A Coronation and a Question

What Did It Mean? by Angela Thirkell

published 1954

 

 

This one was suggested when we were looking at books with question-marks in the title last year. When I found out it was a later book in Angela Thirkell’s oeuvre, dealing largely with preparations for celebrating the coronation of QEII in 1953, and that Lydia Merton – a great favourite Thirkell character – featured, I was keen to read it.

First of all the title: It’s a bit ragged, but I think the point is that someone has got hold of an ancient prophecy from a local rural gent, and some of the characters are trying to work out what it all means? Something like that - it’s very like Harry Potter. But it doesn’t impinge much on the plot to be honest.

That is, if you can call it a plot. All the local nobs meet up for social events, formal and informal, and discuss the affairs of the neighbourhood. This alternates with meetings of the Coronation committee, planning a day of entertainments after the big event: ie everyone watches the service on their new-fangled TVs, and the next day they have their own celebrations.

All kinds of old friends from previous books turn up, particularly from Thirkell’s Northbridge Rectory, including Miss Pemberton and Mr Downing. There are some unexpected developments there, and, even more important, this allows me to use again this great favourite picture used by me to reprsent them.

(The photo, from the Smithsonian, is of Herbert Spencer Jennings and his wife)

And of course there is a pageant, something I do love in a book. You can find many of my posts on this topic, and more wonderful pictures like these two, using this link

There is the usual snobbishness and acceptance of the innate superiority of the gentry. A former Lady Pomfret ‘had never put on a pair of shoes or boots in her life’ – the maid did it. This does not, to me, indicate superiority, but rather the opposite.

There is then a discussion of girdles – much featured on the blog last year – with the current Lady Pomfret objecting to these items being called a belt:

‘I can’t see why one says belt now,’ she added. ‘Belts don’t go from above your waist to half-way down your thighs,’ to which Lucy replied that girdle was even sillier, but what else was there to call them and her mother would say stays when she bought them, which Lady Pomfret said was perhaps better than corsets.

Nice sociological moment in my ongoing researches.

Thirkell is very good at random conversations, and people hiding their innermost thoughts, or misunderstanding each other, but I thought in this book she went too far in her authorial voice. Take this:

‘I do see what you mean,’ said Lydia, ‘and thank you very much indeed. I think I hear the front door’ (which phenomenon will readily be grasped by our reader) ‘so shall we go into the drawing-room.’

The book is full of this – ‘you will know what we mean’ – but in very pointless and unnecessary ways. I do not think the clause in brackets adds anything. And another example:

They quite forgot to turn off the stew in the oven (a phrase which every housewife will understand) till they smelt something burning.

And then there were the authorial putdowns of people who pronounce words differently and in general were hilariously stupid compared with the poshos: they don’t have the breeding you see. This is the reason I can only take Thirkell in small doses, never more than one book at a time.

But – it was entertaining when it wasn’t cringe-making…

Girdle picture,Vogue, 1951, via Clover Vintage Tumbler.

Norman soldiers from the Builth Wells Historical Pageant, one of my all-time favourite resources, via Flickr.

Elizabethan lady and gentleman, same source

People can keep writing books with pageant scenes, or finding new such books for me, and I will never run out of pictures, the collections online are just wonderful.

The Coronation itself is not featured much in the book, it is the surrounding local events we are dealing with.

For interest, I looked at David Kynaston’s excellent book on social history, Family Britain 1951-57 (he has done a series of them, using contemporary resources including newspaper cuttings and Mass Observation diaries, and they make for fascinating reading.)

‘As in the case of the Royal wedding six years earlier, it had taken a while for public opinion to warm up.’ – and he quotes some very neutral opinions on the Coronation. Of course there was a complete range of views, and there are descriptions of decorations in streets (snap judgement: more in terraces of working people than in middle-class suburbs), plans for street parties, and the usual class consciousness, with a story of some parents worrying about the mixture of children at the party. You do feel that any normal child would just want to go to the party and eat cake and run around, and not care who else was there. And to be fair to Angela Thirkell, she doesn’t much distinguish the class of children – just seems to be not keen on any of them.

I loved the detail that organizers who had collected money for parties were reluctant to buy the food at the Co-op, because they might be thought to be benefitting themselves unduly.

Co-op shops had a membership scheme, a kind of cashback. Everything you bought was noted, and eventually you got a ‘divi’ – a dividend. When you bought something you told the cashier your divi number to be sure of getting your future discount. I remember as a child going to the Co-op for my auntie, and being terribly worried afterwards because I had given my mother’s divi number instead of that of her sister.

I do feel that Angela Thirkell and her party organizers would have had no knowledge or worries about this particular aspect.

The weather was famously terrible on Coronation day, which must have delighted the doom-sayers who had said people must be mad to be planning to sit out in the streets.

My family were far from being Royalists, but when I was growing up, always in our house was an old book called The ABC Guide to the Coronation, by Lewis Broad with illos by Hazel Cook. It cost 2/6, and I think was on sale beforehand so you could understand what was going on. This book eventually came to me (no-one else wanted it) so I am giving it this late outing: top picture shows the cover and some of the content.

The 1953 Coronation has featured in various books on the blog:

Conjurer’s Coffin by Guy Cullingford

Parenting and Pageants (Charlotte Fairlie by DE Stevenson)

Dress Down Sunday: Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart

Xmas Book Scenes: Village Carol Service

The Elly Griffiths book The Blood Card

Tuesday Night History and Mystery: The 1950s Again

-       Is a modern thriller about a threat to the coronation of Elizabeth II

This book is set at the time of the coronation of George VI:

To Wake the Dead by John Dickson Carr

This extraordinary memoir by Princess Marie Louise features many coronations, from Edward VII to Elizabeth II

My Memories of Six Reigns by Princess Marie Louise