6. ‘This time I was THERE taking part’: the television broadcast of the 1953 coronation

This final chapter examines how both the temporal immediacy of television as a new medium of mass communication and the domestic settings in which most British viewers watched it transformed the emotional dimensions of monarchy on coronation day in 1953. It draws on 163 Mass Observation directive reports written by respondents about their experience of the coronation and more than 200 school essays composed by adolescents between the ages of twelve and sixteen on their involvement in the event in order to analyse some of the effects the television coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s crowning had on viewers’ feelings. This chapter builds on the work of royal biographer Ben Pimlott and others who have argued that the television broadcast enabled a greater number of people to participate in a royal event than ever before and that this large-scale involvement engendered a heightened sense of national community among audiences.¹ However, this idea is taken one step further here. As well as tightening the imagined bonds of nation that linked viewers around the country, the televised coronation enriched the social relationships of those who gathered as collectives to watch the broadcast. The coronation was generally viewed from the informal setting of the home alongside family or friends and often evoked intimate and highly personal responses from audience members. And yet, this was also a unique shared experience because, for the first time ever, kinship and friendship groups across the country were able, via the BBC’s live transmission, to visually consume and interpret the meanings of monarchy together. Their shared identification with the event and the royal family at its centre reaffirmed the empathetic bonds that connected them to the House of Windsor and strengthened their own relationships with one another. Indeed, this chapter shows how the BBC and British media managed to intensify the emotions expressed by viewers in response to the television broadcast of the queen’s crowning by drawing attention to the familial aspects of the coronation story: Mass Observation personal testimonies reveal that audiences responded positively to maternal images of the queen, with adults and children expressing a shared loyalty to and affection for her which consolidated the emotional meanings they associated with the monarchy while strengthening their own interpersonal bonds.²

The 1953 coronation has received more historical attention than any of the earlier case studies examined as part of The Family Firm. Some scholars have interpreted the event as a moment of national renaissance following the Second World War: according to this idea, the youthful queen personified the post-war generation’s hopes for a brighter, more affluent future and her crowning on 2 June exemplified a cluster of uniquely British moral and spiritual beliefs.³ Recent historical work has also emphasized the Commonwealth dimensions of the occasion and the way the media projected a renewed vision of a group of post-imperial nations that remained closely united through their shared ties to the crown.⁴ The suggestion has been that, with the rise of the USA and USSR on the world stage, the coronation acted to reassert Britain’s global position by fusing established traditions with newer, modern symbols like the television broadcast of the ceremony.⁵

Historians have also devoted more attention to the public’s response to the coronation than to any other aspect of the popular reception of the modern monarchy. In particular, scholars have sought to test contemporary arguments made by the sociologists Edward Shils and Michael Young that the event was ‘an act of national communion’ in which the public joined with the queen in reaffirming the moral values at the heart of society.⁶ Shils and Young’s analysis was over-functionalist in its emphasis on national unity and, while it helped to spawn a significant body of scholarship in the field of media studies on the nature of televised national events, it failed to account for expressions of dissent or disaffection experienced by members of the public on coronation day.⁷ Mass Observation respondents notably articulated a range of opinions, including critical perspectives. For example, several complained that the coronation was London-focused and that their communities were too far-removed geographically to enable them to feel as though they were participating in it.⁸ In a similar vein, historian Joe Moran’s recent study of television viewership on coronation day has assessed the varying reactions of Mass Observation respondents to the BBC’s coverage, which ranged from awed attentiveness through irreverent derision to indifference.⁹ Nevertheless, one idea hidden away in Shils and Young’s wide-ranging analysis that has stood the test of time is that Elizabeth II’s coronation was, in essence, the day of the ‘family unit’: it brought ‘vitality into family relationships’ and ‘was a time for drawing closer the bonds of the family, for re-asserting its solidarity and for re-emphasizing the values of the family – generosity, loyalty, love’.¹⁰ This chapter builds on this idea by arguing that 2 June 1953 witnessed not only a reinvigoration of the empathy that linked media audiences to the House of Windsor (and the viewing nation at large) but also a deepening of the shared understanding of the monarchy that connected families and friends.

The first section examines the fractious debates that unfolded publicly and privately regarding the televising of the Westminster abbey coronation service and how, once the committee responsible for overseeing its organization finally, and reluctantly, agreed to allow the BBC to broadcast a live transmission of most of the ceremony, the prospect of the television coverage exercised a powerful hold over media audiences and helped to generate enthusiasm for the occasion. The sense of anticipation can be discerned from a collection of more than 200 school essays, most of which were written in the month before 2 June by girls at grammar schools in west London and Cheshire and by boys from schools of unknown status in Bury St. Edmunds and Surrey.¹¹ The essays reveal royalist identities in formation under influences exerted on them in the classroom (that is, by a teacher, their peers and the educational setting) and external influences such as family, friends and personal beliefs.¹² All the essays examined here contain traces of a pedagogic influence in the form of repeated themes and attitudes; unfortunately there are no accompanying documents that illuminate the activities or discussions on which the essays were based, nor is it always clear to what questions the pupils were responding. However, there are many personal and idiosyncratic features in the essays which reveal how the girls and boys considered television to be a new conduit of mass participation through which they expected to share in the coronation. In particular, the national dimensions of the event generated deep interest among these adolescents, who envisaged themselves forming part of a privileged viewership on coronation day.

The second section draws on a wider range of Mass Observation personal testimonies to explore how members of the public internalized and responded to television images of the coronation. Examining the directive replies of the regular Mass Observation panel in response to a special coronation-day survey and essays written by the girls from the west London and Cheshire grammar schools after the event, this section gauges how television coverage of the ceremony affected viewers’ emotions by enabling them to visually experience first-hand what had hitherto been an exclusive occasion. Adults and children notably remarked that television allowed them ‘to feel’ as though they had participated in the coronation service as part of a national community of viewers. However, at the same time the domestic settings in which most respondents and essayists watched the coronation shaped their experiences of the event: quotidian domestic rituals and informal conversations overlapped with the unique television images, producing a dynamic media environment in which families and friends interpreted the meanings of the event together, strengthening their shared understanding of monarchy and the emotional connections that underpinned their social relationships.¹³

The third and final section examines the many descriptions in the Mass Observation records of Elizabeth II’s domestic role on coronation day. It begins by analysing the symbolic visual economy of the queen and her young children as constructed by Pitkin’s official royal souvenir magazines and the press in the years leading up to the coronation. It then moves on to examine how the BBC carefully choreographed images of the queen’s relationship to her son and heir, Prince Charles, on coronation day and the way these scenes prompted a large number of comments from the Mass Observation panel and school essayists. The public reactions to Elizabeth II’s motherly image reflect the special investment adults and children had in her maternal role as queen. These comments also suggest that the BBC’s deliberate focus on this aspect of the monarch’s public image evoked from media audiences personal identification with her which not only invigorated the shared emotions that linked groups of television viewers but also strengthened a national emotional community that empathized with the queen. The words of the Mass Observation respondents and schoolgirls who wrote about the coronation also clearly reveal the enduring legacy of the concept that royal life was an unenviable burden, with many discussing either the queen’s vulnerability during the ceremony or the way that she had to make personal sacrifices which affected her domestic happiness in order to serve her peoples.

‘I shall have my eyes glued to the Television set’

Preparations for Elizabeth II’s coronation began almost immediately after her father died on 6 February 1952.¹⁴ The most contentious element in all the planning for the event was whether or not the BBC would be permitted to televise the queen’s crowning from Westminster abbey. By 1952, television had achieved maturity as a form of mass communication, benefiting from the rapid construction of television masts and transmitters across Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It also gained in popularity as better quality television sets became available to consumers and as the BBC diversified its programming as the nation’s one and only television broadcaster (ITV was launched in 1955).¹⁵ However, Buckingham Palace and its allies remained deeply distrustful of the new medium – a scepticism that can in part be explained with reference to the prevailing attitude among the British elite and intelligentsia that television was a ‘low’ form of entertainment which had a corrupting influence on public life.¹⁶ As we know, the BBC was prevented from televising the 1947 royal wedding ceremony out of concern for the privacy of the royal family and, since becoming queen, Elizabeth II had refused to let her Christmas broadcast be recorded for TV or have ‘close-up’ images of her face televised during royal public appearances.¹⁷

In spite of the condescending strain of opinion that presented television as a source of social harm, the BBC wanted to provide its rapidly growing viewership with new kinds of access to the monarchy – a policy that both adhered to its longstanding aim to bring the House of Windsor closer to media audiences while lending the new medium of TV a veneer of respectability that might help to offset critical views. In this vein, at the beginning of June 1952 BBC executives approached the official coronation commission, which was chaired by Prince Philip and tasked with overseeing the organization of the event, to suggest that radio and television be allowed to transmit the coronation service live to the nation and the world.¹⁸ Anticipating the commission’s objections to the use of new technical equipment and artificial lighting in the abbey (as had been the case at earlier royal events), the BBC made it clear to the officials involved in the staging of the ceremony that its television crews were highly professional, that its apparatus could be kept to a bare minimum and that the television cameras required less illumination than newsreel cameras.¹⁹ This put the commission in a difficult position because if they were to grant newsreel film crews access to record the service along with radio broadcasters, as they had done in 1937, then why should television cameras be excluded?

