AUTHOR’S PREFACE:  In June 1953 Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth.  Her coronation was the world’s first major television event, TV itself being about four years old.  Over 20 million people all over the world watched the coronation, many of them crowded around a neighbor’s TV, watching TV for the first time in their lives.  It was broadcast in 44 languages.

Stalin died in March 1953, during our Brownfield Junior High School girls’ acrobatic show - - the Gym Dandy Show - - where, dressed as a clown, I stood atop a big old empty oil barrel and spun it with my feet across the gym floor to the trampoline, and, on the trampoline, jumped high soaring to the ceiling, flopping my arms and pretending to lose my balance. After I flopped off, Lenora performed fancy, graceful flips on the trampoline, and Mary Jane and I mimed playing our clarinets at a basket of smoking dry ice while an LP of snake-charmer music was playing and twenty other girls performed splits, backbends, parallel bar feats and trapeze tricks.

In the middle of all this, the music canned suddenly stopped, and a voice on the P.A. system said they had to interrupt to make an important announcement - - that word had just been received that the Soviet dictator had just died.   You could sense the thrilling shivers, the recognition of history-in-the-making coursing through the crowd gathered in the gym.  Then our Gym Dandy Show resumed.

Brownfield, population 8,000, was so far north in the Texas Panhandle it was closer to the state line of Colorado than to Austin, and so far west it was just thirty miles from New Mexico.  For pomp and ceremony in our lives, we made do with funerals and, once a month, the Lord’s Supper, but that was no more than eating crunchy fish-shaped crackers and chugging grape juice for wine and no decoration except a tablecloth over an altar table, while my father stood in the pulpit and intoned, “This do ye I remembrance of Me.” 

We had a TV, one of the first in town.  When I came home from school, I watched “Kukla, Fran and Ollie.”  Once a week, my father and I watched the “Friday Night Fights,” brought to us by Gillette with its with its “Look Sharp, Be Sharp March.” The whole family, that is, my mother, father and big sister, Brenda, never missed “I Love Lucy,” and we loved watching “Your Hit Parade” together, the way we had gathered round the radio to listen to it just four years earlier. People everywhere went around singing “Don’t let the stars get in your eyes, don’t let the moon break your heart”, one of the big hits of that year, and kids from junior high were always going Dum-da-dum-dum from the “Dragnet” theme song.

Into the middle of all this came, to our cabinet-style Zenith TV and to my marveling eyes, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.  Announcers with English accents described the street scenes of London, where my fifth-grade English pen-pal had lived in a bombed-out building during the War, and to which city my fifth-grade class sent cans of food to the school children of London.  But that was 1948, and this was 1953, and London was celebrating.

The broadcasters said there were parties all over London. People from all over the world camped out in the streets, with the various classes mingling, singing, drinking, sharing food, champagne and brandy, and dancing in Conga lines.

The lights of Buckingham Palace came on as dawn broke, and trumpets sounded.  I could see the glittering rococo carriage coming.  It looked just like Cinderella’s in the movie! 

Daddy said it was built in 1762 and had been used in every coronation since.  Immediately after he said it, the broadcaster said it.  I looked at Daddy, and we smiled. Daddy loved the richness of history, and I was taking after him.  I was not taking after Mother, who did algebra for fun!

The four-ton coach borne by sixteen paired horses of the Royal Horse Artillery passed through Trafalgar Square. Shouts and cheers burst from the huge crowds. Caissons rolled.

The TV camera’s view shifted to high up in the gothic and glorious Westminster Abbey, panning across the thousands of guests, many of whom appeared to be stuffed into the Abbey’s most inaccessible vertical pockets.

Officials carried the Regalia - - the be-jeweled Great Sword of State, the Bracelets and Rings, the Orb and St. Edward’s Crown, from the south transept to the High Altar.  The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, Elizabeth’s younger sister, walked past choir-stalls where sat rulers and dignitaries from all around the world.

A surge of cheering from outside the Abbey signaled that the coach bearing the Queen and Prince Philip was nearing. The Great Procession began its magisterial entry down the nave of the Abbey.  First came Heralds and Pursuivants, then High Commissioners who carried standards and banners aloft, and who were followed close behind by Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth States, and after them, Sir Winston Churchill wearing the robes of the Order of the Garter.  Swords glinted and the Regalia flashed in the arc-lamps. “Pursuivants”, I whispered to myself. “Pursuivants.”

