‘Chilly day with frequent showers,’ begins my grandfather’s entry for Tuesday 2 June 1953, the day of the present Queen’s Coronation. He hoisted the Union flag in one of his fields, where the bonfire was being prepared, and walked up to a disused chapel where the whole Sussex village watched the Coronation on something most had not seen before — television; ‘a true marvel’, he wrote. After lunch, he went to the green by the Royal Oak pub where he had been asked to plant a new young oak for the occasion. His diary has an abbreviation of his speech. It started with the Restoration (prompted by the name Royal Oak), and moved on to George III, in whose reign was born ‘Qu. Victoria whom I often saw and knew the cadence of her voice & witnessed the splendours of her Diamond Jubilee, my one qualification for my job. Now a queen again. Our young qu. and our old Constitution. Watching by television one must think our young qu. and her iron constitution.’ ‘God save Qu. Elizabeth,’ he ended, ‘& flung my hat in the air. Then shovelled in earth.’ Today, the royal oak he planted, and the one my mother planted for the Silver Jubilee, have grown so large that they take up most of the green, but the same Queen is on the throne.
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That night in 1953, there was a bonfire in the village, kindled by the cast-iron torch which my grandfather had carried in the Eton Corps parade to celebrate Queen Victoria’s 80th birthday. The torch is still with the family. I hope my sister can find a use for it this 2 June, as she celebrates in the same village. In my own village, a few miles off, we shall all gather in the Queen’s Garden — laid out, and so christened, in 1953 — for a picnic and a group photograph.
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