Reporting on the first meeting of the executive coronation committee (the managerial offshoot of the commission), which took place on 16 June 1952, the archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, recorded that he and the duke of Norfolk (also officially titled the earl marshal and the man responsible for overseeing the organization of the secular parts of the coronation) agreed that the BBC’s proposal for television should be ‘resist[ed] … altogether’ to begin with. However, both realized that should the television cameras require ‘no more lighting and no more space than cinematograph apparatus’, as the BBC had suggested, then it would be ‘extremely difficult to say that what can be filmed cannot be televised’.²⁰ Nevertheless, at subsequent meetings of the executive and joint coronation committees, Fisher and the earl marshal formed a united front in opposing the BBC’s plans for television and were successful in winning over other committee members to their point of view. As well as repeatedly questioning the feasibility of the broadcast on technical grounds, they presented a number of other arguments, including that television would place an ‘intolerable strain on the Queen and everybody else’, believing that ‘no mistake [made in front of the cameras could] ever be rectified’. They also thought that some Christians might find the televising of the ceremony ‘offensive’ because of its sacred character – although they conceded this was a weak point with which to oppose television given that a newsreel film had been made of George VI’s coronation sixteen years previously.²¹

The problem the archbishop and earl marshal had was that every argument they presented against television met with a counterargument from the BBC, which intended to persuade them of the important and respectful role television could play in bringing the ceremony to the nation at large. Leading the BBC’s campaign was director of television George Barnes, who met with Fisher and other members of the various coronation committees to try to convince them that his team would not only televise a reverent vision of the ceremony to viewers, but that any ‘untoward incident’ that might occur during the service could be hidden from the audience at home through the careful editing of the live transmission by a BBC producer stationed at a control desk in the abbey.²² By the beginning of October 1952 it seemed that Barnes was winning the battle and that pressure was building on the royal household and coronation committees to agree to television. Fisher noted in his diary that should he and the duke of Norfolk be forced to allow the whole ceremony to be televised, then the consecration and communion would have to be concealed from the cameras because of the sacredness of these parts of the service.²³ However, on 20 October Buckingham Palace suddenly announced to the press that, after very careful consideration and further consultation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his cabinet, it had been agreed that television coverage would be restricted to the procession in and out of the Abbey.²⁴

Barnes was surprised and disappointed as he thought he had managed to convince those in charge of the coronation that television was a good thing.²⁵ Indeed, Pimlott has suggested that the main reason the royal household turned television down at this point was that the queen herself was against it and had expressed grave reservations about the broadcast to Churchill, who reluctantly agreed to take her side.²⁶ However, the prime minister proved to be sensitive to public and political opinion: the press complained about the palace’s decision to exclude television viewers from the service, with the Daily Express going so far as to undertake a poll on the issue that resulted in a front-page headline announcing that four out of five of its readers favoured televising the entire ceremony.²⁷ Meanwhile, Churchill became the target of a barrage of angry criticism from opposition MPs who claimed to have received large numbers of letters from constituents outraged that they would not be able to see their new queen crowned.²⁸ In response to these concerns, the prime minister arranged an informal conference at 10 Downing Street on 24 October with members of the executive coronation committee, including the archbishop of Canterbury, the earl marshal and the monarch’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles. As Fisher recounted in his diary:

As already noted, the hallowed nature of the rituals referred to by the archbishop helps to explain why he and the private secretary thought these elements of the ceremony should be concealed from television audiences. This view eventually won the day and, although the duke of Norfolk was still far from happy about the prospect of a television broadcast, it was agreed by those who attended Churchill’s meeting that the BBC would be afforded the same access as the newsreels to record the entire abbey ceremony – apart from the anointing and communion – on the condition that cameramen did not take any close-up images of the queen at any point during the service.³⁰

On 28 October 1952 Churchill was able to report to the House of Commons that it was probable that the restrictions on television would be lifted. Responding to questions put to him by his political opponents, he outlined his support for television and suggested it would enable the public to participate in the coronation in a new, positive way. He then went on to stress to his audience that the broadcast should not be viewed irreverently or as a ‘theatrical piece’, but as an occasion of the utmost moral seriousness – a refrain that would continue to dominate discussions of the televised ceremony until coronation day.³¹ After this parliamentary sitting, the earl marshal duly stated that the executive coronation committee would reconsider the question of television and, finally, on 8 December 1952 it was officially announced that the ceremony would be televised according to the plans first outlined at 10 Downing Street back in October.³² The newspapers were ecstatic and celebrated the volte-face as a triumph of the public’s will over an unpopular royal decision. The Daily Express even suggested that it was now the queen’s desire to be ‘crowned in the sight of all the people’.³³ Whether or not this was true, reports like this one gave the impression that a compassionate monarch listened to and cared for her subjects and wanted them to participate in her coronation.

*

The effects of the decision to grant the BBC permission to televise the coronation service were twofold. First, and most straightforwardly, in the run-up to 2 June 1953 the coronation was heralded as a landmark moment in the history of broadcasting, with the media celebrating Elizabeth II’s crowning for the way it would witness a majority of the British population coming together around television sets in order to partake in a royal public spectacle. But, at the same time the presence of the BBC’s television cameras meant there were added pressures on the stage-managers of the coronation to ensure everything was just right. In this respect, new kinds of mass communication once again stimulated a professionalization in the way royal public events were orchestrated for media audiences – as had been the case with royal occasions in the 1930s, although then they had primarily been arranged for radio listeners rather than television viewers. Of course, the 1953 coronation service was also broadcast live from the abbey for wireless listeners who were either unable or unwilling to watch it unfold on television. However, those most intimately involved in the preparations for the coronation, including the archbishop of Canterbury, the earl marshal and the monarch herself, focused their attention on how it would appear on television screens and did all they could in the months and weeks before the big day to ensure that it ran smoothly. For example, special lighting tests were conducted by the BBC for Fisher, Prince Philip and the queen, who had the final say over the artificial illumination that would be used for the television broadcast.³⁴ Similarly, the royal household worked with the abbey authorities to try to ensure that the television cameramen stuck to the agreed ‘no close-ups’ policy.³⁵ And, on 15 May – just over two weeks before the coronation – an intensive daily rehearsal schedule began in order to familiarize the royal and religious protagonists with the many movements and rituals involved in the ceremony. When the queen was unable to attend, the duchess of Norfolk stood in for her as the central performer and Fisher recorded with satisfaction in his diary that he and the earl marshal led the rehearsals together – a partnership that turned out to be a great success.³⁶

While all this was going on at Westminster, schoolchildren across the country were completing classroom exercises that focused on the upcoming royal event. In answer to the question, ‘What do you think about the coronation?’, a thirteen-year-old girl at a west London grammar school wrote that ‘the government is always having a moan about housing, but never thinks of ways in which it can cut down in pomp and ceremony and save money for more important things’. But despite her criticism of the cost of the coronation, she expressed a keen desire to participate in it:

The themes contained in this quotation are characteristic of those that shaped many of the essays written by adolescent children on the meaning of the coronation. First, this schoolgirl was typical in opposing government expenditure while nevertheless stating a strong desire to see the coronation.³⁸ To explain this contradiction, she invested the event with a special historical meaning which related to the fact it was the first time ‘ordinary people’ could see it.³⁹ Other children similarly characterized it as the ‘greatest occasion’ or ‘spectacle’ they would ever see because of the innovative access provided by television. For them it signified a landmark moment in a longer tradition of royal events.⁴⁰ The girl’s comment on Elizabeth II’s benevolence in letting television viewers see the coronation is indicative of the way the media helped to popularize the idea that the queen personally wanted to be crowned in front of her people when, in fact, she had initially opposed television.⁴¹ Notably, the schoolgirl also believed that television would create a national community around the focal point of the coronation, using the personal pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ to convey the inclusive nature of television viewing.⁴² Many other children articulated a heightened awareness of a national collective when they asserted that ‘everywhere’, ‘all over Britain’, ‘everyone’ would be joining in the coronation celebrations.⁴³ The account of one fourteen-year-old schoolboy from Surrey was typical: ‘The coronation is being telivized [sic] and then projected on to the cinema screens throughout the country so that practically everybody will hear or see the coronation’.⁴⁴

The essayists’ desire to participate in the coronation through the BBC’s television broadcast was informed by a popular belief that it would offer privileged access to the spectacle. In this respect, their expectations were shaped by the wider media-led discourse on the unique opportunities created by television for mass participation.⁴⁵ A number of the west London schoolgirls also claimed that television offered a preferable means of joining in with the coronation rather than spectating from the procession route. One fourteen-year-old girl was typical when she stated that ‘as we are lucky enough to have a television, I will be watching the screen for most of the day. I would very much like to see the Procession in life, but I know that I would only see a very little after waiting many hours’.⁴⁶ She suggested that TV offered superior and more comfortable access to the coronation spectacle and one of her classmates agreed that television offered comprehensive coverage: ‘On Coronation day, I shall have my eyes glued to the Television set, so that I do not miss one single thing … I expect that if I did go [in person] I would hardly see anything. But by going to my friend’s house, I shall be able to see everything and to hear everything as well’.⁴⁷ These responses were characteristic of many of the reactions recorded by the girls at the west London grammar school, informed as they were by a belief in the obstructive nature of crowds on the procession route and, more notably, by the pervasive idea circulated by the media that television had created new and improved opportunities for popular spectatorship.

The desire to publicly participate through the television coverage was particularly acute among schoolchildren who lived far away from London and whose families did not intend to travel there to see the coronation. In contrast to their London counterparts, pupils at West Kirby girls’ grammar school in Cheshire tended to think it was preferable to see the spectacle first-hand and that television coverage was ‘the next best thing’.⁴⁸ One schoolgirl from Cheshire, whose family had planned a trip to the capital to see the procession, remarked that she would be ‘one of the lucky people who will be in London’, which suggests that there was a certain amount of social prestige attributed to her position by her classmates.⁴⁹ The Cheshire girls’ value system was informed by their provincial status; their desire to participate in person differed from the attitudes of the schoolgirls in the capital, who took for granted their access to central London. For the girls from north-west England, television thus acted as the key conduit through which they could experience a sense of national inclusion and took on a powerful imaginative role. One fourteen-year-old girl was typical in her description of the sense of expectation that she and her peers ascribed to the television broadcast:

This girl was enthused by the coronation preparations in London but lamented that her own provincial location meant she was unable to join the festivities in the capital. Her repeated longing for ‘colour’ typified the responses of schoolgirls from Cheshire, some of whom stated that television’s monochrome pictures would not fully convey the coronation spectacle – a complaint that could be interpreted as a symptom of the austere nature of the early post-war period and the longing for more affluent times.⁵¹ For adolescent girls like this one, television provided access to an event from which they otherwise felt excluded and the prospect of her participation through television was crucial to sustaining her enthusiasm for the coronation.

Against this backdrop of anticipation, children who did not expect to be able to watch the televised coronation experienced a sense of exclusion from the imagined national community of viewers. One of the girls at school at West Kirby grammar was typical in the way she articulated this anxiety: ‘We are not lucky enough to have a television, but I am hoping that a kind friend of mine will let me watch hers. I would be very disappointed if I missed it’.⁵² An essay written by the same girl after the event reveals that she managed to watch television on coronation day and the opening sentence of her composition shows the sense of inclusion she experienced seeing it: ‘ We saw everything very clearly, and I only wish it was in colour’.⁵³ One of her classmates was not so fortunate. Out of all the girls at the Cheshire grammar school who wrote essays before the coronation, just one unequivocally criticized the occasion and her disapproval might have stemmed from the fact that she did not expect to be able to watch television, although she did not freely admit this was the case. She complained that ‘there is too much display about [the coronation]’ and ‘too much “hero-worship” about the royal family’. She thought she would spend 2 June ‘either out for a country walk with [her] family, or gardening, or going to the nearest baths’: ‘We are not listening to anything connected with the Coronation on our radio, or going to neighbours television [sic]. The seats for the route are too dear to waste money on and I can think of far more pleasant things to do than stand in a crowd, which I hate anyway all pushing for a view’.⁵⁴ But her objections to the coronation had softened by the time she wrote her second essay after it. She had, in fact, spent all 2 June listening to the wireless broadcast of the event while knitting and described how she had been captivated by the event: ‘The service was quite a nice one, the singing was lovely, especially the first anthem. The description of the dresses and uniforms was fascinating. I would have loved to have seen the colours and decorations’.⁵⁵ Her participation as a listener and her longing to have seen the colour and pageantry reveal that she, too, was inspired by a desire to experience the coronation and suggest that her original criticism of the event may have partly sprung from a sense of exclusion from the televised spectacle.

