On the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, on 2 June 1953, Marian Raynham, living in the Surrey town of Surbiton with her husband and two children, recorded the celebration lunch they had that day. Nothing gives a greater flavour of the times – or of how much life in Britain has changed since then.
“Listened to it all,” Raynham told the chroniclers of Mass Observation, the forerunners of public opinion testing. “I took advantage of the religious part to put the lunch on the table. They loved the lunch – tom [-ato] soup, a big salad with Nut Meat brawn and strawberry blancmange and jam and top of milk.” She went on to spring clean behind the couch: “did room, later crocheted, later rested.”
You would have to be 75 or so now to even dimly recall life before the Queen and, although those of us brought up in the later 1950s can still remember – just – what that decade felt like to a child, it is almost impossible for most people to recapture how different Britain was then from now. In clothing, transport, education, work, food and above all in attitudes and outlook the country has changed exponentially.
When Elizabeth II came to the throne following the death, from lung cancer, of her father, George VI, in February 1952, food and sweets were still rationed. You could have 4oz (113g) of sweets a month and 8oz of sugar. “Not a bad meal,” said Winston Churchill, the prime minister, when the meat ration was shown to him, until it was pointed out that was the amount allowed for a whole week.
Clothes had only just come off coupons. When the king’s death at the age of 56 was announced on the BBC wireless – the only broadcast source of news - there was widespread shock because it had not been realised how ill he was. Men stopped their cars, took off their hats and stood to attention in the streets as a mark of respect: black ties were worn and crepe-paper armbands.
Parliament adjourned for a week following tributes and condolences by MPs and peers. The BBC shut down, apart from news bulletins and weather forecasts, and theatres and cinemas closed. Even when radio resumed, comedians were banned and the only light entertainment was the anodyne soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary. On the day of the king’s funeral two men who failed to observe two minutes’ silence in Fleet Street were attacked by the crowd and had to be rescued by police. Even then, many people thought the BBC had overreacted: “Am missing my funny men,” Raynham noted.
There was a rush to buy televisions for the coronation itself – 56% of the adult population watched at least some of the ceremony. But to do so most of them had to find a neighbour with a set. Although the number owning a television doubled between 1952 and 1954, at that time there were only about 3.25m sets, all in black and white and with just one channel – and they cost about £70, the equivalent of nearly two months’ wages for many people. There had even been a debate about whether the day should be televised at all.
Those were not the only limits on communication: if most people wanted to make a telephone call, they had to find a telephone box and reach the number through the operator. Direct dialling was not introduced until 1958.
Change was coming, though, in the shape of Independent Television and ITN, which had a less deferential political style – at the time of the coronation, television could not even report politics properly – new music from the US, new “kitchen sink” theatre, new public housing, new towns to replace old slums, new cinema, the end of empire and imperial pretensions, and there were even new materials to make cheaper clothes.
Prince Philip, in the first of what would come later to be gleefully described as gaffes, was shown proudly round a factory making the new wonder material Terylene: “Ah yes,” he said, “I remember this new invention. Somebody showed it to me and gave me a shirt … I did wear it. Very interesting – clammy, isn’t it?”
In 1952, Britain still had a home-grown car industry – Morris and Austin were merging to form the British Motor Corporation, a Tory government had pledged to build 300,000 council homes a year, and at the previous autumn’s general election there was a turnout of 82.5%.
The public respectfulness and deference, not just to the royal family but across society to those in authority, continued for another decade, although there was also an undercurrent of low-level grumbling about cost and privilege.
“Too much fuss and much too much money is being spent on the coronation,” one respondent told Mass Observation, and a 70-year-old man in Fulham added: “The press overdoes it until people are sick and tired.”
But the Manchester Guardian’s day-after-coronation cartoon by David Low, showing a family with a post-celebration hangover, created outrage and 400 protest letters. “A joke in bad taste, I feel certain the ‘gentlemen’ behind the Iron Curtain are rubbing their hands with glee,” wrote MB Sketchley of Heaton Moor, Stockport.
When the author John Grigg – himself a member of the peerage – had the temerity to criticise the Queen (“a priggish schoolgirl”) in an article in 1957 and to blame her tweedy entourage (“a tight little enclave of English ladies and gentlemen”), he received 2,000 letters of complaint and a punch in the face. As late as 1964, an opinion poll found that a third of those questioned still believed the Queen had been chosen by God rather than heredity. The idea of depicting Her Majesty in a cartoon – especially as irreverently as James Gillray had depicted the Prince Regent 150 years earlier – was inconceivable. Television sketches, let alone Spitting Image puppets, were unthinkable for another 30 years.
God, or at least the church, was everywhere. Shops generally closed from Saturday lunchtime until Monday morning and what bishops said still mattered, even though the long slow decline in churchgoing was already well under way: only about 15% of the population regarded themselves as regular church attenders in the early 1950s, and nearly half the population went to services once or twice a year.
