Coronation Day 1953 could have marked the end of radio as we know it. No one wanted to listen to the commentary from Westminster Abbey. Everyone wanted to see what was going on. Hearing could not, it was thought, be as effective an act of witness as viewing the glittering diamonds, the gleaming satin, the pageantry, the pomp and the extraordinary sight of the weight of royalty, both physical and metaphysical, being bestowed on so slight a young woman. Those who had the money rushed out to buy a Regentone table TV or a Baird Townsman. Those who couldn’t afford to buy or rent a TV begged a neighbour to invite them in, or travelled to the nearest Odeon or holiday camp, where big screens were linked up to the TV transmitters that had been speedily (and controversially) installed to ensure there would be national coverage for this epic event.
That day in June marked the beginning of mass TV, with up to 20 million people experiencing their first-ever viewing of a television outside broadcast. Only half that number listened to the day’s events on the wireless. But radio fought back, valiantly. It might not have pictures but it was still, in 1953, technologically on top — quicker to respond, more adaptable and more reliable.
On the evening of 2 June, the BBC’s radio team were determined to show off what they alone could do. The furthest their colleagues in TV could reach out to was Berlin, just 900 miles away. On the air, though, at the switch of a button, the BBC’s Home Service connected its listeners to voices in Fiji, Korea, Lusaka, Trinidad and Montreal. In Coronation Day Across the Globe, first broadcast in 1953 and not heard again until last Sunday on Radio 4 Extra, we were given a global tour of reactions to the day’s events gathered during the day and niftily edited for broadcast just a few hours later. As if to prove that radio could reach the parts not yet thought possible for TV, we heard about the cattle drover in Australia who, 700 miles from the nearest town, was yet able to listen to the Coronation service on his ‘portable’ radio. (Transistor sets were not readily available until 1954 so the wireless he carried in his backpack must have been jolly cumbersome, but I guess we should believe the story.)
Radio, we were repeatedly reminded, could be heard and made by everyone, wherever they were. A valiant reporter and radio producer climbed to the top of Ben Nevis in the midst of a summer snowstorm and sent messages of goodwill and of ‘profound peace’ from the roof of Scotland, 4,000 feet above sea level. In the background, as proof we were indeed north of the border, we could hear the bagpipes, which, we were told, were being played by pipers on the ramparts of the castle in Edinburgh. Once again, radio’s technicians were anxious to show off, splicing together two simultaneous sounds from different locations as if to prove that TV could only ever play second fiddle to the wizardry of wireless.
Sixty years later, though, this 90-minute audio montage celebrating the Queen and her commonwealth of nations sounded as weirdly outdated as the pictures of ancient, bandy-legged retainers in white stockings and gold-braided redcoats walking up the aisle of Westminster Abbey behind the Queen Mother. Yet there was something deeply affecting about listening to something that came straight out of another time, as remote to us now as the dinosaurs, yet still within the living memory of people we know. In Camberwell, a very youthful-sounding Brian Johnstone reported from a raucous street party, with the crowd of south-east Londoners singing songs from old-time music-hall. ‘I’ve got a loverly bunch of coconuts’ could be heard in the background, everyone joining in as if one voice, a single community joined together by its similar cultural roots and memories. In the vale of Evesham, the villagers feasted on roast ox, just as they would have done, we were reminded, to celebrate the accession of Good Queen Bess. Back on the Mall, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas talked about the ‘gay and excited crowd’ as they waited for the Queen to appear on the balcony. How different will be the celebrations for the next Coronation?
Over then to a small bar in Paris where the drinkers enthusiastically tuned into the ceremony, shouting for our benefit ‘Vive La Reine. God Save the Queen’, as if they had never guillotined their own monarchy. Would any Frenchman dare say such a thing in these post-euro days? In Berlin a woman who had watched the service on TV in a room filled with her English and German friends was interviewed afterwards in the studios of British Forces Broadcasting in Germany. The picture was a bit blurry, she explained, because in these early experimental days the transmission from London was via a series of relay stations. But, she told us, ‘this programme brought London to Berlin. She [the Queen] seemed to be smiling straight at us. And we had a clear picture of Sir Winston Churchill.’ Only eight years earlier Hitler had died in his bunker.
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