The Coronation, 1953

At this time in 1953, Winston Churchill was Prime Minister of England, and over here President Dwight Eisenhower was still in the early months of his first term of office, and "Mamie pink," the First Lady's favorite color, was a trending fashion. I Love Lucy was just concluding its second season; Lucy's competitors Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Imogene Coca were household names. Steam locomotives were still to be seen pulling passenger and freight trains all across the U.S.A., though brightly-painted diesels had already crowded them out on some routes. To get from New York to Los Angeles, you could take the 20th Century Limited to Chicago in 16 hours overnight, rocked to sleep in a snug, air-conditioned Pullman bedroom (think of the famous scenes in North by Northwest with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint); and then after a leisurely 12-hour layover in Chicago, during which you could enjoy the city's finest offerings in the way of shopping, dining, and perhaps taking in a museum or a movie, the Super Chief would carry you on to the Golden State in just 39 3/4 hours; in other words, a civilized traveler who left New York on Friday afternoon at 5 p.m. would arrive in L.A. at 8:30 on Monday morning. Plenty of millionaires and movie stars, as well as ordinary folks, still traveled that way in 1953.

But for those in a real hurry, the quickest way to get from New York to Los Angeles was a nine-hour non-stop flight aboard an elegant, four-propellered Lockheed Constellation (price: $158.25 one way, or $1360 in today's dollars; plus 10% federal transportation tax). It took twelve hours for a Connie to jump the Atlantic and wing you to London, with a stop in Newfoundland or Ireland en route. Cunard's magnificent ships, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, still plied the North Atlantic in tandem like clockwork, with one arriving and departing New York harbor every week, along with the liners of many other steamship companies. More people still crossed the Atlantic by ship than by plane. And the SS United States, pride of this nation since winning the Blue Riband a year before, was likewise shuttling back and forth between England and America at 32 knots, or 37 mph for you landlubbers - the fastest thing afloat. There were no spacecraft, no astronauts, and no NASA. Telephones were black and identical, had dials, not pushbuttons, weighed about five pounds, and were all of them wired securely to the wall. None of them took photographs. There were no color televisions, microwave ovens, or home computers. Even rock'n'roll was unknown: Elvis had yet to cut his first demo record. And nobody had ever heard of McDonalds.

It was a very different world, but one thing has remained constant since then, amidst all the flux of change: sixty years ago today, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey, the first major public occasion to be televised nationwide in Britain, with film footage delivered across the oceans by military jet planes to be seen on TV screens throughout much of the world.  Here's a behind-the-scenes documentary produced by the BBC that includes stunning color footage of the Queen, the pageantry and processions, and the ceremony itself - which, as the commentator says, and I think rightly, was of a grandeur and magnificence that will never be seen again.



William Shawcross, official biographer of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, writing in The Telegraph:

As the country has become more diverse and restless, the only real focus of unity today is the monarchy. And we saw in both the Golden and Diamond Jubilees how much people value that. The union is mystical and, I would say, that it is vital.

The paradox – indeed, the genius of constitutional monarchy – is obvious in the Coronation ceremony. The Queen is anointed in the presence of God, as she truly believed; she was crowned and she sat in the chair in which so many of her forebears had sat to be crowned. Lords temporal and spiritual paid homage to her. But at the same time, she swore oaths to preserve the laws of her lands.

Put another way, she was God’s anointed that day but she swore to God to obey the elected representatives of her people.

This system of government may seem archaic to those who consider themselves progressive, but it has worked remarkably well for centuries.

Never better, perhaps, than under this monarch. And that is at least in part because she is utterly true to everything she experienced at her Coronation.

At Christmas 2000, she explained: “For me, the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to live my life.”

That Christian framework has enabled her to keep every one of the vows she made on that wet summer’s day 60 years ago.