Some schoolchildren were more cynical of what they perceived as the pressures to partake in the event. Eight boys aged fourteen to sixteen, out of a class of sixteen boys at a Surrey school of unknown status, complained that the coronation had become a focal point of national curiosity and criticized the popular attitude to spectatorship on the procession route in London: ‘I for one would not get crushed and trodden on just to get a glimpse of a horse drawn carriage going by. Many people will get badly hurt in the crowds that will go to see the coronation and those that see it will just be able to talk to others and say, “I saw the coronation”’.⁵⁶ This fourteen-year-old boy’s opinion was shared by a number of his peers, something which may indicate their essays were influenced by an in-class discussion that preceded the writing exercise. All the same, this quotation illustrates the fact that some adolescents were very critical of what they deemed the self-gratifying motivations behind the popular interest in the coronation. They thought that those who would go to see the procession would do so just so they could tell others they had ‘seen it’ – a theme famously satirized by the 1950s Trinidadian calypso artist Young Tiger in his song ‘I Was There (At the Coronation)’.⁵⁷

The superior tone of the schoolboys’ criticism and the disdain they expressed for the behaviour of what they implicitly presented as the self-indulgent masses also possibly points to their middle-or upper-class social status. This kind of class-focused condescension was even more apparent in the set of essays written by a group of boys at a school of unknown status in Bury St. Edmunds. One fourteen-year-old captured the tone of many of the essays:

Echoing Churchill’s earlier warning about how the coronation should and should not be viewed, this boy discussed how television had the potential to desacralize the religious elements of the coronation service and claimed that a ‘majority of people’ did not appreciate its spiritual significance. One of his classmates recorded that he and his peers had had two history lessons and three scripture lessons on the ‘religious side’ of the event, which almost certainly informed their outlook.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, several others alluded pejoratively to the ignorance of what they perceived as the ‘majority’ by comparing them to football spectators – a theme echoed in essays written by girls at the grammar school in west London.⁶⁰ These condescending sentiments were indicative of the wider elite and intellectual anxieties about television as symptomatic of a ‘low’ mass culture which allegedly worked to debase public life.⁶¹ However, like their female counterparts, despite having reservations about mass spectatorship most of the boys at Bury St. Edmunds still expressed a longing to watch the television coverage so that they did not miss out on what they deemed a unique national event. A thirteen-year-old captured this tension when he stated that ‘Televiewers are lucky it is to be televised’, although he added ‘some viewers might take it as an entertainment, not as … a religious service’.⁶²

The school essays thus reflect adolescent children’s beliefs – instilled either inside or outside the classroom – that most British people planned to join in the coronation, with television facilitating mass popular involvement. While some essayists expressed concerns about the cost involved in staging the event, the obstructive crowds on the procession route, the distance that separated them from the London-based celebrations or the nature of the mass spectatorship that television would generate, they also noted their longing to participate personally through the television coverage of the coronation. In this way the new medium and its innovatory significance offset other criticisms of the coronation and stimulated broad interest in the royal event among media audiences, which ensured that a national viewership would gather in expectation around television sets to watch the crowning of Elizabeth II.

‘Looks like her mother’

On 2 June 1953 there were 2.7 million television sets operating across Britain with an average of seven and a half adults to a set. The BBC estimated that 20.4 million adults saw at least half an hour of the service, which was almost double the radio audience. This equated to 56 per cent of Britain’s adult population – these figures excluding children.⁶³ This section examines how adults and children who watched the coronation on television thought they were sharing in a special moment as part of a national collective. It also analyses how, at the same time, television viewing was characterized by highly personal modes of consumption and a tension between national and more intimate experiences that seems to have been the defining feature of the televised event. This tension was animated by the domestic settings in which most viewers watched the coronation, as well as by the people with whom they saw it. Commonplace activities and conversations overlapped with the extraordinary scenes transmitted from Westminster abbey, with audience members engaging with the live moving images in novel ways. Notably, this home-based spectatorship witnessed audiences empathizing with the protagonists of the House of Windsor, expressing their thoughts and feelings in ways that were mutually reinforcing, which in turn evoked an affirming emotional experience among groups of viewers around the national focal point of the family monarchy.

Out of the seventy-six women who documented their coronation day activities for Mass Observation, thirty-five noted that they watched the televised procession and ceremony. This was roughly proportionate to the number of male respondents who saw it: forty out of eighty-seven men stated that they had seen the television broadcast. That almost half of all Mass Observation respondents watched the coronation coverage is, in itself, indicative of the mass participation created by television. A further thirty women and men listened to the service by wireless. A striking feature in all the directive replies are the negligible levels of opposition or apathy noted by respondents about the occasion: only fifteen out of 163 expressed disdain or disinterest in it. Given Mass Observation’s progressive, anti-establishment origins, the lack of criticism is significant.⁶⁴ As with the correspondence sent by readers to the Manchester Guardian censuring David Low’s famously derisive ‘Morning After’ cartoon, or the letters sent to Kingsley Martin criticizing the New Statesman’s flippant coronation coverage, the Mass Observation reports indicated that a broad consensus existed that the queen’s crowning was an important national event which should be treated with respect.⁶⁵

Some of the Mass Observation respondents who watched television were influenced by the belief that the coronation met with broad acceptance, if not admiration, among the public and that the nation was united in celebrating it. The description of a thirty-six-year-old male clerk was typical. Comparing the 1953 coronation of the queen to that of her father in 1937, he recorded that it was distinguished by ‘the fact that the whole nation joined in’, indirectly indicating that the divisive events of December 1936 had turned people off the coronation of George VI.⁶⁶ He described how ‘radio and TV made this an awe-inspiring ceremony. In 1937 I was an eavesdropper by radio, but this time I was THERE taking part’.⁶⁷ For this respondent, television facilitated a more national and a more intimate experience, the temporal simultaneity of the images from central London enhancing his sense of personal involvement while also heightening his awareness of a British community of viewers. A man from Cheshire who watched television with his children also commented that they ‘took part in the actual service’ and, contrasting the 1953 coronation to that of George VI, remarked that he ‘remember[ed] little of the 1937 Coronation as it was a thing apart – not like this one where one was actually present through T.V.’.⁶⁸ Like the clerk above, this man expressed that he felt more involved through television and that by watching he had joined in an event which was for the first time accessible to the entire country. The socially integrative effect television had in overcoming regional differences was most explicitly articulated by an accountant from Sheffield when he stated: ‘This year we seem to have actually taken part in the ceremony, and it was not just something that happened in far away London for the benefit solely of the inhabitants of that city’.⁶⁹ These Mass Observation respondents described how television had brought a national community together in celebration of the coronation, while acknowledging a personal sense of participation as well. Indeed, the tension in these descriptions between the collective and the intimate experience of television viewing was succinctly recorded by a schoolteacher from Weald in Sussex when she reflected that ‘this Coronation was much more intimately and deeply shared by the whole people’.⁷⁰

Adolescent schoolgirls who wrote essays about their coronation experience also discussed how television had heightened their personal sense of involvement in the event. Asked to record how they had spent coronation day, one girl from the grammar school in Cheshire responded at length:

This full and complex response shows that the girl thought a community of viewers had formed around the focal point of the televised coronation and that European audiences shared in it, too. She stated that she and ‘millions’ of others had been immersed in the event, with the ‘perfectly transmitted’ television images allowing them ‘to really feel Elizabeth is Queen’ and that they also ‘were taking part’ – the new medium, with its moving pictures, clearly enhancing the authenticity of the experience. As with Mass Observation respondents who listened to the radio broadcasts of previous royal events like the 1947 royal wedding and 1937 coronation, her sense of participation and feelings seem to have been enlivened by the sounds and images of the ‘cheering, excited crowds’ – a feature regularly noted by the schoolgirls who wrote about their coronation experience.⁷² Furthermore, her description of the occasion as ‘new history’ in the making corresponded with the earlier essays that invested the coronation with special status because of its landmark associations. In this vein, adults and children also sought to memorialize the television broadcast by photographing the screens of television sets as the coronation played in front of them. One man in Southend-on-Sea in Essex photographed his television, investing the coronation broadcast with special historical meaning by generating a material record through which he and members of his family could later commemorate the event (Figure 6.1).⁷³

Figure 6.1. A photograph of a television screen showing Queen Elizabeth II as the coronation service unfolded, taken by a man from Southend-on-Sea on 2 June 1953.

The one grievance occasionally expressed by adolescents about the television coverage which detracted from their sense of involvement related to the lack of colour images.⁷⁴ Schoolgirls from Cheshire complained about this more often than the pupils in west London, probably because they knew it was unlikely they would ever see the colourful decorations on the procession route for themselves. Adult Mass Observation respondents rarely complained about the television coverage, with just a handful of criticisms aimed at the size of television and its inability to fully convey the scale of the coronation spectacle.⁷⁵ Most of those who watched television instead praised the engaging qualities of the broadcast: its captivating effect was recorded by a thirty-nine-year-old housewife who stated that, when ‘the camera caught [the queen] as she waved out the window and smiled, two women [with whom she sat] spontaneously and quite unself-consciously waved back as though they had been present [sic]’.⁷⁶ Clearly, television had the capacity to engross audiences who impulsively responded to the visual images they consumed.

The domestic settings in which most people watched the televised coronation and the company with whom they saw it were crucial factors in shaping the experiences reported by the Mass Observation respondents. One seventy-one-year-old woman who saw the coronation on television with her tenant and his relatives stated that she had worried before the event that she might not have been invited to watch television. Then, on the day itself, she wrote with pleasure that while watching ‘a sense of the continuity of history gripped me, and I felt glad that I belonged to this country, and was no outsider’.⁷⁷ The feeling of involvement she experienced while watching television needs to be interpreted in relation to the sense of participation she felt because of her inclusion in her tenant’s party. As well as the sense of collective viewing created around television sets, Mass Observation respondents who watched the coronation in their own or others’ homes alongside family or friends experienced a heightened personal involvement because of the informal atmosphere of domestic settings. The broadcast had the simultaneous effect of stimulating imagined identification with a national community of other television viewers while deepening the shared emotional experience of the coronation among groups who watched it together. Mass Observation had asked the respondents to ‘give a short hour-by-hour description of [their] day’ on 2 June and, although this meant they listed their normal activities alongside the more unique aspects related to television viewing, their reports reveal how the special qualities of the coronation were transformed by the constant ebb and flow of quotidian domestic rituals.

