As we celebrate the coronation of King Charles III on Saturday 6 May 2023, we asked Fellows to share their memories of the last coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth II which took place on 2 June 1953, almost 70 years ago to the day. This is what they told us. Thank you to all who got in touch to share their memories with us.
I was commissioned as a National Service Second Lieutenant in May 1953 and posted to serve in the Federated Malay Forces in the Emergency and was due to fly on the day of the coronation. Two days before, I received a communication telling me that my posting was cancelled. Apparently, General Templer felt that National Service Officers were often sent back home just as they had become proficient in jungle warfare so there was no point in posting them to Malaysia.
So, I breathed a great sigh of relief and watched the procession in Pall Mall and saw the service on TV at a friend’s club there. As my regiment, the Royal Fusiliers, were based at the Tower of London I lined the route with my platoon when a few days later the Queen had lunch at the Guildhall.
I have two memories of that event: I had to shout my commands very loudly above the noisy cheers of the crowd and the Household Cavalry accompanying the Royal Procession rode as close as they could to us infantrymen without actually touching us! - The Reverend Patrick O'Ferrall OBE HonFREng
I was, aged 16, one of the first Queen’s scouts in northwest London and we were all given the chance to go and sell programmes at the coronation. I was on Park Lane (only 2 lanes then of course) and we went up the night before with our sleeping bags and slept in the underground car park of the garage on the corner of Mount Street (you could do things like that in those days!).
Next morning, I had a bag of programmes and sold them to the people gathering in the stands. I remember very clearly the newsboys running along shouting “Everest climbed”. When the procession went by were able to stand between the tiered stands and watch it. In the afternoon I was then in the crowds surging along through the parks to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen on the balcony.... and cheer! I remember that the mood of everyone was so happy: the beginnings of a new era after the misery of the immediate post-war years, power cuts, rationing, and very cold winters.
What has this go to do with engineering, you may ask? Well, there are so many details, that I just cannot remember, like what did we do with the money? Did we have a 'float'? What happened to our sleeping kit? Where did we get food?
I realise now that the reason none of this stuck was that my mind in those days was totally and completely full of building short wave and vhf radios and antennas! Girls, sport, not a trace! Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square at that time were full of shops selling ex-wartime wireless stuff, spilling out onto the pavement, and my pocket money went on buying it, lugging it home on the tube, and modifying and using it.
Three years later I started as a student apprentice at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd and began my engineering career which ended in 2000 when I retired as Technical Director of Racal Defence Systems Ltd.
I am still building radios by the way! - Peter Blair OBE FREng
First, a non-memory. The coronation took place in the week of my final examinations at Oxford. My mind was very fully occupied, and I was hardly aware of the coronation at the time.
Secondly, a memory from about a year earlier. In those days, the Spectator magazine ran a small section of quotes from other publications. One was from the Gainsborough Gazette in Lincolnshire and I quote pretty well verbatim after all these years: “It has been announced that the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II will take place on Tuesday 2 June next year. Readers will note that this clashes with Gainsborough market.” The Spectator wrote below, “Unless of course some other arrangement can be made”. - Brian Cook OBE FREng
On the day of proclamation, our school in Crieff, Scotland, all led by the pipe band walked down to the town square to hear the provost and town crier proclaim.
We had a very small black and white television screen in a large cabinet. The neighbours came in so that we could all watch.
There was great dislike of the English by the Scots. I was very conscious of this as an English boy in Scotland. Efforts to make postboxes with the cypher EIIR caused terrible near-riots as many considered the Queen to be Elizabeth the first of Scotland. This resulted in a number of bombs being placed in post boxes. The cypher in Scotland was then changed to a crown.
When we did the qualifying exam for grammar school, at about that time equivalent to the eleven-plus, every was required to pass arithmetic without using algebra. Some would state this was the reason that Scotland produced so many brilliant engineers – because arithmetic ensures common sense, wisdom and relationship of engineering interreactions.
I remember parading just after the coronation with all the scouts of the area, a large crowd of boys to celebrate the coronation. Incidentally we all wore sheath knives at our belts. - Richard Rooley FREng
With fifteen or more neighbours and school friends, I recall squeezing into the living room of the only house in our road that had a TV set – acquired specially for the coronation! The image was of course, a raster-scanned 405-line black and white picture produced on the phosphor face of a slightly curved 19-inch (diagonal) screen, the biggest domestic cathode-ray tube TV available at the time, I seem to recall. We had to sit in semi darkness in order to improve the image contrast.
A 19-inch screen seems very small compared to today’s gigantic wall-hung TVs (dependent, as are all TV images now, on sophisticated solid-state imaging technology, digital signal processing, etc). But to me even that was impressive compared to the 12-inch screen on which I had seen TV for the first time in my life five years earlier; that was in a darkened room at the back of the HMV shop (closed only recently) on London's Oxford Street. That was 1948, and the BBC was televising the Olympic Games, the first notable outside broadcast after the Second World War.
Due to the high cost of TV cathode ray tubes, 12” (diagonal) screens were the most popular. But to satisfy the desire for bigger images, some retailers sold large water-filled Perspex lenses to be placed in front of the TV screen so that, sitting more-or-less directly in front of the TV, you got a somewhat enlarged image.
In an extraordinary attempt to overcome the limitations of black-and-white pictures I recall seeing in one shop a celluloid sheet which could be placed on the TV screen. The sheet was divided into three bands – blue at the top, a yellowish central band, and green at the bottom. In front of a suitable panoramic view, for example, this was supposed to give the viewer the illusion of a coloured picture; but the mind boggles at its effect on, say, the face of a news reader! - Dr John Beynon FREng