ABSTRACT
The year 1953 saw the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in an elaborately staged ceremony that drew on supposedly ancient traditions to consolidate the position of the monarchy. But much of the poignancy and drama of the ceremony came from the fact that it was a young woman of 27 who was now publicly declaring herself to be at the service of the people. The story of how Elizabeth came to inherit the throne was told and retold in the months before the Coronation. Princess Elizabeth, it was said, had always been close to her father, the King, because of the sense of public duty she shared with him. The news of his death was broken to her early one morning in February 1952 when she was on an official tour to Kenya and news coverage emphasised the personal tragedy of the bereaved daughter as well as the constitutional position of the queen apparent. The Daily Mirror reported that ‘Queen Elizabeth the Second came home tonight to her mother’s arms’ (9 February 1952). In her person, the new queen embodied the different roles of the new woman. As well as being a daughter, she was also a wife and mother; Prince Philip as Duke of Edinburgh was the first of the Lords to swear fealty to her in the elaborate coronation ceremonial, and the four-year-old Prince Charles watched in Westminster Abbey as his mother was crowned. As a woman, the Queen was also subject to the scrutiny of the fashion writers and the cameras; what she wore was widely reported, and she was also known to be interested in fashion and society. It was this combination of roles that was the key. As Richard Dimbleby wrote at the time, in a book for children that told them about Elizabeth Our Queen, it was not the formal title but ‘the personality of the Queen’ that was important. ‘What mattered in the eyes of her people was the fact that Queen Elizabeth the Second was, as Winston Churchill summed up, a fair and youthful figure, princess, wife, mother’ (51).
