the editor of English Coronation Records (London, 1901).

182 MOA, CL1.

183 E.g., MOA, CM6, CO3, CO10, CO18, CO22, CO25, CO28, CO32, CL9, CL16, CL34, CL35, CL63, CL65, CL86.

184 MOA, CO6.

185 MOA, CL41.

186 MOA, CL63, CL65, CO32.

187 Sunday Express, 9 May 1937, p. 9. For comparable coverage, see The Sunday Times, 16 May 1937, p. 9.

188 BBCWA, R30/443/5, Extract from Commentary in Westminster Abbey by Howard Marshall and Commentary on the Coronation Service by Rev. F. A. Iremonger. See also <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIzqrMfUzwo> [accessed 4 June 2018].

189 H. Marshall, ‘In the Abbey’, The Listener, xvii, 19 May 1937, pp. 958 and 970.

190 Daily Mirror, 13 May 1937, p. 15.

191 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Keep fit and play the game: George VI, outdoor recreation and social cohesion in interwar Britain’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., xi (2014), 111–29, at p. 113.

192 See also Olechnowicz, ‘“Jealous hatred”’, p. 306; D. Pocock, ‘Afterword’, in Jennings et al., May the Twelfth, pp. 415–23, at pp. 422–3.

193 LPL, Lang 21, fos. 202 and 211, Earl Marshall to C. G. Lang, 11 Jan. 1937; ‘Coronation Service: Television’. See also J. Moran, Armchair Nation: an Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (London, 2013), pp. 36–7.

194 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/6, A. Hardinge to J. Reith, 21 Dec. 1936.

195 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/8, 12 and 42, J. Reith to A. Hardinge, 30 Apr. 1937; L. Logue to J. Reith, 8 May 1937; J. Reith to C. Wigram, 25 Feb. 1937.

196 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/7, J. Reith to A. Hardinge, 27 Apr. 1937 and 30 Apr. 1937.

197 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/36–7, S. Tallents to A. Lascelles, 9 Feb. 1937 and reply on 18 Feb. 1937.

198 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/45–50, various letters between S. Tallents and A. Lascelles, 4 March – 7 Apr. 1937.

199 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/8 and 10, J. Reith to A. Hardinge, 30 Apr. 1937 and 7 May 1937.

200 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/11, L. Logue to J. Reith, 8 May 1937; RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/12, J. Reith to M. L. Alcock, 10 May 1937.

201 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/16–29, ‘Poet Laureate’s draft of the broadcast’. Under current restrictions imposed by the Royal Archives, the draft and accompanying correspondence have been removed from this file, although the index on its front cover indicates that this is the correct reference for these documents. As P. Williamson has noted, original authors of royal speeches ‘observed a protocol of confidentiality and the Royal Archives preserve the convention that the words of royal persons are their own’ (Williamson, ‘Monarchy and public values’, p. 228, n. 16).

202 King George’s Jubilee Trust, The Coronation of Their Majesties King George VI & Queen Elizabeth: Official Souvenir Programme (London, 1937), p. 2.

203 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal death and living memorials: the funerals and commemoration of George V and George VI, Hist. Research, lxxxix (2015), 158–75, at pp. 168–71.

204 King George’s Jubilee Trust, Official Programme of the Jubilee Procession (London, 1935).

205 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/COR/1000/56, ‘Synopsis of The Empire’s Homage’. Again, the BBC’s emphasis was on ordinary, ‘representative’ people’s voices such as those belonging to ‘a farmer, fisherman, miner’. The synopsis included the observation that ‘the unofficial speakers are designed to strike a more intimate note, symbolising the unity and common humanity of the Empire on Coronation Day’.

206 Quoted in The Times, 13 May 1937, p. 16. For a press reference to the whispering see News Chronicle, 13 May 1937, p. 2.

207 Daily Mail, 13 May 1937, pp. 9–10; Daily Herald, 13 May 1937, p. 3; Daily Express, 13 May 1937, p. 3; News Chronicle, 13 May 1937, p. 2.

208 MOA, CO23; also CO22, CL24, CL56, CL61, CL64.

209 MOA, CO3.

210 See also MOA, CL1, CL35, CL107.

211 MOA, CO28. For an almost identical response see CO32.

212 Listeners’ preoccupation with George’s pronunciation is reflected in various comments from the MO reports and probably accounts for the absence of any real recorded appreciation of what he had said, aside from the charwoman’s recollection that he would ‘do his best for everyone’. For comments on the king’s voice and diction, see MOA, CO14, CO20, CO22, CO24, CO25, CO32, CL8, CL107.

