LAST year was the Queen’s diamond jubilee. This year, however, marks another milestone in her reign – the 60th anniversary of her coronation.
It was on June 2, 1953, that the young Queen was driven in a golden state coach from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey to be officially crowned Queen Elizabeth II.
The 60th anniversary of that occasion will be marked with a service of celebration at Westminster Abbey on June 4 this year. There will no doubt be street parties across the country – as there were on the day itself almost 60 years ago – as well as reruns on television of the coronation procession.
One York family will be watching the old footage of the Queen’s state coach passing through the streets of London all those years ago more closely than most. Because one of the resplendent Household Cavalrymen who escorted the young monarch to the Abbey was York’s very own Clive Grantham.
Clive is now a retired 82-year-old, who still manages to stand straight and proud when the occasion calls for it.
Back then he was a strapping young 21-year-old in all the pomp of his youth and his Household Cavalry uniform.
He vividly remembers the procession through the streets of the capital. He was mounted on his horse, four rows back from the Queen’s coach – and could clearly see the monarch ahead of him.
The noise was deafening, he recalls, the crowds who lined the streets cheering and waving. Luckily, the horses had been given training to prepare them for the noise.
He said: “It was indescribable, really, the people that were there. It was a very happy occasion. People were having parties. And I was proud to be there.”
Almost as proud as Clive himself was Rose, the young Cockney girl he was walking out with, who was soon to become his wife.
She’d met him some time before. She and her friend had gone to Trafalgar Square, and were walking down Whitehall when a Frenchman asked her to pose for a photo with a young Household Cavalryman standing guard on horseback.
She did so, and as she was standing beside the horse, felt the cavalryman’s foot gently nudging her back, and a teasing voice saying: “Don’t break the camera”. She fell for him straight away, Rose – then 16, now 77 – admits. “It must have been the uniform.”
She came back at 4pm the same day, found Clive on guard again, and even though he wasn’t supposed to speak on duty, the pair managed to arrange a date for the following evening. “And four children, nine grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren later, here we are.” she said, from their home in Huntington.
On the day of the Queen’s coronation, Rose and her family were crowded around her aunt’s television – she was the only person in the family with such a new-fangled contraption – looking to see if they could spot Clive.
“I knew exactly where he was going to be,” Rose said. “I saw him on his horse, and I said ‘There he is! There he is!’.”
Clive, who was born in Malton, was with the Household Cavalry from 1949 to 1954. It was a busy time. He escorted the gun carriage carrying the coffin of King George VI at the King’s state funeral on February 6, 1952, attended the opening of Parliament and other state occasions, including escorting visiting royals, and was a regular at Trooping the Colour.
When he left the army, he returned north with Rose, by then his wife, becoming a gamekeeper at Nun Monkton, then a milkman, then a Rowntree employee, and finally, for 36 years, a postman.
But he has never forgotten his time as a member of the Household Cavalry.
He said: “It was a hard life, in many ways. There was a lot of work. Your horse came first. You looked after them, and they always got their food first, but there are plenty of good memories.”
This June, he and Rose will be recapturing some of them, watching the coronation celebrations on TV, and paying particular attention to the old footage of the Queen’s coach being escorted to Westminster Abbey.
“We’ll be seeing if we can pick him out again.” Rose said.
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