Coronation | During Queen Elizabeth’s famine-era coronation, even the courtesans’ dresses became too tight: “Ready, girls?”

London

King Charles III will be crowned on Saturday at Westminster Abbey just like her mother the Queen Elizabeth II nearly seventy years earlier.

But that’s pretty much where the similarities between mother and son’s life situation end.

When Elisabet was crowned, she was only 27 years old mother of two small children. The monarchy received a fresh face, as the saying goes.

Boiled in many broths, Charles, on the other hand, is crowned at the ripe old age of 74. Even the king’s grown sons already have their own families and their own broths.

When Elizabeth was crowned, hardly anyone questioned the monarchy. Britain was still recovering from World War II. In times of famine and rationing, coronations served as a national spirit lifter.

Instead, Charles’ goal is to keep the coronation as modest and down-to-earth as possible, so that too many people don’t get upset. Criticizing the monarchy is commonplace in the 21st century – and often even the starting point.

How about world politics?

At the time of Elizabeth’s coronation, the prime minister of Britain was an almost eighty-year-old war hero Winston Churchill. The dictator of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin had died during the coronation in March, and Churchill thought the time was right to start a new dialogue between the West and the Soviet leadership.

During Charles’s coronation, Britain will also be led by a conservative prime minister. Rishi Sunak42, is significantly younger than the monarch.

However, the same eastern direction as before, i.e. Moscow, causes concern.

Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was the first to be televised in its entirety. Naturally, the British broadcasting company BBC was involved.

The behind-the-scenes contemporary testimony is the best Anne Tennant or Anne Glenconner i.e. the Baroness of Glenconner in her memoir Lady in Waiting – My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown (2019).

Glenconner’s maiden name was Lady Anne Coke (b. 1932) and the daughter of an earl. At the coronation, she was one of Queen Elizabeth’s six young maids of honor. The main task of the maids of honor was to support the queen’s approximately six-meter long velvet cloak trimmed with fly skin.

Besides that, the fire of twenty-something maidens looks decorative.

Coronation outfits for the queen and the rest of the royal family as well as the maidens had been planned Norman Hartnell. However, the impressively embroidered court maids’ dresses were not lined, so they itched uncomfortably.

“They [puvut] was also sewn very tight. But they looked lovely and we were smitten,” Glenconner writes.

The coronation the arrangements were handled by the then Duke of Norfolk ie Bernard Fitzalan-Howard. The duke had experience in the credit assignment, as he had also managed to answer Elizabeth’s father’s ie of George VI of the coronation arrangements sixteen years earlier in May 1937.

According to Glenconner, the duke left nothing to chance. Backing him up, he had a hundred charts on which every minute of Elizabeth’s coronation had been clocked.

“He [Norfolkin herttua] was even prepared for the fact that his own bald head had to be powdered a couple of times during the day because of the television cameras filming from above.”

To Coronation Day the preparation started at five in the morning. The maids of honor were put on proper make-up so that they wouldn’t look too sloppy on TV.

The ordinary audience had different challenges. Thousands had spent the night on the streets of London to get good vantage points along the coronation route.

“A strange sight awaited us in London, when the streets were full of cheerful people sitting or standing in the pouring rain. It was an incredible revelation, especially considering all the post-war gloom,” Glenconner writes.

Westminster Abbey opened to invited guests as early as six in the morning. Eight thousand guests packed into the church.

Charles’ coronation is a much smaller event: only about a couple of thousand guests.

Glenconner is said to be often asked if the Queen looked nervous.

“It didn’t seem like it. He was calm as always and knew exactly what he was doing.”

The Queen had also practiced carrying the heavy crown beforehand.

Before when the queen entered the church, she reportedly turned around to check that the court maids were in their positions:

“Ready, girls?”

At church Glenconner had fainted. The smelling salt didn’t help, and neither did the squirming of the toes when it got dark in the eyes.

At the last minute, one of the masters of ceremonies – who happened to be, fittingly, still a war hero – offered a helping hand. The coronation ceremony avoided a commotion in front of the television cameras.

After the service, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, offered the core group brandy nauks from his pocket mat. The Queen reportedly missed out, but Glenconner took reinforcements

to the public coronation day was crowned by Queen Elizabeth and the rest of the royal family waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Even the young maids of honor could join.

“The crowd shouted so loudly that the sound was physically felt up to the balcony,” Glenconner later wrote.

Before that, the Queen’s children were Prince Charles, then under five, and the princess Anne, almost three years, had been able to say hello to their mother and gone to hide under this big skirt.

When the queen had taken the crown from her head and placed it on the table, Charles had reportedly been wearing the crown immediately.

The queen’s husband, the prince Philip on the other hand, he couldn’t resist interfering with the layouts of the coronation photos, which in turn angered the official coronation photographer, i.e. by Cecil Beaton.

“The Lord is good and will take the pictures himself,” Beaton, who was in pain, tapped the prince for advice, according to Glenconner.

The queen and her mother reportedly looked shocked. However, Philip had understood the cough, and the shoot had been completed.

What happened to the Queen’s coronation maid of honor Lady Anne Coke?

He was engaged for a while in the early 1950s of Johnnie Althorp with, but the engagement broke off. If this hadn’t happened, the royal family wouldn’t exist in its current composition either: Althorp is best known as a princess Diana’s as a father

Instead of Althorp, Anne married Colin Tennant’s, who later became the Baron of Gleconner and the founder of the island holiday paradise of Mustique. The marriage became unusual by normal standards.

The baroness became a princess Margaret’s i.e. the queen’s sister’s courtier and trusted person.

Circle a small wheel.