Coronation Day Across the World

The crowning of King Charles III and Queen Camilla this weekend will only be the third time that a Coronation has been broadcast.

The first, on 12 May 1937, was for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It was, according to Engineer in Charge of Outside Broadcasts Robert Wood, “the most complicated broadcast the BBC had ever attempted”. Two control rooms were set up, one at Westminster Abbey for the National Programme and Empire Service, and one at Middlesex Guildhall for all the foreign commentators. The sound from 58 microphones – 11 along the route for commentators, crowd noises and music, 15 for overseas use and 32 in the Abbey. 

BBC radio commentary was provided for the procession to and from Westminster Abbey by the team of John Snagge, Howard Marshall, George Blake,  A.W. Dobbin, Michael Standing , Harold Abrahams and Thomas Woodrooffe. As Snagge would later recall: “All the commentators were as nervous as kittens, because there was no rehearsal, but we came away with a feeling the broadcast had been pretty well done, under the circumstances”. There was no commentary during the actual service though microphones were installed in the Abbey to pick up the speech and music. The BBC’s Director of Religion, the Rev Frederick Iremonger, was on hand to read and explain ‘the rubrics’. For the Empire Service broadcast additional shortwave transmitters were installed at Daventry to ensure coverage.

This was also the first televised Coronation so for any of the 10,000 or so people in the London area with access to one of the new-fangled television receivers three cameras were on hand to transmit pictures of the procession near Hyde Park Corner. Permission to install a further three cameras inside Westminster Abbey had been refused.  Providing the tv commentary was Freddie Grisewood.     

The BBC radio coverage of the 1937 Coronation was issued on 78 rpm discs and recordings of the ceremony are online. Shortwave recordings of the full day’s coverage as relayed by NBC in the States are also possibly online somewhere, though I’ve failed to locate them. So I’m grateful to Sandy Finlayson who kindly sent me some audio files five years ago. This sequence is what was broadcast before and during the procession to Westminster Abbey. Note that none of the ‘observers’ are actually named though John Snagge is immediately recognisable. Making the opening ‘This is London’ announcement is Stuart Hibberd. As the BBC was also sending sound output to the Office of Works loudspeakers along the processional route, listen out at 12 minutes for in instruction to turn down the loudspeakers near the Abbey annexe as “they’re causing some interference”.

For the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 the radio and television coverage was a major logistical exercise. In May 2013 I wrote about the domestic radio coverage so in this post I’m dipping into the pages of London Calling to see what listeners around the world heard.

Programmes for Coronation Day, 2 June 1953

Programmes for 3 June 1953

At this time the General Overseas Service relied quite heavily on rebroadcasting programmes already heard on the Home Service or Light Programme. So on Coronation Day we inevitably have the same coverage of the procession, the crowning service and the RAF fly past, the speeches by Winston Churchill and the Queen and the fireworks.  

The Director of External Broadcasting John Clark
had his own personal memories of the 1937 Coronation

London Calling provides a list of the large commentary team that includes sports commentators, former war correspondents and some Commonwealth radio guest broadcasters.  Whilst Richard Dimbleby was the senior television commentator, on the wireless it was John Snagge, by now a veteran of royal occasions. With John at Westminster Abbey were Howard Marshall, Audrey Russell and Ted Briggs. Near Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Memorial were Jean Metcalfe, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, William Richardson and the splendidly-named Australian broadcaster Talbot Duckmanston. Others on team were Raymond Baxter, Rex Alston, David Lloyd James, Alun Williams, Frank Gillard, Tom Fleming, Charles Gardner, Henry Riddell and John Arlott.   

Aside from the coverage of the Coronation itself the Features Department, working with News and OB, made two major contributions. Long Live the Queen! was a ‘radio pageant’ linked by Robert Donat’s narration and the music of William Alwyn. The programme was “a series of close-ups of men and women of many lands, putting into words their feelings, and the feelings of those for whom they speak, about the Queen”.

Coronation Day Across the World was an ambitious live programme – with some pre-recorded elements – described as “using all the facilities of short-wave radio, (to) build up a living, instantaneous sound-picture of the world’s rejoicing on Coronation Day”.  It was similar in scope to the hour-long features that had preceded the King’s Christmas Day speech for the previous decade.

Here’s Coronation Day Across the World which was not without the odd technical hitch. Four minutes in commentary passes to Wynford Vaughan Thomas outside Buckingham Palace but evidently although he’d heard his cue at the time he was unable to secure his position on the Victoria Memorial so large was the crowd.

At intervals during the day on the General Overseas Service are extracts from the Commonwealth Gala which had been heard on the Light Programme on the Sunday evening and featured artists from Britain and the Commonwealth. Those on the bill included Elsie and Doris Waters, Dick Bentley, Bernard Braden, Hutch, Ted Kavanagh, Gladys Young and Cecily Courtneidge. Dick Bentley was also on Take It From Here which was also heard over on the Light Programme.

London Calling provided a couple of pages of wavelength information, one listing the usual wavelengths for the majority of the week’s programmes, the second showing all the details for the Coronation broadcasts on 2 June. These included all the wavelengths specifically directed the different regions or countries as well as those which may be heard under favourable conditions, designated ‘secondary coverage’. Listeners were also advised that many other organisations were planning to re-broadcast the BBC transmissions.      

Staying with royal events a little longer last year I posted pages from the June 1977 issue of London Calling to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Again thanks to Sandy Finlayson I now have copies of some of the World Service programmes featured in that month. One of the programmes comes from the Theatre of the Air drama stand and is a production of Laurence Housman’s 1934 play about Queen Victoria, Victoria Regina. The play, essentially as series of vignettes about the queen’s life over a sixty year period, had been performed on BBC radio before, but this was the first production in nearly thirty years. In this adaptation directed by John Pitman, Jane Wenham stars as Queen Victoria. The cast includes John Castle as Albert, Lockwood West as Gladstone, Betty Bascomb as Mrs Gladstone, Garard Green as Palmerston, Manning Wilson as Melbourne, Brian Haines as Russell and Denis McCarthy as Beaconsfield with Joan Hart as the Narrator.     

This recording of Victoria Regina was made in Canada and taken from a BBC World Service transmission via the now defunct relay station at Sackville, New Brunswick.       

For more on the 1937 Coronation this Transdiffusion articlehas extracts from the 1938 BBC handbook. And for an over view of Coronation broadcasts please listen to the latest podcast from Paul Kerensa’s British Broadcasting Century.