Even so, in the 1950s the Church of England would still have its say over the possible marriage of the Queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, to a divorced, non-aristocratic RAF wing commander, Peter Townsend – and the Queen would ban her from doing so.
The idea of decriminalising homosexuality was still anathema: the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing was first visited by the police investigating what was described as an incident of gross indecency the night after George VI died and, like many others, Turing was eventually hounded to suicide. Even when the law was repealed in 1967, the ageing war hero Lord Montgomery could still fulminate in the House of Lords against “the most abominable bestiality that any human being could take part in”. And, of course, capital punishment was in force throughout the 1950s.
The young Queen was surrounded by advisers – all men – who had grown up in the Victorian and Edwardian eras: Churchill, her first prime minister, Alan “Tommy” Lascelles and Michael Adeane, her private secretaries; and for the first 15 years of her reign, her press relations – such as were thought necessary – were handled by the fearsome Commander Richard Colville, who loathed and despised the press and was accordingly known as the Abominable No-man. Colville placed an embargo on filming even the outside of palaces and refused to allow the BBC to film the royal arrival at Balmoral for television news. It was as much as the Queen could manage to broadcast a Christmas message, which she would do every year throughout her reign, increasingly lacing her speech with moral and religious reflections that the nation noted in its post-lunch torpor and then ritualistically ignored.
The great moral and attitudinal changes began in the 1960s, with growing affluence and the loosening of old deferential ties. The royal family, with a certain amount of distaste and reluctance, moved too. The chief agent of the change was the Duke of Edinburgh. He persuaded his family to allow an extremely stilted, but ground- and ice-breaking, documentary about the royal year – an idea which would have given Colville conniptions.
A time-traveller from 1952 dropped into today’s Britain would find the country irrevocably and astonishingly changed, from the fashions and hairstyles in the streets to the mobile phones and laptops being consulted by everyone they met. The first thing they would probably notice would be the ethnic diversity. Although the Empire Windrush carrying a new generation of immigrants from the Caribbean had docked in 1948, black people were not common sights in many areas beyond the inner cities in the early 1950s and the main waves of south Asian and East African immigration were still to come. Overt racial prejudice was rampant and unchallenged as were other prejudices, against the Irish diaspora, Catholics and Jews, foreigners, disabled and gay people. Ecumenism between religious groups was rare and the idea that different faiths should have a role in the Coronation - as will happen when Charles is crowned - would not have occurred to anyone.
The time traveller would be overwhelmed by the vibrancy of the streets and speed of traffic. They would be stunned by the absence of heavy industry and factory whistles. Computers and social media would amaze as would the immediate and wide-spread availability of news from around the world. Medical advances would baffle and astonish, but the idea that hospitals and the NHS were overwhelmed with patients, some having to wait hours for treatment, would depress.
They would be shocked by the lack of deference, the belligerence and the swearing on television, in the streets and in the home. They would be surprised that more people had not seen service in the armed forces. And they would probably note, above all else, that the country was not at ease with itself: people were more dissatisfied. In some ways the public tolerance of difference is greater: it is no longer socially acceptable to use derogatory terms in speech, though people still do, but anonymous abuse online is common and vicious.
The time traveller would be appalled at the level of earnings today - in 1953 the average weekly take-home pay of a manual worker was just over £9 (first division footballers earned much the same). And by the cost of accommodation - then the average house was valued at £2,750, though most people still rented.
Perhaps our time traveller would be left most quizzical by the place of women in modern society: the fact that many of them still had jobs after marriage, that there were women in senior positions all over society and that three had become prime minister – inconceivable in 1952. That their pay was still less than their male colleagues would not have surprised.
Only one feature was unchanging: that the same woman was on the throne throughout the whole period, from the age of 26 to 96. They would have said, you had to hand it to her.
The new smiley, grandmotherly figure chimed with the new century’s sentimentality. It was a variation on the cultivation of middle-class manners and expectations that the royals have followed at least since the time of Queen Victoria.
Her very vacuousness, a steadfast refusal to allow her views to be known on any subject whatsoever throughout the great changes of her reign, made it hard to categorise her, apart from by inference, or to criticise her personally, which of course was the point, and made it difficult for the republican movement to make headway. Despite all the changes in British society, republicanism remains a minority belief , stubbornly stuck at around about 30% of the population.
Fervent interest in the monarchy, of the sort that leads people to sit out overnight to watch the parade go by, is also a minority pursuit. People now, as in 1952, remain sympathetic or indifferent to the royal family most of the time, unless their behaviour is perceived to be extravagant or idle.
They do, however, like a royal occasion as an excuse for a holiday, or a party. The historian David Kynaston quotes Barbara Castle, then a rising young Labour politician, later a cabinet minister in the 1960s, writing at the time of the coronation: “I didn’t see what all the fuss was about … I hoped this would be the last coronation of its kind we should see, it was so unrepresentative of ordinary people … [but] I think there is no doubt this is a minority view, even among the working class.”