The Archbishops and Bishops processed down the nave and left in their wake a stirring anticipation throughout Westminster Abbey and on TV sets around the world, for the Queen would soon follow. Oh, this glory was like the glory described to her students by my seventh grade reading teacher, who, with her eyes glowing and arms dramatically pointing to outside the classroom, told us how we could,  by reading a book, fly out the window on our magic carpets!

Elizabeth appeared.  As she crossed the threshold of the Abbey, a trumpet fanfare accompanied her. “Vivat, Vivat, Regina Elizabetha!” shouted the Westminster scholars from high up in the Abbey near the enormous pipe organ.

She was so beautiful, I swallowed my iced tea wrong. and Daddy had to slap me on the back. To majestic music and glittering pageantry, Elizabeth with her six Maids-of-Honour and the Duchess of Devonshire, walked with slow and measured steps up the nave, past Peers of the Realm in scarlet and ermine robes, and women wearing ribbon slashes, and honor guards in shining helmets.

All this acclaim for the young woman, Elizabeth, the 27-year-old!

My big sister Brenda ambled in and sat down on the hassock by the phone to watch.  She was my buddy, she had taught me how to steal watermelons, shoot marbles and sing, “I’m a Whiskey Widder I’m a Tellin’ You”, with just the right twang, but now she had become a high school personage and interested in other things, like talking on the phone all the time to LuAnn.

Mother went to the kitchen and came back with fried Spam sandwiches which we placed on our new-fangled TV trays. The Maids-of-Honour gently laid the train of the robe upon the carpet, and Elizabeth knelt in prayer at the altar as the anthem came to an end.  Lu Ann, a high Episcopal, got to kneel in prayer when she went to church, but we Baptists never did, only at prayer meetings when someone got taken with the holy ghost, but that hardly ever happened.  We were not Holy Roller Pentecostals, after all.

“And now comes the first of the ancient customs,” whispered the reverential broadcaster, “the Recognition.”  The queen rose from the Chair of Estate.  The Archbishop of Canterbury with Great Officers of State, first to the east, then all sides, presented her to the people - - “Queen Elizabeth, your undoubted queen.”  The people responded with shouts of “God save Queen Elizabeth!”  She curtsied.  Trumpets blasted.  She sat in the Chair of Estate.

The Archbishop administered the Oath, and Elizabeth took it, so help her God. The tasteful voice of the TV reporter intoned, “Now begins the communion service, which in turn will lead to the most solemn moment of the Coronation - - the Anointing.” When, upon the invocation upon the Queen, the choir sang off-screen, “Come Holy Ghost Our Souls Inspire”, I could have just died from high emotion.

Now, with the Sword of State carried before her, Elizabeth moved to King Edward’s chair over which four Knights of the Garter held the canopy of cloth of gold. The Duchess of Devonshire and the Lord Great Chamberlain carefully removed from Elizabeth her crimson robe. The Queen took the diadem of precious stones from her head.  She unclasped her diamond necklace.  Now standing in a plain white garment, in striking contrast to all that surrounded her, she was ready to be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.  The canopy was brought over her, and she was hidden from view from the people in the Abbey and from the TV people, too.

I took this opportunity to run use the bathroom.

From the commode I could hear the music of Handel’s “Zadok the Priest”, and my music-loving sister’s voice ta-da-ing along.  Our church children’s choir had sung Handel’s “Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates”, for a contest the year before, but another children’s choir from some other truly-truly podunk town won first prize, just because they sang the loudest.  It didn’t seem fair that our kid’s choir was executing choral intricacies and precisely singing “And the King of glo-ho-ho-ry shall come in”, while theirs was simply screaming at the top of their lungs, “And the King of GLOW-REE shall come in!” - - but there it was.

I rushed back from the bathroom. Oh, thank god, She was still under the canopy, and I hadn’t missed seeing Her for one tiny moment.

Mother, said it was all very splendid. Daddy said that he believed that Zadok the Priest had been sung at every coronation since George II in 1727.  Brenda went back and forth from  watching the TV screen to watching the phone. After the gorgeous music and Anointing, came the Investiture with the great golden mantle.  After the mantle, the spurs.  After the spurs, the Sword of State brought by the Lord Great Chamberlain, and the Sword of State girt about Her by the Archbishop, the Sword then laid upon the Altar and redeemed by a Peer who drew it from the scabbard and carried it before Her Majesty.  I was beginning to think in words like these.  Daddy liked words like these, too.  Sometimes he made himself laugh by saying in a fancy voice, “Twas ever thus, twill ever be.”