One forty-seven-year-old housewife who lived in Scotland hosted a television party for twenty people at her home. Her preoccupation over the course of coronation day was providing hospitality for her guests and she concluded her Mass Observation report by noting that ‘although I had felt anxious about feeding all the guests I felt we had all had a happy day and that television had indeed made all the difference’.⁷⁸ This woman clearly found gratification in the positive experience of hosting a television party. One of the essays written by a schoolgirl from west London also revealed in two sentences the ease with which television viewers had transferred their attention between the coronation and ordinary home life:

Mealtimes like this one interrupted the experience of the televised coronation for many adults and children who watched the broadcast in domestic environments. Women in particular stressed that they spent considerable time preparing food and girls often stated that they helped female relatives prepare for the day’s events. In this respect it seems that gender helped to determine how people experienced the coronation. As historians Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer have noted, ‘the shared experience of the everyday could create an emotional intimacy between mother and daughter’, something which is evident from a number of the personal testimonies collected by Mass Observation in connection to the coronation.⁸⁰ A forty-one-year-old male agricultural researcher from Crawley noted that, at his television party, the ‘womenfolk busied themselves before viewing commenced with the preparation of food’.⁸¹ Meanwhile, a twenty-seven-year-old housewife from Portsmouth, who spent some of 2 June listening to the radio coverage, stated that her other coronation activities revolved around her domestic work and two young children, which included feeding her baby, washing nappies and keeping her toddler entertained.⁸²

As we have seen, the potential for desacralization generated by the television broadcast of the coronation worried Church leaders like the archbishop of Canterbury, courtiers like Alan Lascelles and politicians like Churchill, all of whom thought that the spiritual significance of the ceremony might be lost on viewers.⁸³ It was made clear to the public that the very sacred moments of the coronation service would not be shown on television, the most important of which was the sovereign’s anointing. Newspapers also issued readers with instructions to join in the prayers and spoken ritual with the congregation in the abbey.⁸⁴ But Mass Observation personal testimonies show that reverent silence was not always observed in front of television sets. The aforementioned schoolgirl from London was typical when she recorded that she and her mother used the moment of anointing to plate up the family’s dinner.⁸⁵ In accordance with Mass Observation’s longstanding policy to reveal how the British public’s behaviour differed from its official representation, it asked its respondents whether they and the group with whom they watched television had observed silence as officially requested. The question naturally elicited a range of replies, most of which suggest that viewers paid little heed to the calls for quiet.⁸⁶ Where silence did prevail, it was usually out of respect for other guests who were watching. A forty-year-old accountant who was one of the few respondents to visit a public venue to watch the coronation stated that he, and the strangers around him, kept quiet for the duration of the broadcast. Viewing at a large television party at a primary school in Heaton Mersey in Stockport, he noted that during the queen’s anointing ‘the whole hall was silent … apart from the children who had become bored and were running up and down in the corridors’.⁸⁷ Just down the road in Northenden an Anglican vicar commented that at his television party ‘there was a reverent silence during the anointing but [he thought] with most ordinary people it would have been more so had it been visible’.⁸⁸ A similar complaint was levelled by several of the respondents at the way the BBC censored the communion – the other sacred moment of the service – from its viewers. Experiencing a sudden sense of exclusion from the ceremony, they remarked that they and their company had deemed it a fitting moment to engage in their own activities. An accountant from Sheffield recorded that he and his brother’s family had used the ‘awkward part [with] the blank at the sacrament … to exchange ideas about what had happened’, while a twenty-five-year-old student who watched with seven of his friends reported that the moment of communion ‘was considered suitable for handing round cigarettes’.⁸⁹ Every-day rituals like these were significant, with the televised coverage encouraging a shared desacralization of royal ceremony in the space of the home, be it through serving lunch with one’s mother, chatting about the meaning of the royal spectacle or lighting cigarettes. Ironically, official efforts to protect the sanctity of the service by hiding parts of it from viewers thus seem to have led to an increase in irreverent, every-day activity among some groups.

The level of informality that characterized television parties was always greatest when those present were all close family. A railway clerk who watched with his wife, baby and his brother’s family in Ealing, London, recorded the jocular comments made by the group during the television broadcast:

The familiar tone of these remarks shows that television enabled media audiences to engage with the monarchy in a new way. They could consume television images without paying undue attention to the official soundtrack, instead offering their own audible running commentary. Unlike cinema and radio, in which silence was imperative to understanding what was going on, those who gathered to see the BBC’s coronation programme were usually sitting upright in a cluster or ‘viewing circle’ around television sets and could openly converse and discuss the experience as events took place in front of them.⁹¹ The remarks made by the Ealing family reveal how emotional reactions to the coronation became embedded in the affective economy of everyday life, with the group’s conversation undermining the sanctity of the service through irreverent banter that focused on the character traits and foibles of the royal protagonists. The family’s commentary suggests they had developed a personal familiarity with the royals: observations like ‘looks like her mother’ and ‘looks so old now’ show how the speakers casually indicated to one another their knowledge of the House of Windsor’s main actors. The experience of the coronation for this group (and presumably many others) thus witnessed the deepening of a shared understanding and identification with the royal family as the coronation unfolded.

Although more respectful in tone, the directive reply of a retired civil servant who watched the television coverage with a group of her friends at home in Lancaster also reveals the spontaneous communal reactions inspired by the television broadcast:

This quotation again indicates that the civil servant and the company with whom she had watched television underwent a shared experience. Just like the family in Ealing, she and her friends discussed, contested and affirmed one another’s opinions about the visual images in front of them. The civil servant’s sense of participation was conveyed through her recurring use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’, whereby she conflated her experience of television viewing with that of the rest of the group – a rhetorical device often used by Mass Observation respondents and schoolgirls in their essays.⁹³ These shared, informal conversations point to the way viewers could experience an emotional unity around television sets, with the consumption of mass-mediated royalty leading to a tightening of interpersonal relationships as audiences picked over the meanings of monarchy together.

The television coverage of the queen’s coronation generated a more intimate and more inclusive sense of participation in a royal ceremony than ever before. Mass Observation directive respondents and schoolgirls from across the country felt they formed part of a national community of viewers linked together around television sets. While the informal atmosphere of the domestic settings in which most viewers watched television transformed (and often undermined) the spiritual dimensions of the coronation, the conversational mood that characterized these spaces encouraged audiences to verbalize their thoughts and feelings on Elizabeth II and her family and, in so doing, they articulated a shared identification with royalty that connected them to the groups of people with whom they sat. The Ealing and Lancaster television parties were typical in their focus on the personalities of the royals, who formed a shared point of reference. A national community of viewers was thus united through their shared empathetic ties to the queen and her kin and, as the next section reveals, the BBC deliberately elevated this familial element to strengthen the emotional bonds that linked members of the public to the House of Windsor and to one another.

‘My mummy is coming back’

The photographic coverage of Elizabeth II’s children had antecedents in the intense visual exposure of her own childhood in the 1920s and 1930s and before that in images of the youthful Edward, prince of Wales, in the 1910s. However, this earlier coverage did not compare in volume or intimacy to the photographs of Prince Charles and Princess Anne produced for public consumption in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Somewhat ironically, the vast photographic souvenir industry that emerged around the monarch and her children in these years can be explained by a desire on the part of the royal family to exercise tighter control over their public image. In January 1950 the former royal governess, Marion Crawford, who had cared for Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret when they were children, went rogue and sold her memoirs about her time in the service of the royal family to an American publication, the Ladies’ Home Journal.⁹⁴ The memoirs were then published by Woman’s Own magazine in Britain and proved a roaring success with readers – although the palace worked hard to cast doubt on the accuracy of Crawford’s recollections. Notably, this betrayal (which was never forgiven) came in the same year that the royal family was scandalized for a second time by the activities of the duke of Windsor. At the end of the war, Edward had once again become a thorn in the side of the monarchy. In 1944 the king’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, began to enquire secretly whether some unofficial post could be found for the duke in the USA that would keep him out of Britain and away from politics and the public.⁹⁵ However, to the frustration of the courtier, Edward rejected all his offers of unofficial posts, believing instead that his abilities would be better put to use in an official capacity on the other side of the Atlantic. The result was another souring of relations between the duke and the royal household, which led to him and the duchess moving to France where, with debts – personal and financial – to settle, he set about writing his memoirs. These were originally commissioned by the USA’s Life magazine but were also purchased by Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express, which published them in mid December 1947, less than a month after Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. As Edward’s biographer has noted, these were ‘good-tempered and colourful pieces that painted an attractive picture of the royal family and its daily life’ in the period up until 1914.⁹⁶ They were not very revelatory but, according to the Sunday Express’s editor John Gordon, the palace sought to have them withdrawn from publication, although they were unsuccessful in their efforts.⁹⁷ The memoirs sent the newspaper’s sales figures and the duke’s popularity rocketing and so it was that the Express group set about securing the second instalment of Edward’s recollections, which he had already begun writing.⁹⁸ He eventually completed these and they were subsequently purchased and published by the Sunday Express in 1950 to great acclaim; they brought the duke’s story up as far as his romance with Wallis Simpson, his accession as king and his abdication. Gordon reported to his boss Beaverbrook that the newspaper achieved record consecutive sales increases every week the serialization of the memoirs continued, as well as the highest sales figures ever recorded by a Sunday paper.⁹⁹ He also noted that ‘the Windsor instalment last week which brought Mrs. Simpson into the picture produced a heavy correspondence – heavier than any instalment since the earliest ones. And all very favourable. Indeed if we are not careful we shall be putting the Duke back on the throne’.¹⁰⁰ Clearly the memoirs aroused interest among British readers and evoked positive emotional identification with Edward and his wife. When the articles were later published in book form in 1951 they were also extremely popular, A King’s Story selling more than 80,000 copies in its first month alone in the UK.¹⁰¹

The duke of Windsor thus remained a prominent and well-liked member of the royal family despite the best efforts of courtiers to keep him out of the limelight. As had been the case during the first year of the Second World War, he acted as a distraction from George VI’s domestic group and his activities threatened to undermine the prestige of the monarchy by tarnishing its reputation after palace officials and the king had worked so hard to regain the public’s support after the abdication. This was undoubtedly the reason why Elizabeth II expressly forbade Edward from attending her coronation in 1953.¹⁰² It is no coincidence that, in the period when the duke was publishing his memoirs, the royal household developed a new media strategy that involved providing trusted photographers with more intimate access to life at the palace, particularly the domesticity of the queen and her young family, in an effort to refocus the public’s attention on the line of succession. These photographs were issued to the press, reproduced as collectibles and also published by Pitkin as part of official souvenir magazines.¹⁰³ The first Pitkin royal souvenir magazine was published to celebrate Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday in 1947 and another shortly followed to commemorate her and Prince Philip’s wedding. However, it was the birth of their first son, Prince Charles, in 1948 that initiated a sustained photographic public relations campaign that focused on the younger members of the House of Windsor. Pitkin was given permission to reproduce images taken by royal photographers like Marcus Adams and Lisa Sheridan, who were granted special access to Charles and later on to his sister, Princess Anne. The images were subsequently printed in souvenir magazines such as the annual ‘Golden Gift Books’ of the royal children, which were published to coincide with their birthdays. The images in these souvenirs ranged from formal shots with Charles and Anne sitting together in front of the camera to more natural images of them playing to pictures of them posing happily alongside their parents (Figures 6.2 and 6.3).¹⁰⁴ The message conveyed by these souvenirs, which replicated the visual codes from family photographs of ordinary British people during the 1950s, was that Charles and Anne were ‘normal’ children and that their mother and father loved and cared for them like all parents would.

