The excitement of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation 60 years ago in the royal family has been revealed in private home movies on display at the Buckingham Palace as part of the Queen’s Coronation Exhibition, starting on Saturday at Buckingham Palace to coincide with the summer opening of the state rooms in the palace.
The movies reveal the drama behind the scenes as Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is seen waving his arms as he tried to get the extended royal family and European royals, all dressed in their finest, to squeeze together for a group photograph.
The queen as a disciplinarian mother is revealed briefly when four-year-old Prince Charles and two-year-old Princess Anne cover their faces with their hands during a photograph session. A stern word from their mother is all they need to behave properly.
The highlight of the exhibition is the display of coronation dress the young queen wore for the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953. The dresses, robes and gowns worn by the queen and her immediate family are on display for the first time since the coronation ceremony 60 years ago.
The Queen’s white satin coronation dress, created by British couturier Norman Hartnell, incorporates an iconographic scheme of embroidered national and Commonwealth floral emblems in gold, silver and pastel-coloured silks, encrusted with pearls, crystals and sequins. The exhibition also includes Hartnell’s original designs for the dress and his embroidery samples.
The Queen’s Robe of Estate, which she wore when she left Westminster Abbey for Buckingham Palace, is on display too. Made of English purple silk-velvet, the robe is more than 6.5 metres long from the shoulder to the tip of the train and embroidered with wheat ears and olive branches, representing peace and prosperity.
The embroidery, which includes 18 different types of gold thread, was designed and executed by
the Royal School of Needlework. The embroidery of the robe took 3,500 hours to complete between March and June 1953.
The exhibition display includes jewels worn by the queen on the Coronation Day, like the diamond diadem and diamond coronation necklace and earrings. The diadem designed and made for George IV to wear at his coronation in 1821 and the necklace and earrings were made for Queen Victoria in 1858.
Tables from the two coronation banquets staged at Buckingham Palace, on June 3 and 4, 1953, have been recreated in the State Dining Rooms with their lavish settings of Georgian porcelain and silver-gilt, and decorations of pink and white roses and carnations for the exhibition.
The exhibition, which is spread over many rooms, has linked displays with how the rooms were used during the coronation - the Green Drawing Room was where photographer Cecil Beaton took coronation portraits of the queen, and other official portraits were taken in the Throne Room. It is in these rooms that photographs and the home movies are on display.
“The exhibition brings together a magnificent display of dress and objects which are both unique and personal to the queen and so redolent of the extraordinary events of Coronation Day,” according to exhibition curator Caroline de Guitaut, from the Royal Collection Trust, who revealed that the queen visited the exhibition earlier this week on Wednesday.