During my time at St George’s School, Windsor, the funerals of George VI and his mother, Queen Mary, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the installation of Winston Churchill as a Knight of the Garter all took place.
The funerals and the Garter service were held in St George’s Chapel, where I was a chorister. For the Coronation, our choir was one of many invited to sing in Westminster Abbey.
Over 70 years, memories fade or are altered. So I shall turn first to what, as a 12-year-old, I wrote to my parents five days after the greatest of those royal events, the Coronation. The letter opens with personal matters rather than the historic occasion – Nigel Molesworth slightly avant la lettre: Down with Skool! would appear that autumn.
‘Dear Mummy and Daddy,
‘Thank you very much for taking me out on last Monday and giving me such an excellent lunch at the Old House Hotel [in Windsor]. Also thank you for your letters and Children’s Newspaper. Please could you send me a two-pound pot of Red Plum Victoria Jam and a one- pound pot of Frank Cooper’s hard honey.
‘The Coronation was magnificent and the colour was perfectly beautiful. We had just next to us a superb orchestra comprising the best players in England who played everything faultlessly and kept wonderfully together under their outstanding leader Paul Beard. We were roused by Miss Wright [assistant matron] at 4.25am and after a quick breakfast we were supplied with Spangles [fruit-flavoured boiled sweets] and a tin of Horlicks Milk Tablets.
‘We changed in the Westminster [School] Gym and had great fun socking the punchball. Mr Cleave [our headmaster], who was supervising us, gave us a small packet containing two ginger biscuits and an egg sandwich and an orange bottle filled with milk. We had to wait four hours in the Abbey before the service began and during that time a number of processions passed into their stalls.
‘The Queen’s dress was lovely. It was studded with diamonds and pearls and had attached to the back of it a velvet, mauve train embroidered with white lace and ermine. Prince Charles [then aged four] was sweet. He poured incessant questions upon his patient grandmother and was delighted with the fanfares which numerous times echoed and re-echoed round the Abbey.
‘We got back to school just in time to see the end of the procession and later we listened to Winston Churchill’s and the Queen’s Speech and the lighting up of the Mall. We retired to bed just before the fireworks. I didn’t feel at all tired and it was a great day which I shall never forget.
‘Yesterday we paraded after lunch on the lawn and Mr Cleave gave us our [Coronation] medals. They are lovely and we will wear them for the first time on the Queen’s official birthday on 11th June.’
My strongest memory today, shared with other choristers to whom I have spoken, is of the music. In the galleries built for the occasion we were next to a 60-strong symphony orchestra, occupying the screen which separates the choir from the nave, an electrifying experience for boys who had not seen such a group of players before, let alone at such close quarters.
I remember in particular the opening of Handel’s Zadok the Priest, in which violin arpeggios raise the tension to an almost unbearable pitch before it is released with the explosive entry of the choir, a body at the Coronation nearly 400-strong.
I was also struck by the pure, bell-like tone of two Abbey boys in Vaughan Williams’s O Taste and See, the motet commissioned for the Coronation from the 80-year-old composer, a hunched figure who attended one of the rehearsals in St Margaret’s, Westminster.
Nicholas Hare, a fellow chorister at St George’s, then aged 12, recalls the trumpet fanfares. Chris Brown, a nine- year-old in the Abbey choir, remembers the ‘somewhat raucous but enthusiastic “singing” of the “Vivats’” by the Westminster School Queen’s Scholars’ as the Queen entered the building to the sounds of Parry’s I Was Glad’.
Both Chris and Christopher Field, then a 13-year-old member of the Bromley Parish Church Choir who also sang in the Westminster Abbey Special Choir, were impressed by the most substantial work commissioned for the occasion, William Walton’s Te Deum, scored for orchestra, organ, double choir and semi-chorus, which brought the service to an end.
Brown remembers Walton, ‘this very urbane, handsome and famous musician’, coming to the song school to conduct the Abbey choir in a rehearsal of what was very challenging music. He was thrilled to get his autograph.
Christopher was bowled over by the Te Deum, ‘probably the most difficult thing that I, an ordinary parish choirboy, had ever had to learn’. He worked on it with the organist and choir mistress in Bromley at her house.
Music played before and after the service was conducted by Adrian Boult. The music performed during it was conducted by William McKie, director of music at the Abbey. Chris remembers him ‘perched on a plinth above the organ’ and ‘famously hugely nervous being in charge of such a major historical event’.
His beat was relayed to two other conductors, John Dykes-Bower from St Paul’s Cathedral and William Harris from St George’s. Looking across the central aisle of the choir, Chris saw Dykes-Bower using one of his choristers as a music stand, the poor boy having to hold his score for long periods at a time.
On the opposite side of the aisle, we took our beat from Harris, known to us as Doc H, a genial, roly-poly figure who had been organist at Windsor since 1933.
During the war, he had directed a madrigal group in Windsor Castle formed by princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, senior choristers from the chapel, Etonians, Grenadier Guards and members of the Windsor and Eton Choral Society.
Aside from the music, Chris recalls the Abbey remaining shut for months, with the nave turned into ‘one huge building site, full of scaffolding and stacks of wooden planking’. He was fascinated to see ‘a railway track running the length of the Abbey from the West Door to carry all the building materials needed to construct the huge array of stands to accommodate the 4,000 extra members of the congregation’.
On Coronation Day, Christopher was amazed by the sight of peers and peeresses robing before the service in marquees in Dean’s Yard: ‘In my juvenile imagination, this was like the Field of the Cloth of Gold.’
Shortly before the Queen’s entry into the Abbey, great amusement was caused by the emergence under the screen of a crew of ‘Mrs Mops’, with their Ewbank carpet-sweepers, removing the last specks of dust from the gold-and-blue carpet which ran the length of the building. People even stood up, thinking the service had begun.
We had been in the Abbey since early morning, waiting for a ceremony which would last nearly three hours.
What to do if we were caught short? Nicholas remembers being advised to hang on to his milk bottle in case of emergency. There were also Elsans, a long way down, in the side aisles.
Nicholas and I were given our Coronation medals four days after the ceremony. Christopher received his three weeks later by registered post. His mother brought the envelope early in the morning to the tent in their Bromley garden where, as a keen Boy Scout, he was sleeping through the summer months.
My medal has had a few outings since. The most notable was at a get-together of old choristers for Evensong at St George’s to mark the 50th anniversary of the Coronation in 2003. Saturday 6th May will be next occasion to air it.
Simon Scott Plummer was the foreign leader-writer at the Daily Telegraph. He still sings in a choir