Figure 6.2. Marcus Adams, ‘Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles’, 1948/49 (RCIN 2808647). Reproduced by Pitkin in H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth: Silver Souvenir (London, 1949), p. 26. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Figure 6.3. Marcus Adams, ‘Prince Charles and Princess Anne’, 24 October 1952 (RCIN 2014220). Reproduced by Pitkin in The Second Golden Gift Book of Prince Charles and Princess Anne (London, 1952), p. 3. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

The Pitkin souvenirs also regulated the exposure of the royal children. Courtiers were haunted by the media feeding-frenzy that had upset the royal honeymoon in 1947 and therefore tried to exercise tighter control over the media’s access to the royal family’s private lives.¹⁰⁵ As already noted, this move towards a more professionalized royal public relations system had been spearheaded by Lascelles after the abdication crisis and was later fronted by Richard Colville, the palace’s press secretary. After Prince Charles’s birth only the accredited cameraman Graham Thompson was given permission to film the royal baby.¹⁰⁶ Two years later, in 1950, following his sister’s birth, Princess Elizabeth made it known through Colville that she ‘objected to photographers taking unauthorized pictures of her children’.¹⁰⁷ Indeed, Thompson, who by this point had moved to the BBC’s television department, was reprimanded by his new employers for making an unauthorized film ‘of Prince Charles at play’ which contravened ‘the tacit agreement with the Press, Newsreel Companies, and other interests, to respect the Prince’s privacy’.¹⁰⁸ Official royal photography and the Pitkin magazines thus enabled the monarchy to exercise control over the scenes of royal family life that were made public; and the souvenirs created an idealized visual iconography that simultaneously drew attention to the royal group’s ‘normal’ characteristics by presenting them in informal, domestic poses.

Britain’s newspapers helped to popularize this iconography by reproducing an idealized image of the monarch and her children. In the weeks before the coronation the press published many stories and photographs that presented Elizabeth II in her maternal role and emphasized that Prince Charles and Princess Anne were ordinary children.¹⁰⁹ For example, the Daily Mirror dedicated a central spread to three large photographs taken by Lisa Sheridan of the queen playing ‘in-and-out-the-window’ with Charles and Anne at Balmoral (Figure 6.4).¹¹⁰ In its caption the Mirror explained to its readers what was taking place in the ‘wonderful new pictures’, providing a dialogue between the queen and her children to animate their personalities and relationship. In view of this romanticized presentation of the royal family, a Mass Observation directive report written by a Manchester university student is pertinent. On coronation day he went for a half-mile walk through ‘side streets’ in the city, which he suggested were ‘all more or less slums’ and only ‘2 front-room windows were not decorated with a picture of the Queen, and/or [her] children’, with ‘the Duke less in evidence’.¹¹¹ The implication of this respondent’s comments – that the people in these homes venerated the personalities of the queen and her children – is indicative of the post-war culture of royal maternalism that had been generated around Elizabeth II.

Figure 6.4. ‘Let’s Play In-And-Out-The Window’, Daily Mirror, 1 May 1953, pp. 8–9. © The British Library Board.

In light of the extensive media coverage of the queen’s maternal image before her coronation, it is unsurprising that the BBC sought to draw attention to her children and particularly to her relationship with her son and heir in its television broadcast on 2 June. In so doing, the BBC encouraged emotional identification between audiences and the royals, elevating a common reference point to unite viewers around the bond between mother and son. The Mass Observation respondents and school essayists noted that, on three separate occasions during the day’s broadcasting, they or those people with whom they watched reacted very positively to the televised scenes of the prince.

The first time adults and adolescent children reacted positively to Charles on 2 June was when he first appeared during the coronation service. In the week before the coronation the media speculated whether or not he would be present in the abbey to witness his mother’s crowning.¹¹² This speculation had raised some concerns among the public, one fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from west London writing in an essay that she thought ‘Prince Charles … ought to see his mother’s actual crowning as it would show the significance that his mother is Queen’.¹¹³ One of her classmates also thought he should be present as it would ‘prepare [him] for his’.¹¹⁴ The queen’s maternal role and Charles’s position as heir influenced how the BBC designed the scene in which he appeared during the service. Outside broadcast producer Peter Dimmock learnt that the prince would be present in the royal box with the queen mother and Princess Margaret at the moment the queen was crowned. He instructed his cameraman, B. P. Wilkes, who was in charge of filming the royal box, to focus in on Charles and, immediately after the archbishop of Canterbury finished the prayer that preceded the queen’s crowning, the television broadcast cut to a scene of the prince looking down at his mother.¹¹⁵ The implication was clear: here was the heir to the throne watching his mother undergo the ritual he would one day experience himself.

Charles’s sudden appearance on television screens around the country elicited powerful reactions from viewers. Schoolgirls from Cheshire and west London noted in their essays that they thought his arrival in the royal box was particularly exciting, one remarking that ‘when we saw Prince Charles sitting with the Queen Mother ready for the crowning it was certainly one of the happiest moments’.¹¹⁶ This essay writer clearly acknowledged that Charles’s arrival had stimulated viewers’ interest. Several adult respondents also suggested that the television images of the prince in the abbey were the ‘most stirring’ or ‘touching’ they witnessed on 2 June, while others made sense of these scenes through the maternal story on show.¹¹⁷ For example, the retired civil servant who had watched at a television party in Lancaster commented that ‘we were all pleased when we saw Prince Charles in the Abbey and someone said she wondered whether the one time when the Queen looked up for a moment was when he came in’.¹¹⁸ The media actively mobilized this story of motherly care through these scenes, with the BBC’s television commentator Richard Dimbleby stating at a later point in the abbey broadcast that the monarch had briefly glanced at her son; and the following day the press also suggested that her fleeting look aside had been at him.¹¹⁹ One Mass Observation respondent identified as one of the ‘most stirring incidents’ she witnessed on 2 June ‘the one and only sideways glance and smile [of the queen], the only moment which television showed us when she was not wholly engrossed in the ceremonial. This according to newspapers was directed to her son perhaps as he was leaving the Royal Box’.¹²⁰ Viewers also chose to photograph their television sets while Charles was on screen, which again suggests they thought these were special moments worth recording for posterity (Figure 6.5).¹²¹

Figure 6.5. A photograph of a television screen showing Prince Charles and the Queen Mother in the royal box, taken by a man from Southend-on-Sea on 2 June 1953.

The second time the prince appeared as part of the television coverage also prompted enthusiastic responses from British viewers. As already indicated, he left the royal box and returned to Buckingham Palace before the coronation ceremony had ended. Two hours later the BBC was televising scenes of his mother inside the gold state coach as she completed the final stretch of her return journey from the abbey. As the procession rounded the Victoria memorial at the end of the Mall, the television transmission switched to images of Charles and Anne looking down from the palace windows and pointing at the queen’s carriage. The media had frequently reproduced this image of the royal children watching their mother from a distance as she performed her public role in the early 1950s.¹²² One girl in a class of eight-and nine-year-old children at Northumberland Heath junior school in Kent recorded in an essay written about what she anticipated seeing on coronation day that ‘the two children will be looking at [the queen] through the palace window’.¹²³ This girl thus acknowledged that this type of image of Charles and Anne was part of the recognizable canon of photographic scenes associated with the royal family in this period. Several of the adolescent schoolgirls from London and Cheshire commented that they particularly enjoyed these images on coronation day, one typically recording that she ‘liked it when Prince Charles and Princess Ann [sic] saw their mother come home. Princess Ann got very excited and Prince Charles kept banging on the window’.¹²⁴ Adult respondents also expressed pleasure at these scenes: a thirty-four-year-old religious minister recorded his ‘delight’ at the ‘unconscious reactions of the royal children as caught in the window by the TV camera’.¹²⁵ A teacher from Hertfordshire was even more enthusiastic, making a special point about these images: ‘I should like to mention Prince Charles’s excitement when he caught sight of the Coach from the window. He kept pointing as if he would like to push through the glass, as much to say “Look, there’s my mummy in her coach. My mummy is coming back”’.¹²⁶ This woman empathized with the royal actors, investing the images with a special emotional meaning that focused on the children’s desire to be reunited with their mother. As the religious minister stated, the charm of this scene lay in its appearing natural and ‘unconscious’, with Charles and Anne behaving as though they were normal children. The images, of course, had a deeper symbolic significance to which the Mass Observation evidence attests. The early 1950s were characterized by heated public debates on the roles women should occupy in British society. The welfare state, with its system of tax allowances, benefits and national insurance, had incentivized the idea that a women’s primary role was as home-maker and mother. As historian Sean Nixon has noted, ‘expert’ psychologists like John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott ‘gave additional intellectual weight to the idea that women’s key responsibility was as a full-time mother who took exclusive care of the developing child’.¹²⁷ The lonely figure of the ‘latch-key child’ waiting for mother to return home from paid work outside the domestic sphere loomed large in the public’s imagination and contributed to a rise in social anxieties about maternal deprivation.¹²⁸ The scenes of the royal children watching their mother from the palace windows, expectantly waiting to be reunited with her, acted as a stark reminder that the queen’s public duties prevented her from fulfilling her domestic role, as she was unable to be at home with her children. Charles and Anne’s separation from their mother and their visible happiness on her return home thus amplified the public discourse on the burdensome nature of royal status and the sacrifices it required of its protagonists. The duties imposed on royalty also symbolically manifested themselves through Charles’s presence in Westminster abbey on coronation day. It was unusual for a child aged just four to be present at such a service, but the images of him alongside his grandmother, the queen mother, conveyed how a long life of public service lay ahead of him.

