“Taranaki Central Press” TUESDAY, MAY 11, 1937. THE CORONATION

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 430, 11 May 1937, Page 4

“Taranaki Central Press” TUESDAY, MAY 11, 1937. THE CORONATION

To-morrow in Westminster Abbey the King and Queen will be crowned. It will be a magnificent spectacle, and a rare one for in Britain there has been no Coronation for 26 years, and Kings are now fewer in the world. The need for ceremony and pageantry on great occasions is all the more urgent to-day because modern democracy has little that is picturesque about it, and the great occasions are fewer in what has been sadly termed “the daily round, the common task,” somewhat drab and dreary amid the surroundings of modern civilisation. The publicity given the preparations for the Coronation and the rehearsals of the processions and of the Abbey ceremony tends to focus attention on the Coronation as a spectacle. But the stately ceremony and the glittering procession are not all, and they are not for nothing. “The pomp and ceremonial, the regalia and all the wonder of the spectacle, stand for things unseen.” The King will be crowned as “His Most Excellent Majesty George the Sixth, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland, and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.” He will be the first king in British history to be crowned imperially, King of Great Britain and also of five autonomous young nations. His Cabinet in Whitehall has no constitutional voice in the ruling the Dominions. It is the Cabinet for the United Kingdom and the dependent Empire; but he, as King, will reign over all these, and over Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand as well. The Crown he will wear will have for him a significance that it had for none of his ancestors. It has become, in the words of the -statute of Westminster, ‘“the symbol of the free association of the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations . . .” which are united by a common allegiance to it.