On June 3, 1953, the day after Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, a front-page story in the Manchester Guardian led with this dateline: Outside The Palace, Tuesday Night.
“At 9:45 tonight the Mall, which had been like the bedraggled aftermath of a party before you have so much as emptied the ashtrays, was transformed to the glittering centre of a city of beautiful nonsense,” Nesta Roberts wrote. “… When the Queen came, it was for the first half minute or so to stand herself on the lighted balcony, tiny, remote and glittering, bowing and waving to the crowd. For that moment, she seemed herself the source of the brilliance to come. … Somebody had brought into the crowd a fat golden retriever on a lead; someone else a 12-month-old child found asleep in a pushcar; many were towing small children like so many fish on the ends of lines. ‘How long will she reign daddy?’ one heard a small boy, aged perhaps 5, ask. Years and years came the reply. ‘As long as you are alive and longer I hope.’”
It was a fitting prediction. After Elizabeth’s death on Thursday, at 96, we dug into the archives for front pages from her coronation. Here are a few of them from England, Canada and the United States, via newspapers.com.
England
Canada
United States