“Aren’t you going to eat that sandwich?” asked Brenda.

Sure enough, I had not even thought about it.  “In a minute,” I answered.

After the Sword of State, the investiture with the Armill and the Royal Robe. After the Investiture, the receiving by Elizabeth, while sitting in the Chair of State of Edward the Confessor, the Orb and Sceptre. After the Orb and Sceptre, the Crowning. The Archbishop slowly raised the Crown and held it high for a moment while the world held its breath.  Then he said, “God crown you with a crown of glory and righteousness.” And crowned her.

The Peers and Peeresses put on their coronets and caps.  “God save Queen Elizabeth! Vivat Elizabetha!” the people shouted. From the distance, guns were fired from the Tower of London, bells rang, drums rolled, more trumpets trumpeted. The roaring of the crowds in acclamation, the shouting of  “God Save the Queen”, the trumpets blasting, pierced my heart.

Onto these young and beautiful shoulders majestically descended this burden and responsibility, amidst this grandeur and magnificence.  The broadcaster, his hushed voice barely concealing his excitement, whispered that it was now it was time the Inthronization. The air conditioner started sputtering, and Mother got up to see what was wrong with the pesky thing. How she had survived those many long years before air conditioning she didn’t know.  Queen Elizabeth II rose from King Edward’s Chair and climbed the steps to Her Throne.  Officers and Peers carried the Regalia and stood round the steps.  And so, too, did the eight lovely Maids of Honour in their glittering white gowns.

“Elizabeth”, the voice intoned, was now, “anointed, crowned, enthroned.”

“You’re not going to eat that sandwich,” declared Brenda.

“You can have it,” I said. 

She took the fried Spam sandwich off my plate and ate it, glancing piteously at me in her big sister way at my worshipfulness of Her Majesty. While she polished off my fried Spam sandwich, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Duke of Edinburgh, Princes, and Peers of the Realm knelt before their newly-crowned Sovereign and spoke the appropriate words of homage, promising to be faithful and true to their sovereign lady and  “ . . . .  become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks.  So help me God.” Then they backed off bowing.

Mother said the air conditioner only needed the hose re-attached. She got back in time to see the Duke of Edinburgh’s homage to his queen who was also is wife.  She said that, poor man, it must have been hard for him because he wouldn’t look straight into Her eyes but off to the side.  After the homage the thousands of assembled guests sang, “All People that On Earth Do Dwell, Hallelulah!  Hallelulah!”  And then, for the first time since Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, the British people shouted “God Save the Queen!”

To William Walton’s triumphal “Te Deum”, the Sovereign descended from the Throne and into St. Edward’s Chapel, off to the left of the Coronation Theatre, attended by her nobles, bishops and, certainly those Maids-of-Honour. There they remained for some time, out of view from the people.

Now the empty chairs, the cameras panning the cathedral, its stained glass, history, gravitas.

Then, a rustling, not a rustling that was heard but one that was felt.

The great procession had re-formed itself, beginning with the heralds and pursuivants, and recessed up the nave and out of Westminster Abbey, with each gleaming component folding seamlessly into place.  After the Duke of Edinburgh took his position, a trumpet announced the re-appearance of the Queen, who moved out of St. Edward’s  Chapel, followed by her Maids of Honour in their glistening white gowns, the Duchess of Devonshire, and the Archbishop.

Carrying the Sceptre in her right hand and the Orb in her left, Queen Elizabeth II walked slowly and in splendor. Her purple robe was trimmed with gold.  On her head the Imperial State Crown flashed with the red ruby of the Black Prince set among emeralds, sapphires and diamonds.

As she passed, the people bowed and curtsied like a rippling wave.  They sang, “God save our noble Queen!”

It was the kind of moment that sent shivers of gloriousness up and down your spine.  I jumped to my feet and sang along.

“Carolyn, sit down.  You’re only supposed to stand up for our own national anthem.”

“I know that,” I said and sat down.

“Carolyn always gets so moved,” Mother said.

In truth, everyone was moved.

