The Coronation

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Flanking the Queen from left as they were then titled: Lady Moyra Hamilton, Lady Anne coke, Lady Jane Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Lady Mary Baillie-Hamilton, Lady Jane Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby and Lady Rosemary Spencer-Churchill

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It was a photograph that captured the youth, glamour and femininity of what would come to be called the new Elizabethan age.


Britain’s 27-year-old Queen had been crowned in Westminster Abbey earlier that day, June 2, 1953, and now she poses for photographs in Buckingham Palace. She is wearing the Imperial State Crown and the exquisite Coronation gown designed by Sir Norman Hartnell. The 21ft ermine-trimmed velvet Purple Robe of Estate flows from her shoulders.

She is flanked by her Maids of Honour: six of the country’s most blueblooded young women, all single, beautiful and, like the Queen, wearing gowns by Hartnell.

The picture, taken by official Coronation photographer Cecil Beaton, delighted Her Majesty and became one of the defining images of the day. What it does not reveal, however, is the human hinterland behind the pomp and splendour. It gives no clue to the Maids’ discomfort: their gowns were rib-crushingly tight.


Queen Elizabeth followed a precedent set by Queen Victoria by having Maids of Honour instead of pages to bear her Coronation train. It was their duty to unfurl the cumbersome train as she alighted from the Gold State Coach outside Westminster Abbey and hold it aloft using six silk handles invisibly stitched into its underside.


‘Ready, girls?’ the Monarch asked her attendants as they paused at the Abbey doors to begin their historic procession to the altar.

Their delicate choreography delighted even notorious perfectionist Beaton, who described the Maids, whose ages ranged from 18 to 23, as the Queen’s ‘retinue of white, lily-like ladies’.

Now, in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year, they relive a momentous day they can still vividly recall, six decades on . . .