When her father King George VI died on February 6, 1952, Princess Elizabeth, as she was until that moment, was on tour in Kenya with Prince Philip.
Becoming Queen of the United Kingdom at the age of 25, she would go on to reign for 70 years and 214 days as Queen Elizabeth II, the longest of any British monarch.
Her coronation on June 2, 1953, the fourth and final of the 20th century, became and remains a groundbreaking event in global history thanks to the decision for it to be televised and broadcast around the world.
The sight of the new Queen on television screens brought royalty into the living rooms of her subjects, moving towards demystifying the monarchy in a way that has evolved into today’s royal family with their press officers, social media accounts and tell-all memoirs.
The princess becomes Queen
News of her father’s death wasn’t relayed to the princess, but to Prince Philip, after a message sent to the British embassy in Nairobi wasn’t passed on because it was written in code.
Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary, Martin Charteris heard the news from a reporter who was covering the tour.
“Mike crawls in [to the room] as he doesn't want the princess to look up and see him so he's crawling out of her sightline and gesturing to get hold of the radio,” the princess's lady-in-waiting and prince Philip’s cousin, Pamela Hicks, said on her daughter India Hicks’s podcast. “He secretly turns it very, very low and hears all the stations [playing] the same dirge-like music, being very solemn, so it’s obviously true.
“Philip just takes the newspaper and covers his face with it, hides behind it and says: ‘This will be such a shock!’”
Landing in London on February 7, 1952, Hicks revealed that courtiers had to bring a black dress on board as princess Elizabeth didn’t have any mourning clothes. The incident started a tradition of royals always travelling with mourning clothes.
The first coronation of the media age
Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in London was the first to be televised around the world.
According to education platform MacMillan, in 1953, 50 per cent of households in the USA had televisions, while in Britain, fewer than two million homes had a TV set.
As a result of the coronation, there was a huge rise in the number of British homes with televisions, with the BBC reporting: “The number of TV licences shot up from 763,000 in 1951 to 3.2 million in 1954. Many see the coronation as UK television's tipping point.”
In the UK, it is estimated that 27 million people watched the coronation on televisions at home or on screens set up in pubs, village halls and cinemas across the country when it was broadcast on the BBC.
Demystifying the monarchy
The 1953 coronation was the first to be televised in full. While BBC cameras had followed the outdoor procession of the coronation of princess Elizabeth’s parents, King George VI and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1937, they had not been allowed inside Westminster Abbey for the ceremony.
It was Prince Philip who, wishing to modernise the monarchy and make them more visible, suggested the ceremony be televised at a meeting of the coronation committee of which he was the chairman.
Former prime minister Winston Churchill is alleged to have opposed the idea, saying that it would be “unfitting that the whole ceremony, not only in its secular but also in its religious and spiritual aspects, should be presented as if it were a theatrical performance".
The Queen Mother is also said to have disapproved, but the princess sided with her husband.
It’s impossible not to overstate the impact the televised ceremony had on the UK populace, as an article from The Times the following day noted: “At first it was difficult to grasp the fact that what one saw was not a news film but historic events unfolding even as one watched.
“Yesterday, by penetrating at last, even vicariously, into the solemn mysteriousness of the Abbey scene, multitudes who had hoped merely to see for themselves the splendour and the pomp, found themselves comprehending for the first time the true nature of the occasion.”
Influence on the UK media
The effects of the June 2, 1953 coronation not only paved the way for the British monarchy’s relationship with the media and public today, but it also started a media revolution in the UK.
In the United States, the coronation was televised on all four networks — CBS, NBC, DuMont and ABC.
The inclusion of advertising breaks throughout the ceremony, while upsetting some British sensibilities, acted as a catalyst for the launch of a second British television channel, ITV (Independent Television) three years later in 1955, which included advertising and competed with the monopoly held by the BBC.
Televising the event also made unprecedented strides in drawing back the curtain between the inner workings of the ruling classes and the people of Britain.
“Parliament wasn't broadcast, there was a lot of secrecy and very little accountability,” historian David Kynaston told the BBC. “But suddenly, this new medium could transmit quasi-private events. It was quite a shock.”
The press and the modern monarchy
It can be argued that a direct line can be drawn from Prince Philip’s recognition of the power of the media as a public relations tool back in 1953, to Prince Harry’s recent appearances in the media promoting his autobiography and Netflix documentary.
The coronation laid the groundwork for creating an intricate relationship between monarchy and media, an association Prince Harry has lifted the lid on.
“Within my family, you have the newspapers laid out pretty much in every single palace,” Prince Harry told ITV’s Tom Bradby. “My family have been briefing the press solidly for well over a decade.”
