Uncle George Remembers XVIII

“I think it was Sir Walter Scott who wrote the lines, ‘One flooded hour of glorious life, Is worth an age without a name’*, and I think I know exactly what he meant. I once felt like that myself, if only for a fleeting moment.

My wife and I slept the night before the coronation in my maisonette at the College of Arms. Another occupant of my lodgings there that night was my mother-in-law’s maid, loaned to my wife to help her put on her very special evening dress and tiara at five o’clock in the morning. My wife’s father had loaned us his motor-car for the occasion and that, with the chauffeur curled up inside it, spent the night in the courtyard below.

Things sprang to life at about 4.30 am with the arrival of a policeman on a motor-bike, who rang the bell and hammered on the gates, which woke the College porter, who woke the sleeping chauffeur, who woke my resident caretaker, who woke the maid, who woke us, all in the space of a few minutes. I had arranged to have a police escort because I simply had to be at the Abbey on time. ‘No Garter, no coronation’, I had explained to the overworked police-chief when arranging it and, though perhaps not entirely true, since I had an understudy in the person of my College colleague, Sir Gerald Wollaston, to take my place in case of accidents, it made him appreciate the desirability of my having a clear run through.

Thus we went to the Abbey like a knife through butter, all crossroads disregarded, all traffic waved away by policemen when they saw us coming. You would normally allow a minimum of fifteen minutes to get from the College to the Abbey or, on an occasion like the coronation, perhaps two to three hours. We did it door to door in four and a half minutes flat.

When we were about half-way there we began to see the car queues building up, bumper to bumper, on both sides of the road. They were filled with aristocratic grandees in their coronation robes, who had probably already been there for hours, with more to come. As we swept by and through the British peerage and other splendid figures in their stationary motor-cars, I swear I could hear the cries of rage of the disprivileged and see their fists as they shook them at us. We ignored them and drove by smoothly with our noses slightly in the air, as is the right of the super-privileged.

Once the coronation ceremonies were over, however, we became ordinary folk again – no outriders, no special facilities, and though we were lucky enough to find our motor-car, we had to take our place like everyone else in the gigantic jam. Our ‘flooded hour of glorious life’ was over.”

(To be continued)

The Hon, Sir George Bellew, KCB, KCVO, KStJ, FSA.

*   “Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! Throughout the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name” was actually written by Thomas Mordaunt.