The final time the Mass Observation respondents and schoolchildren reacted enthusiastically to scenes of the prince and his interaction with his mother was the climactic balcony appearance after the latter’s return to Buckingham Palace. Charles’s behaviour on the balcony received more positive comments from adults and adolescents than any other aspect of the royal family’s conduct on 2 June.¹²⁹ A thirty-four-year-old printer from Newtown, mid Wales, was typical in his remarks on ‘the antics of Prince Charles on the balcony’ as the ‘funniest incident’ of the day, with the heir to the throne grasping at his mother’s bracelets as she and her family waved to the crowds gathered below them.¹³⁰ Again, it was the ‘natural’ quality of this scene that appealed to viewers – the prince’s unplanned ‘antics’ lacking royalty’s usual formality.¹³¹ A housewife from Leeds also suggested that the ‘funniest incident’ from 2 June was the moment ‘on the balcony before the fly-past [when] Prince Charles reached over, took his mother’s right hand and put it up, as much to say, “Practice what you preach” – and she waved’.¹³² As with the queen’s sideways glance that was caught on camera during the coronation service, television viewers invested these moments with emotional meaning to emphasize an affection between mother and son. And, to augment the public’s personal identification with the royals, the popular press published stories and photographs on the prince’s behaviour on the balcony which used an intimate language to animate the relationship between him and his mother. The Daily Mirror was typical in using the caption ‘Mummy – Mummy’ to conjure this informal royal image (Figure 6.6).¹³³

On the one hand, the BBC’s television coverage of Prince Charles’s interaction with his mother clearly encouraged audiences to identify personally with scenes of royal maternalism, invigorating an emotional community of viewers who empathized with the domesticity of the House of Windsor. On the other, this focus on royal familialism accentuated the public narrative on the unenviable character of royal life. In a similar vein to the coronation of her father sixteen years earlier, media audiences also expressed special concern for the queen’s wellbeing during the coronation ceremony. In part we should interpret this in relation to the stress that both the media and Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher placed on the burdens of royal duty and the pressures of the coronation service in advance of the event, much like Cosmo Lang had in 1937.¹³⁴ The queen had also drawn attention to the personal difficulties she would encounter as monarch when she told listeners at the end of her 1952 Christmas broadcast that she would dedicate herself anew to their service on coronation day. Having vocally reaffirmed her commitment to serve her subjects, she then asked listeners to support her in her onerous role, just as her grandfather had done in his final royal broadcasts two decades previously: ‘I want to ask you all, whatever your religion, to pray for me on that day – to pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve Him and you, all the days of my life’.¹³⁵ The monarch’s words were widely reported by newspapers that emphasized her commitment to her difficult position and even claimed she had written the broadcast herself – thus implying that the feelings she expressed were real.¹³⁶

Figure 6.6. ‘Mummy – Mummy!’, Daily Mirror, 4 June 1953, p. 9. © The British Library Board.

The public’s sympathetic reactions to the queen on 2 June 1953 suggested that they were moved by the vulnerable image of her that had been carefully crafted in the lead-up to the coronation. For example, a group of thirteen-year-old girls from the grammar school in west London recorded in their essays that they thought Prince Philip should be with the queen in the service to support her.¹³⁷ One of these girls couched her concern in broader terms relating to the personal hardships endured by the monarch: ‘I don’t think that the Queen should be always working. Many others will agree that the Queen has a hard time, after all she is a human being. The Royal Family are not together enough, is what many say’.¹³⁸ This kind of anxiety, which focused on the personal sacrifices made by Elizabeth II, was communicated implicitly by Mass Observation respondents and essayists who expressed disquiet that she was separated from her family during the coronation service, with several stating that she looked ‘lonely’ or ‘weighed down’ by the crown on her head.¹³⁹ Although royal and religious officials had expressly prohibited television close-ups before the event, it is notable that the BBC cameramen in the abbey disregarded this rule on the day itself in order to present audiences with large pictures of the queen’s face that enabled viewers to scrutinize it and identify with the emotions it conveyed.¹⁴⁰ In respect of these close-ups, it is perhaps unsurprising that Mass Observation respondents and schoolgirls noted concerns about the queen’s ‘youth’ and the way she ‘looked very nervous’.¹⁴¹ The phrases recorded by viewers about the queen’s apparent unease echoed the responses of many of those who had listened to the radio broadcast of her father’s coronation sixteen years before. As in 1937, it is clear that the narrative of the burdens of royal public life took on a very literal form through the monarch as she endured a seemingly torturous coronation service that was being transmitted live not only to Britain but to audiences spread across the rest of the world.

The public’s sympathy for Elizabeth II should also be interpreted in relation to the popular belief that she was placing public duty ahead of personal ambition, sacrificing fulfilment as a young woman to undertake her role as sovereign. A large number of school essayists specifically focused on this story of sacrifice. Girls at the Cheshire and London grammar schools seemed to be reflecting on a previous classroom discussion on the meaning of the coronation when they wrote that they thought the queen was ‘dedicating her life’ to the ‘service of her people’ and ‘her country’ and that she was thus owed ‘our loyalty and support’.¹⁴² Some explicitly asserted that the queen’s dedication involved her forsaking her personal ambitions: a fourteen-year-old girl stated that ‘she must always put other people’s desires before hers, no matter how she feels about it’.¹⁴³ These examples show that adolescent children were educated on the meaning of the coronation and that this helped to popularize the normative discourse on the burdens of royal life. These essays also reveal that members of the public envisioned the queen’s national duty in relation to the constraints it placed on her personal development; and that the formation of royalist identities in the classroom was partly rooted in empathy for the monarch at a time when fulfilment in domestic life was deemed to be a core tenet of modern selfhood.¹⁴⁴

Conclusion

On 9 June, exactly one week after the coronation, Geoffrey Fisher wrote to George Barnes at the BBC’s television department to congratulate him and his team on the broadcast:

Fisher similarly confided in his diary that he thought the ‘religious significance’ of the event had been ‘much more generally appreciated than at the last Coronation’ and added that he thought the ‘Queen’s request for the prayers of everybody in her Christmas broadcast made a very deep impression’.¹⁴⁶ The archbishop thus seems to have warmed to television as a form of mass communication as a result of the coronation broadcast, recognizing in it the potential to strengthen the religious beliefs of viewers and to make more visible the popular meanings that underpinned the monarchy’s public image. For Fisher, this primarily concerned Elizabeth II’s commitment to serve her subjects. As we have seen, the queen’s ostensible burdens and her domestic role were more integral to her public presentation on her coronation day than historians have previously acknowledged. While the media and other public voices heralded a New Elizabethan Age and the dawn of Commonwealth, Mass Observation sources suggest that public attitudes to the monarch on 2 June focused mainly on her personality and family life. The respondents who partook in Mass Observation’s coronation-day survey had also participated in an earlier survey that had asked them whether they ‘ever [had] personal thoughts about the Queen [and] if so, what sort of thoughts [these were]’.¹⁴⁷ It is a great shame that all but one of the original replies to this directive have since been lost, but the one surviving reply, oddly enclosed with the 2 June responses and written by the same retired civil servant who had watched the coronation at a television party in Lancaster, illuminated the strong empathetic connection that mass media facilitated between members of the public and the royal family:

Clearly recognizing the key role played by the media as the organizing force in her para-social emotional relationship with the queen, this woman was among a number of respondents who expressed loyalty to the monarch which was rooted in the ability to identify with her personally.¹⁴⁹ For some Mass Observation respondents it was this intimate identification that distinguished Elizabeth II from her father. Several compared the 1953 coronation to that of George VI and noted that the abdication of Edward VIII had tarnished the 1937 event, but a forty-two-year-old primary school teacher went one step further when she stated that, while the new queen was ‘young and the family appeared romantic’, her father had been ‘a sincere but not a romantic figure’.¹⁵⁰

This chapter has shown that the media and BBC television in particular played a crucial part in generating a popular appeal around the post-war royal family. The prospect of seeing the television broadcast of the coronation notably offset other public criticism about the event, with adolescent schoolchildren acknowledging a strong desire to participate in what they perceived as a historic occasion. On the day itself, television facilitated new modes of participation by enabling viewers to conceive of themselves as part of a national community linked together around television sets in the home. Across the country Mass Observation respondents and school essayists recorded that they experienced an increased sense of involvement as part of a collective British viewership. Equally, the informal domestic settings in which most people watched television enhanced the shared and intimate qualities of the coronation experience by encouraging viewers to relate personally, and as part of groups, to the images they consumed, deepening their mutual emotional identification with the royal family. Furthermore, we have seen how the BBC elevated the familial aspects of the coronation by focusing on the queen’s maternal image, which, in turn, stimulated shared feelings among its national viewership and fostered sympathy for the monarch’s ostensibly onerous public role.

___________

1 B. Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (London, 2002), p. 207; M. Aldridge, The Birth of British Television: a History (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 169 and 178–9.

2 Elizabeth II will be referred to as ‘the queen’ in this chapter, while her mother, also known as Queen Elizabeth, will be referred to as the queen mother or queen dowager. Queen Mary died in March 1953, so George VI’s consort was the only member of the royal family known as the queen mother by the time of her daughter’s coronation in June.

3 J. Anderson, ‘The Tory party at prayer? The Church of England and British politics in the 1950s’, Jour. Church and State, lviii (2015), 417–40, at pp. 420–2; E. Shils and M. Young, ‘The meaning of the coronation’, Sociological Rev., i (1953), 63–81; I. Bradley, God Save the Queen: the Spiritual Dimension of Monarchy (London, 2002), pp. 85–7.

4 W. Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 96–8 and 105–13; T. Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53 (Manchester, 2010), pp. 100–4. See also D. Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition”, c.1820–1977’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–64, at pp. 153–5; P. Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: the House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (Oxford, 2013), pp. 54–60.

5 F. Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven, Conn., 2010), p. 18; Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 206–7; Webster, Englishness and Empire, pp. 115–8; Cannadine, ‘Context, performance and meaning’, pp. 150–4.

6 Shils and Young, ‘The meaning of the coronation’, pp. 66–7.

7 D. Dayan and E. Katz, Media Events: the Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1992) is the key text in this area of media studies.

8 H. Örnebring, ‘Revisiting the coronation: a critical perspective on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953’, Nordicom Rev., xxv (2004), 175–95. See also H. Örnebring, ‘Writing the history of television audiences: the coronation in the Mass-Observation archive’, in Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. H. Wheatley (London, 2008), pp. 170–183; Mort, Capital Affairs, p. 31. See also P. Ziegler, Crown and People (London, 1978), p. 104.

9 J. Moran, Armchair Nation: an Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (London, 2013), pp. 77–81. In highlighting the varied nature of MO reactions, Moran built on D. Kynaston, Family Britain: 1951–57 (London, 2010), pp. 299–307 and Ziegler, Crown and People, pp. 114–8.