 Elizabeth passed through the door of Westminster Abbey, and the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was over. The golden coach now bearing Her Majesty, the Queen, wound its way back through Trafalgar Square past cheering crowds.  In the den of our house in Brownfield, Texas, I sat besotted. Daddy went to his room to chew Sin-Sin and brood over his sermons, thesaurus, and the inexorable march of time.  Mother went to Piggly Wiggly. My sister Brenda called LuAnn, and they met for a Coke.

Unable to come down from the clouds, I went to the garage and batted my paddleball five hundred times without missing. I called out, “The  Queen enthroned! The Queen enrobed!  The Queen with orb and scepter did march in stateliness down the nave!” With slow and measured stately steps, I walked around the garage, singing, “And the Queen of glo-ho-go-ry shall come in!” I bowed and curtsied and scraped before the beautiful Queen who was there in my imagining.

I raced my barrel back and forth across the back yard, my thoughts racing.  Should I or shouldn’t I chance my daring plan? I made my decision, hopped off the barrel, went inside the house and slipped into the den up to the phone, looking stealthily in all directions as though I were about to rob a bank.

As anxiety-producing as it was to dial Operator, it was even more so to imagine the call going through. Would the voice with the English accent on the other end of the line say, “Yes, this is Buckingham Palace.” Or maybe just,  “How do you do?  Buckingham Palace here.”

And I would say what, and with my Texas accent? “Hello, yes.  May I please speak with the Queen?”

They might say, “The Queen is busy.  May we take a message?”  Or perhaps, “Bugger-off.”

What if by some faint chance, the Palace staff put me through to Her, and She picked up the phone (certainly a white one like in Hollywood movies), and She said, “Yes, this is Queen Elizabeth speaking.”

“Oh!  Oh, Queen Elizabeth!” I might gulp, “Hi.  My name is Carolyn Weathers, and I’m a junior high school student from Brownfield Texas? And I just watched your coronation on TV, and-and - - oh, Queen Elizabeth, I don’t care if you’re not my monarch - - I mean, I don’t have one - - I mean I’m not even supposed to, but - - Queen Elizabeth, may I be your liege, please?” 

I dialed.

“Operator,” answered a voice.

“Long distance, please.”

“Long distance?” said the voice.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Long distance?” repeated the voice, with a hint of impatience.

“Yes - - London, please,” I said.

“What?!!”

“London?  Please?”

“What?  Did you say London?  London?!!”

“Uh….”

“London!!  You want London?!”  the voice mocked.

“Yes, please….um….um….Buckingham Palace.”

“Buckingham Palace!!  You want Buckingham Palace?!”

“Please,” I said, reduced by now to squeaks.

The voice laughed hard.   “Say it again.  You want what?!”

“Buck….Buck,, ” I repeated, my chin on my chest.

“Ha, ha, ha, she wants Buckingham Palace.  “Does she want to speak to the Queen, too?  Ha, ha!”

I hung up the receiver like it had turned into a tarantula and stood there, feeling my face turn hot and crimson.

I retreated to the bedroom with twin beds and chintz curtains that I shared with my sister. I took my plastic clarinet out of the case as my sister watched in dismay.  She was such a fine clarinetist she sat solo clarinet in the high school band and easily played tough music like “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral”, “Death and Transfiguration”, and the glissando from “Rhapsody in Blue”. Fair-minded Mother often reminded Brenda that she had sounded just as, well - - grating - - as me when she first started to play, but it hadn’t sunk in.

I was such a novice, I sat in the last row of the junior high school band clarinet section, and butchered the most basic versions of “Minuet in G”, “Star and Stripes Forever”, and “My Country Tis’ of Thee”.

My sister was sitting in the floor by the record player, listening to a 45-record of One Mint Julep by the Clovers.

“You’re not going to play, are you?” she asked.

I said I wanted to play something for the Queen.

“God, Carolyn, that is just square!” she said, putting her hands over her ears.

“For my first selection played in honor of the Queen,” I said, “I would like to play “Stars and Stripes Forever”.”

“That’s a wildly inappropriate selection,” she said, “to play for the British Monarch.”

I cared not.  My patriotism was bursting beyond the bounds of my country, across the pond to include the Mother Country from whence came my ancestors. Some of them, anyway.

I played. My sister grimaced and sang loudly, to drown me out (to the tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever”), “Be kind to your fine-feathered friends, for a duck may be somebody’s mother!”

