LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE 1953

      On my dressing table rests a small leather box with a lid embossed in gold with a stylised crown and below it the date 1953. The graphics are unmistakably of the period we associate with the Festival of Britain, which indeed opened only two years before. At the time I was coming up to being seventeen and in the sixth form of Edmonton County Grammar School sited on the fastnesses of the North Circular Road. The box was a gift to every boy in the school on the occasion of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In it we were to keep our shirt studs, a fact which immediately dates the object to a now vanished sartorial era. The object is as fresh as the day on which I received it and I keep it to hand to remind me of my earliest memory of real spectacle, as I was one of the two young people from my school selected to be bussed into central London on the great day to stand on the Victoria Embankment and watch the great procession make its way to Westminster Abbey. The date was 2 June 1953.

      The fact that it was the forward and not the return procession that I saw turned out to be a stroke of luck, for it enabled me to return home in time to watch most of the coronation on television. The arrival of that in the sitting room of the north London terraced house in which I grew up was another major event. But to return to the morning. That I recall as being a grey one, but then at that age just about everything I could remember had been grey, for the coronation was just eight years on from the end of the war, one which had reduced the country to penury. The capital still visibly wore the monochrome robes of that conflict, enlivened on the day by the splashes of colour of the street decorations and by the tiny red, white and blue Union flags which we clutched and waved.

      It was a long wait and, as I was not tall, my chances of seeing anything were not that great. Nonetheless, there was the thrill of anticipation as a military band was heard from afar and then the great procession unfolded. I do not think that I ever saw more than the top half of a horse and rider. No matter, for two images stick in mind, ones shared at the time by millions of others. The first was an open carriage over which the capacious figure of Queen Salote of Tonga presided, beaming and waving to everyone in a manner which won all hearts. The second, of course, was the encrusted golden coach in which the Queen rode with the Duke of Edinburgh. It must have been lit from within for the Queen’s smiling features and the glitter of her diamonds remain firmly fixed in my memory.

      Subsequent to that there were the pictures on the tiny television screen, hypnotic, like some dream or apparition, certainly images enough to haunt a stage-struck and historically inclined youth for the rest of his life. But I add to that the subsequent film of the coronation, for there it was on the large screen in colour, never to be forgotten, glittering, glamorous, effulgent. This was the England I fell in love with, a country proud of its great traditions and springing to life again in a pageant that seemed to inaugurate a second Elizabethan age. This was a masque of hope, a vision to uplift the mind after years of drear deprivation.

      In retrospect I had seen part of what is now recognised to have been the greatest public spectacle of the twentieth century. What I was not to know was that this impoverished child in his dreary navy-blue blazer, cheap grey flannel trousers and black and gold school tie was to stand, half a century on, resplendent in scarlet and black in my role as High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, along with the whole college, to welcome the Queen at the great service which commemorated her coronation.

      It is now all so long ago that most readers may well ask what is a coronation? Where did such an extraordinary ceremonial come from? What formed and shaped it over the centuries? And how can such a pageant ever have any relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first century? When I last visited the crown jewels in the Tower of London, part of that display was a projection of the film of the coronation. Looking at it, I could not believe that such a thing had been staged in the second half of the twentieth century and, equally, I could not help wondering whether one would ever be staged again. But then that was a viewpoint which sprang from ignorance, unaware of the rich resonances of the ritual or its deep significance in terms of the committal of the monarch to the people. It was questions like these that prompted me to write this book, launching me on a voyage that proved to be one of constant surprise. Amongst many other things it was to reveal the coronation as the perfect microcosm of a country that has always opted for evolution and not revolution. But I must begin at the beginning, and that takes us back not just centuries but no less than a thousand years.