10 Shils and Young, ‘The meaning of the coronation’, pp. 71–3.

11 Approximately 500 school essays are contained in the Mass Observation online archive under the file reference TC/69/3/A–E. These can be located through the keyword search ‘1953 coronation’, which leads to the coronation study, all of which has been digitized. MO’s 1953 coronation project was extremely ambitious and yielded an unwieldy amount of information, most of which is yet to receive historical analysis. This chapter revisits 2 sets of records, both of which have been touched on by Kynaston and Ziegler in their respective studies on the 1953 coronation (Kynaston, Family Britain; Ziegler, Crown and People). It focuses on the first 7 sets of essays contained in files TC/69/3/A and B, batches A to G. These include essays written before and after the event by girls aged 13 to 16 at a grammar school in west London (A, F and G); by girls of the same age at West Kirby girls’ grammar school in Cheshire (B and C); by a group of boys aged 14 to 16 at a school of unknown status in Surrey (D); and by a group of boys aged 12 to 14 at an unknown school in Bury St. Edmunds (E). Essays from other batches (H to P) are sometimes used to support the arguments posited in this chapter, but the analysis presented here has focused on the first 7 batches due to the large size of the archive and because they reflect the opinions of girls and boys of roughly the same age. The essays are separately numbered in the archive and are referred to here using their file reference, batch letters and numbers, e.g., 3/A/A1. The second group of records examined here are the directive replies to the day survey for 2 June 1953, located in TC/69/7/A–H. Seventy-six women and 87 men replied to this survey, discussing what they had done over the course of coronation day as prompted by a set of questions that also asked them to report on any local celebrations, the most ‘stirring’, ‘peculiar’ and ‘funniest’ incidents of the day, whether those watching or listening to the BBC programmes remained silent for the anointing of the queen and how they thought the 1953 coronation compared with that of George VI in 1937. These questions shaped the responses recorded by the MO respondents and this influence is considered throughout the analysis presented in this chapter. Some of the 163 directive replies include index numbers and, where this is the case, they are referred to using their file letters (A–H) and index number, e.g., 7/A/2077. Where there is no index number, the reports are referred to according to their file letter and occupation when stated, e.g., 7/A/Youth Employment Officer. The original hardcopies of both sets of records can be found in the MO archive at The Keep (University of Sussex) under the references SxMOA1/2/69/3 and 7.

12 For further discussion regarding the use of school essays as sources, see H. Barron and C. Langhamer, ‘Feeling through practice: subjectivity and emotion in children’s writing’, Jour. Social Hist., li (2017), 101–23, at pp. 103–6; J. Greenhalgh, ‘“Till we hear the last all clear”: gender and the presentation of self in young girls’ writing about the bombing of Hull during the Second World War’, Gender & History, xxvi (2014), 167–83, at pp. 169–71.

13 On the dynamic, self-reflexive qualities of television viewing, see H. Wood, Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern Self-Reflexivity (Chicago, Ill.,2009).

14 LPL, Fisher 123, fos. 1–2, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’; Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 204. For an analysis of the public response to the death of George VI, see I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal death and living memorials: the funerals and commemoration of George V and George VI, 1936–52’, Hist. Research, lxxxix (2015), 158–75.

15 Moran, Armchair Nation, pp. 63–71, 86–7.

16 S. Nixon, Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c.1951–69 (Manchester, 2013), pp. 95–9 and 143–4; L. Black, ‘The impression of affluence: political culture in the 1950s and 1960s’, in An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited, ed. L. Black and H. Pemberton (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 85–106, at p. 90.

17 Moran, Armchair Nation, p. 74.

18 BBCWA, T16/169, ‘Copy of letter sent by D. H. S. B. to the Coronation Commission’, 3 June 1952.

19 BBCWA, T16/169, S. J. de Lotbinière to T. F. Clark, 11 July 1952; Rev. F. H. House to A. C. Don, Dean of Westminster, 17 July 1952.

20 LPL, Fisher 123, fos. 3–4, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’. The executive and joint coronation committees were both chaired by the duke of Norfolk and reported back to the larger coronation commission headed by the duke of Edinburgh.

21 LPL, Fisher 123, fo. 5, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

22 LPL, Fisher 123, fo. 6, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

23 LPL, Fisher 123, fo. 6, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

24 Daily Mirror, 21 Oct. 1952, pp. 1 and 16.

25 BBCWA, T16/169, Rev. F. H. House to D. Tel. B., 22 Oct. 1922; Daily Mirror, 21 Oct. 1952, pp. 1 and 16.

26 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 205.

27 Daily Express, 22 Oct. 1952, p. 4; 23 Oct. 1952, p. 1; 24 Oct. 1952, p. 1; 28 Oct. 1952, p. 1.

28 Daily Mirror, 21 Oct. 1952, pp. 1 and 16; 24 Oct. 1952, p. 1; 29 Oct. 1952, p. 4; Daily Mail, 24 Oct. 1952, p. 5.

29 LPL, Fisher 123, fo. 8, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

30 LPL, Fisher 123, fos. 8–11, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

31 Daily Mail, 29 Oct. 1952, pp. 1–2; Daily Mirror, 29 Oct. 1952, p. 1; Daily Express, 29 Oct. 1952, p. 1.

32 Daily Mirror, 9 Oct. 1952, p. 1.

33 Daily Express, 9 Oct. 1952, pp. 1 and 4. Pimlott also raises this possibility of a royal about-face (Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 206).

34 LPL, Fisher 123, fo. 21, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

35 LPL, Fisher 123, fos. 23–4, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

36 LPL, Fisher 123, fos. 25–7 and 32, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

37 MOA, 3/B/G2.

38 For other essays which expressed concerns about cost but articulated the writers’ desire to participate, see MOA, 3/A/C9, 3/A/C8, 3/A/C18, 3/A/C22, 3/A/D7, 3/A/D9, 3/B/G6, 3/B/ G10, 3/B/G11, 3/B/G18 3/B/G27. On media criticism of the cost of the event, see Örnebring, ‘Revisiting the coronation’, pp. 187–9.

39 For other examples which emphasize either the innovatory significance of the televisualization of the event or its historical connotations, see MOA, 3/A/B12, 3/A/C19, 3/A/C20, 3/A/C30, 3/A/C33, 3/A/D2, 3/A/D6, 3/A/D8, 3/B/E7, 3/B/E38, 3/B/F12, 3/B/F24, 3/B/G14, 3/B/G17.

40 E.g., MOA, 3/A/C9, 3/A/C11, 3/A/C17, 3/A/D2, 3/A/D8, 3/A/D16, 3/B/E12, 3/B/F8, 3/B/G18.

41 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 204–7; Moran, Armchair Nation, pp. 73–4.

42 For other examples in which essayists presented themselves as part of a British community, see MOA, 3/A/C9, 3/A/C32, 3/A/D1, 3/A/D2, 3/B/E15, 3/B/E23, 3/B/37, 3/B/ F3, 3/B/20, 3/B/G3, 3/B/G17, 3/B/G23.

43 E.g., MOA, 3/A/C5, 3/A/C15, 3/A/C26, 3/A/D2, 3/A/D16, 3/B/E12, 3/B/E27, 3/B/E45, 3/B/F3, 3/B/G12, 3/B/G17, 3/B/G28.

44 MOA, 3/A/D4 (this author’s emphasis).

45 E.g., Daily Mirror, 22 Oct. 1952, p. 7; 9 Dec. 1952, p. 1; 2 June 1953, p. 2; Daily Express, 9 Dec. 1952, pp. 1 and 4.

46 MOA, 3/B/F6.

47 MOA, 3/B/F13. For similar examples, see MOA, 3/B/F/4, 3/B/F/8, 3/B/F/10, 3/B/F/11, 3/B/F/14, 3/B/F/16.

48 E.g., MOA, 3/A/C1, 3/A/C4, 3/A/C8, 3/A/C10, 3/A/C11, 3/A/C15, 3/A/C24, 3/A/C37, 3/A/C29.

49 MOA, 3/A/C3.

50 MOA, 3/A/C7.

51 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 60–98. For other examples of schoolgirls who were concerned about television’s lack of colour, see MOA, 3/A/C2, 3/A/C3, 3/A/C4, 3/A/C27, 3/A/C29, 3/A/C30.

52 MOA, 3/A/C14. For very similar examples, see MOA, 3/B/F27, 3/C/I4, 3/C/J19.

53 MOA, 3/A/B17 (this author’s emphasis).

54 MOA, 3/A/C18.

55 MOA, 3/A/B22.

56 MOA, 3/A/D15. For other examples, see MOA, 3/A/D1, 3/A/D5, 3/A/D9, 3/A/D10, 3/A/D12, 3/A/D14, 3/A/D16.

57 L. Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (London, 2013), pp. 47–8.

58 MOA, 3/B/E8. For other examples, see MOA, 3/B/E2, 3/B/E6, 3/B/E10, 3/B/E11, 3/B/ E12, 3/B/E16, 3/B/E18, 3/B/E20.

59 MOA, 3/B/E4.

60 MOA, 3/B/F14, 3/B/F18, 3/B/F27.

61 Nixon, Hard Sell, pp. 95–9, 143–4; Black, ‘The impression of affluence’, p. 90.

62 MOA, 3/B/E4. For similar examples that express contradictory attitudes towards the televising of the event, see MOA, 3/B/E2, 3/B/E5, 3/B/E10, 3/B/E11, 3/B/E15, 3/B/E17, 3/B/ E19, 3/B/E21, 3/B/E23, 3/B/E26.

63 A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (5 vols. Oxford, 1965–95), iv. 221; Moran, Armchair Nation, p. 77.

64 N. Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 4–8.

65 Kynaston, Family Britain, pp. 306–7.

66 MOA, 7/H/099.

67 Emphasis in original.

68 MOA, 7/F/Chief Inspector. For an almost identical response, see MOA, 7/H/ Agricultural Researcher; and for similar examples which stress a personalized sense of participation as well as a national dimension to their television experience, see MOA, 7/A/01, 7/A/0161, 7/B/793, 7/B/Retired Civil Servant, 7/B/Housewife, 7/D/202, 7/E/4019, 7/F/4037, 7/F/Lecturer, 7/G/4137, 7/H/2, 7/H/03.

69 MOA, 7/F/093.

70 MOA, 7/C/Teacher.

71 MOA, 3/A/B4.

72 For an adult respondent’s interesting description of the immersive quality of the 1953 coronation wireless broadcast, see MOA, 7/F/Retired Farmer. For children’s essays that describe the experience of seeing and hearing crowds on TV, see MOA, 3/A/A4, 3/A/A12, 3/A/A24, 3/A/A30, 3/A/A31 3/A/A34, 3/A/A35, 3/A/A37, 3/A/A40.

73 One of the schoolgirls from Cheshire noted that a boy at her television party was taking photographs of the TV screen (MOA, 3/A/B27), while the photograph presented in Figure 6.1 comes from the private collection of B. Knowles and was taken by his great-grandfather on coronation day in 1953. Notably, one of the MO respondents noted that the News Chronicle had published an article providing readers with ‘advice on taking photos from the T.V. screen’ (MOA, 7/E/4250). For a useful analysis of commemorative processes and photography, see A. Kuhn, ‘Memory texts and memory work: performances of memory in and with visual media’, Memory Studies, xx (2010), 1–16; F. Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the future of history: things, practices and politics’, Jour. Brit. Stud., xlviii (2009), 283–307.

74 E.g., MOA, 3/A/A32, 3/A/A36, 3/A/A40, 3/A/B12, 3/A/B14, 3/A/B17, 3/A/B19, 3/A/B22.

75 E.g., MOA, 7/A/1462, 7/C/023, 7/C/1971, 7/F/050, 7/H/School Teacher.

76 MOA, 7/A/53.

77 MOA, 7/C/023.

78 MOA, 7/A/Housewife.

79 MOA, 3/A/A20.

80 Barron and Langhamer, ‘Feeling through practice’, p. 114.

81 MOA, 7/H/Agricultural Researcher.

82 MOA, 7/A/1826. For other examples of girls’ and women’s domestic-themed experiences of coronation day, see MOA, 3/A/A3, 3/A/A18, 3/A/A22, 3/A/A35, 3/A/A44, 3/A/B2, 3/A/ B10, 3/A/B12, 3/B/G22, 7/A/757, 7/A/4696.

83 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 205 and 211–2.

84 Moran, Armchair Nation, pp. 77–8.

85 MOA, 3/A/A20.

86 For examples of television parties that did not observe a silence, see MOA, 7/A/01, 7/A/School Teacher, 7/A/Youth Employment Officer, 7/A/757, 7/B/0177, 7/C/Teacher, 7/D/0857, 7/E/Chain Store Executive, 7/E/4250, 7/E/4019, 7/E/0708, 7/G/School Master, 7/G/4566.

87 MOA, 7/G/4137.

88 MOA, 7/E/1948.

89 MOA, 7/F/093 and 7/F/Student. See also 7/H/School Teacher and 7/H/1478.

90 MOA, 7/E/4250.

91 For the term ‘viewing circle’, see MOA, 7/H/Agricultural Researcher and 3/A/B27.

92 MOA, 7/B/0137.

93 For examples of these kinds of inclusive description, see MOA, 7/A/4398, 7/B/631, 7/E/4019, 7/H/052, 3/A/10, 3/A/14, 3/A/20, 3/A/29, 3/A/33, 3/A/36, 3/B/4, 3/B/16, 3/B/28, 3/B/29, 3/B/31.

94 On Crawford’s memoirs, see Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 163–4. See also M. Crawford, The Little Princesses (London, 1950).

95 P. Ziegler, King Edward VIII: the Official Biography (London, 2012), pp. 501–8; King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, ed. D. Hart-Davis (London, 2006), pp. 222–4, 239, 269, 355–60, 367, 372.

96 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 523.

97 PA, BBK/H/121, J. Gordon to Lord Beaverbrook, 16 Dec. 1947.

98 Also see Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 524.

99 PA, BBK/H/121, J. Gordon to Lord Beaverbrook, 4 July and 11 July 1950.

100 PA, BBK/H/121, J. Gordon to Lord Beaverbrook, 11 July 1950.

101 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, p. 527. See also S. Bradford, King George VI (London, 2011), pp. 590–3.

102 LPL, Fisher 123, fo. 13, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

103 Very little is known about Pitkin’s role as the publisher of official royal souvenir magazines in this period. This author’s enquiries discovered that Pitkin no longer has an archive, having been subsumed into Pavilion Books. For reproductions of photographs of the royal children in the press, see Daily Express, 14 Nov. 1952, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 14 Nov. 1952, p. 1. For examples of photographs of the royal children printed as souvenir postcards, see RCIN, 2943746, ‘Tuck post card of Prince Charles and Princess Anne’, 24 Oct. 1952.

104 By the end of 1953, Pitkin had released more than 70 separate royal souvenir magazines, focusing on the private lives and public roles of Queen Elizabeth II and her closest relatives.

105 See ch. 5.

106 BBCWA, R34/862/7, Memo from P. H. Dorté to D. H. B, 3 Nov. 1948.

107 BFINA, NRA vol.4, m.3429, ‘Film of Princess Elizabeth’s Children’, 16 Nov. 1950.

108 BBCWA, R34/862/9, B. E. Nicolls to R. Colville, 18 Aug. 1950. Thompson was replaced by the NRA with another accredited newsreel cameraman, P. J. Turner, in 1950 (BFINA, NRA vol. 4, m.3234, ‘Royal Rota’, 7 June 1950; m.4074, ‘Royal Rota’, 14 Aug. 1952; m.4101, ‘Royal Rota’, 18 Sept. 1952).

109 E.g., Daily Express, 14 Apr. 1953, p. 1. This kind of photograph also appeared in popular magazines: Picture Post, 2 May 1953, p. 27; Woman, 9 May 1953, pp. 10–1; Woman’s Own, 28 May 1953, pp. 24–5; Modern Woman, Apr. 1953, pp. 41–3.

110 Daily Mirror, 1 May 1953, pp. 8–9. See also Daily Express, 1 May 1953, p. 3.

111 MOA, 7/G/1873. On the importance of this kind of maternal identification within a Commonwealth context, see R. Feingold, ‘Marketing the modern empire: Elizabeth II and the 1953–54 world tour’, Antipodes, xxiii (2009), 147–54.

112 Daily Express, 2 June 1953, p. 12; Daily Mirror, 1 June 1953, p. 6.

113 MOA, 3/B/G8.

114 MOA, 3/B/G3.

115 BBCWA, T14/869/2, ‘The Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: Producer’s Script’, p. 16.

116 MOA, 3/A/B16. For other examples, see MOA, 3/A/A28 and 3/A/A4.

117 E.g., MOA, 7/A/0219, 7/B/anon, 7/D/195, 7/E/4250, 7/F/806, 7/F/RAF Engineer Officer.

118 MOA, 7/B/0137.

119 E.g., Daily Mirror, 3 June 1953, p. 5; Daily Express, 3 June 1953, p. 12. See also Ziegler, Crown and People, p. 111.

120 MOA, 7/B/631.

121 See also n. 73.

122 E.g., Daily Mirror, 5 Nov. 1952, pp. 8–9; 28 Apr. 1953, p. 9; 1 June 1953, p. 16; E. Scott, The Second Golden Gift Book of Prince Charles and Princess Anne (London, 1952), p. 26 (also published by Pitkin). MOA, 3/A/A18; also 3/A/B14, 3/A.

123 MOA, 3/D/N2/N27.

124 MOA, 3/A/A18. See also MOA, 3/A/B14, 3/A/A11, 3/A/A27, 3/D/O8.

125 MOA, 7/F/Minister of Religion.

126 MOA, 7/A/Schoolteacher. For similar examples, see MOA, 7/C/HW, 7/C/0142, 7/D/195, 7/E/4019.

127 S. Nixon, ‘Life in the kitchen: television advertising, the housewife and domestic modernity in Britain, 1955–1969’, Contemporary British Hist., xxxi (2017), 69–90, at pp. 80–1.

128 P. Summerfield, ‘Women in Britain since 1945: companionate marriage and the double burden’, in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. J. Obelkevich and P. Catterall (London, 2002), pp. 58–72, at pp. 62–3.

129 E.g., MOA, 3/A/A27, 3/A/A30, 3/A/A38, 3/A/B6, 3/A/B14, 3/A/B17, 3/A/B21, 3/A/B27, 7/D/1090, 7/H/Schoolteacher.

130 MOA, 7/E/Printer. See also 7/E/4019 and 7/F/Minister of Religion for almost identical responses.

131 See also MOA, 7/E/4250.

132 MOA, 7/D/0143. See also 3/A/A30.

133 E.g., Daily Express, 3 June 1953, p. 12; Daily Mirror, 4 June 1953, pp. 8–9.

134 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 209–10; Anderson, ‘The Tory party at prayer’, p. 421.

135 Quoted in T. Fleming, Voices Out of the Air: the Royal Christmas Broadcasts, 1932–1981 (London, 1981), pp. 70–1.

136 Daily Express, 27 Dec. 1952, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 27 Dec. 1952, p. 1; Daily Mail, 27 Dec. 1952, p. 1.

137 MOA, 3/B/G18, 3/B/G19, 3/B/G20. For a similar adult view, see MOA, 7/A/1605. This concern about Philip’s place in the service was probably shaped by press articles which, since February 1953, had speculated about the specific role he would perform in relation to the queen. Mischievously, the Daily Mirror undertook a public poll on this question (Daily Mirror, 24 Feb. 1953, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 20 Apr. 1953, p. 1).

138 MOA, 3/B/G18.

139 E.g., MOA, 7/A/1462, 7/A/4398, 7/E/1858, 7/F/Minister of Religion, 7/H/048.

140 Moran, Armchair Nation, pp. 73–4 and 80. See also Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 190–1 and 205.

141 E.g., MOA, 3/A/A34, 7/C/023, 7/C/HW, 7/C/0142, 7/D/2029, 7/E/4250, 7/G/948, 7/E/1948.

142 MOA, 3/A/B17, 3/A/B24, 3/A/C3, 3/A/C20, 3/A/C21, 3/B/F1, 3/B/F6, 3/B/F11, 3/B/F21, 3/B/F23, 3/B/G15. For similar sentiments, see MOA, 3/A/C11, 3/B/G3, 3/B/F15, 3/B/F17.

143 MOA, 3/A/B22. See also 3/A/F3.

144 C. Langhamer, ‘Love, selfhood and authenticity in post-war Britain’, Cult. and Soc. Hist., ix (2012), 277–97, esp. at pp. 277–82; J. Finch and P. Summerfield, ‘Social reconstruction and the emergence of companionate marriage, 1945–1959’, in Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change: Writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne, ed. D. Clark (London, 1991), pp. 7–32.

145 LPL, Fisher 124, fo. 217, G. Fisher to G. Barnes, 9 June 1953.

146 LPL, Fisher 124, fo. 33, ‘Diary of Coronation Events’.

147 MOA, TC/69/2/A, ‘Code List Survey 167’, p. 3.

148 MOA, 7/B/0137, Part A, May 1953.

149 E.g., MOA, 7/A/0161, 7/A/anon (Edenbridge), 7/C/Housewife, 7/C/anon (Brighton).

150 MOA, 7/A/0161. For other examples that discuss the negative impact of the abdication crisis on the 1937 coronation, see MOA, 7/B/Housewife, 7/B/0137, 7/B/924, 7/C/0214, 7/D/1587, 7/G/Schoolmaster, 7/H/055.