“All right, already,” I said and made for the garage, where I screeched “God Save the Queen” on my plastic clarinet until I was sick of hearing it myself, until busy Mother got back from Piggly Wiggly and needed to park the car and asked Brenda and me to help her haul groceries in and put them away, then hang a load of clothes on the clothesline to dry out under the big sky, out in the High Plains wind that bent cottonwood trees double and would have blown garbage cans down the alley with the tumbleweeds if they weren’t fenced in.

The next day, when my sister borrowed the car and she and LuAnn went for a Coke, they took pity on me and dropped me off at the town’s library.  The library was just a small, dusky room in the basement of the courthouse but here I could find books on Queen Elizabeth I among the Zane Grey westerns, and I could surely fly out the window again on my magic carpet.

On the way they serenaded me with “One Mint Julep,” adding grunts and finger-snaps, and I couldn’t help but join in.

“One early mornin’ (uh!) as I was walkin’ (snap!) I met a woman (uh!) we started talkin’ (snap!) I took her home, (uh!) to get a few nips (snap!), But all I had was (uh!) a mint julep (snap!)  One mint julep was the cause of it all!” 

This exciting, saxy new music beguiled me almost, but not yet quite as much, as the Queen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author’s Tidbits:

• The Maids-of-Honour, during interviews in subsequent years said they were treated like the Spice Girls were forty-five years later.  One of them, now a Lady Someone, revealed that when the Maids-of-Honour, the Queen and various Bishops retreated into St. Edwards Chapel after the Crowning and before the Recessional, the Archbishop of Canterbury pulled a flask of brandy out from his voluminous sleeve and offered it to her, saying he imagined she could use it.  She and the other Maids-of-Honour drank.  She hinted that the young Queen did also.  After that, she said, they all formed up for the Recessional and recessed from Westminster Abbey feeling “quite jolly.”

• The Duchess of Devonshire was earlier the mother-in-law of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, renegade sister of the Kennedy siblings, who married an English Protestant aristocrat.  When “Kick” died in a plane crash in 1948, the Duchess of Devonshire wrote the tribute for her. Kathleen’s mother, Rose, did not attend the funeral, as Rose had had nothing more to do with her daughter after she married outside the Catholic faith.

• The 45-record that my sister Brenda played for me, “One Mint Julep” by the Clovers, was one of the first r & B/ rock n& roll recordings, which new kind of music burst upon the national scene the next year, 1954.

• 1953 was the year Salk announced his discovery of the first vaccine for polio, a great moment but too late for the 58,000 people, mostly children, who were stricken in the 1952 polio epidemic in the U. S. alone.

• In 1953 Christine Jorgenson came home to the U.S. from the world’s first transsexual operation, in the previous year, 1952, in Sweden.  She transitioned from male to female.  It was huge news, some, but not all, of it smirky, with lots of he/she jokes. Both my father and mother, otherwise known as the preacher and the preacher’s wife, strongly believed that people shouldn’t ridicule Christine but should accept her for herself.

• In 1953, during the McCarthy era President Eisenhower signed an executive order banning homosexuals from holding federal jobs.  The unintended consequences were to ignite the early gay movement.  In 1957, the same year as my sister Brenda was kicked out of college for being a lesbian, Dr. Franklin Kameny was fired from the Army Map service because of his being gay.  He subsequently founded the Washington, D.D. Mattachine Society.  He and Barbara Giddings organized the first gay rights demonstrations in 1965 to demand that the federal employment ban on homosexuals be rescinded.

• Immodesty requires me to state that I, too, became a good clarinetist, and my sister and I played Sousa marches, Scott Joplin rags and baroque duets together up into the early 1980s.

• For anyone who is intrigued by the mystery of Grand Duchess Anastasia:  The Duchess of Devonshire, Elizabeth’s Mistress of the Robes at her coronation, was born in 1895, the same year as Russian Grand Duchess Olga, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, and older sister of Grand Duchesses Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia and Tsarevich Alexei, all of whom were murdered by the Ural Bolseviks in 1918 in the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg, following the Russian Revolution - - except possibly Anastasia and Alexei whose remains were never found.  If the Russian imperial family had been granted asylum in England and allowed to live out their natural lives, then the ex-Grand Duchesses and perhaps the hemophiliac Alexei would most certainly have been among the world’s dignitaries gathered in Westminster Abbey in 1953 for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.  Anastasia would have been 51.

~~Carolyn Weathers, Long Beach CA, 2009~~