213 MOA, CO17.

214 MOA, CM11, CO15, CO19a, CO22, CL42, CL47, CL65, CL100, CL107.

215 MOA, CO4, CO18, CO29, CO31, CO35, CO44, CL1, CL100.

216 MOA, CO32, CO35, CO18, CO27, CL16.

217 MOA, CO36; also CO44, CL12, CL19, CL107.

218 See ch. 2 and ‘Radio broadcast of the Coronation of King George VI & His Majesty’s Coronation Speech – 12 May 1937’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCGe_ClJqmA> [accessed 4 Feb. 2018].

219 LPL, Lang 192, fos. 352–3 and Lang 223, fo. 233, ‘The Death of King George V, 1936’. See also Daily Mirror, 30 Jan. 1936, p. 1; Daily Express, 30 Jan. 1936, p. 1.

220 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 25 and 192; J. Gardiner, The Thirties: an Intimate History (London, 2011), pp. 458 and 527; J. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, 1867–1953 (London, 1959), pp. 467–9. Queen Mary had kept a careful distance from over-familiar forms of public interaction. Her voice had only twice been recorded: the first time was as part of an HMV gramophone recording that she and George V made to celebrate Empire Day in 1923 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JyC6qw2D_s> [accessed 4 June 2018]. The second time was on film at the launch of the HMS Queen Mary in September 1934. She had also turned down the opportunity to deliver a radio message to the nation in the early 1930s, having been personally beseeched to do so by members of the public and the BBC (BBCWA, R34/862/1; Daily Mail, 10 October 1934, p. 14; ‘Movietone Presents the Launch of the “Queen Mary”’, British Movietone News, 24 Sept. 1934).

221 F. Prochaska, Royal Bounty: the Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 174–5, 183–91.

222 See ch. 2.

223 Daily Mirror, 12 Dec. 1936, p. 1; Daily Express, 12 Dec. 1936, p. 1; Daily Mail, 12 Dec. 1936, p. 9; Daily Telegraph, 12 Dec. 1936, p. 15.

224 Daily Mirror, 11 Dec. 1936, p. 13.

225 Daily Mirror, 12 Dec. 1936, p. 13.

226 Daily Sketch, 12 May 1937, pp. 6–7; News Chronicle, 12 May 1937, p. 7; Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1937, p. 5; Daily Mail, 12 May 1937, p. 6.

227 Daily Mirror, 7 May 1937, pp. 5 and 18; Daily Mail, 7 May 1937, p. 8.

228 Sunday Express, 16 May 1937, p. 6.

229 LPL/Lang 218, fo. 255, ‘Notes on the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’.

230 Daily Express, 13 May 1937, pp. 1–2; Daily Herald, 14 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Mail, 13 May 1937, p. 6; News Chronicle, 13 May 1937, p. 5.

231 Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, p. 584.

232 As with George VI, there were just a few positive comments recorded about his consort, Queen Elizabeth, in the Mass Observation reports (MOA, CM6, CO32, CO36, CL25, CL40). Indeed, the new queen met with as much hostility as praise (CM3, CM4, CO27, CO30, CL8). The MO respondents recorded no criticism of either Princesses Elizabeth or Margaret. When mentioned, they were described using words such as ‘sweet’, ‘well trained’ and ‘excited’ (MOA, CM2, CM3, CM12, CO28, CO32, CL73).

233 MOA, CL25.

234 MOA, CO33; also CO9, CL1, CL2, CL41, CL61, CL73.

235 MOA, CO41.

236 MOA, CO32; also CO33 and CO36.

237 MOA, CO14.

238 MOA, CO14, CO16, CO33, CL15, CL34, CL40, CL56.

239 MOA, CL56.

240 BBCWA, R30/443/5, Schedule for Coronation Broadcast, 5 May 1937, p. 10.

241 The BBC’s expertly crafted choreography was comparable to the auditory political propaganda developed in fascist Germany and Italy in this period (C. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam, 2012); D. Thompson, State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity, 1925–43 (Manchester, 1991)).

242 E.g., Daily Mail, 13 May 1934, p. 24; ‘Pathé Gazette Has the Honour to Present the Coronation of Their Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’, Pathé Super Sound Gazette, 13 May 1937.

243 MOA, CL30.

244 Daily Express, 13 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Sketch, 13 May 1937, p. 1; Daily Herald, 13 May 1937, p. 11; Daily Mail, 13 May 1937, p. 3; The Times, 13 May 1937, p. 25.

245 M. Johnes, Christmas and the British: a Modern History (London, 2016), pp. 158–9.

246 Martin, Magic of Monarchy, p. 107.

247 King, Family Men, pp. 5–7; Langhamer, The English in Love, pp. 6–7.

248 A. B. Baxter, Destiny Called to Them (Oxford, 1939), p. 12. This phrase was recently uttered by Colin Firth in the role of George VI in the 2010 film The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper.