British Broadcasting's Great Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 724, 29 May 1953, Page 7

British Broadcasting's Great Day

HEN NZBS stations go ‘over to London at 9.15 p-m. on Coronation DayTuesday, June 2-they will begin the rebroadcast of the biggest single. day's’ operation in the history of the BBC.’ One minute ‘later listeners will. be taken to the Queen Victoria Memorial facing Buckingham Palace, and for the next seven hours they "will. remain in London for the great events of the great day. The stages in this seven-hour broadcast are summarised in the panel on this page, but hére\aré some additional details. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will leave Buckingham Palace at 9.25 p.m. (N.Z. time), and arrive at the Abbey at 10.0 p.m. The Coronation Service (described on page 6) ‘will start 15 minutes ater and continue till 12.45. From then. till 1.50 when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh leave the Abbey, music from the Abbey and commentaries on departures will be broadcast. The Queen and the Duke will return to Buckingham Palace at 3.30 at the énd of the State Procession through London. After that there will be descriptions of .the scene outside the Palace and along the route till the Queen appears on the Palace balcony and the R.A.F. flies past at 4.15. While the Coronation ceremony and processions will be the focal point of broadcasts) during the coming week, soth@r. Coronation programmes will be heard before and after it. In The Ceremony of the Coronation (a BBC talk first heard from the NZBS on May 3) Lawrence Tanner, Keeper of the Muniments and Library of Westminster Abbey, discusses the ceremony and its setting. This will be broadcast on June 1, ‘On Coronation Day main National stations will broadcast (some on relay, others by a recording) the State Coronation Day Ceremony in Wellington, at which. the ‘speakers will include the Governor General, the Acting Prime Minister and the Mayor of Wellington. Many stations will also broadcast local ceremonies, On Coronation night the Queen will give a Coronation Day message to the

peoples of the Commonwealth, which NZBS stations will rebroadcast direct from the BBC on Wedinesday morning. In the hour before the Queen speaks men and women from all parts of the Commonwealth assembled in London--the seven Dominion Prime Ministers, members of the Services and otherswill tell of their feelings on Coronation Day. This programme, entitled Long Live the Queen! will be narrated by Robert Donat. At its end and preceding Her Majesty’s broadcast, Sir Winston Churchill will propose the toast of the Queen. Later there will be rebroadcasts of the Queen’s message and Sir. Winston Churchill’s. toast. On Wednesday evening North Island listeners will hear He Mihi Ki Te Karauna (Salute to the Throne), a loyal oration in Maori, by Keepa Ehau, a Rotorua Maori orator, followed by an English translation. After this broadcast all National stations will play a shortened version of the broadcast of the Coronation ceremony. — In Coronation Day Across the World, another BBC programme, listeners will hear commentaries and sound pictures of the world’s rejoicing on Coronation Day. Beginning and ending with the crowd outside Buckingham Palace waiting for the Queen to appear on. the balcony, it will visit the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Forces overseas, the Commonwealth, Europe and the United States. The Sun Never Sets: A Musical Roundup of the Commonwealth, will bring listeners excerpts from recordings sent to the NZBS by. broadcasting organisations in other Commonwealth countries in exchange for the programme of Maori music sent from New Zealand. Countries represented are Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan and’ South Africa. The Sun Never. Sets is introduced by William Austin. Coronation Miscellany, an edited version of a BBC broadcast, will bring the day’s Coronation programmes to an end. In the first part, covering events of the day, the contributors are likely to include the New Zealanders’ Hector Bolitho, who will represent the NZBS in the Abbey, and David Delany, who

will be somewhere along the Coronation procession route. In the last part of the programme, about the festivities of the evening and night, another New Zealander, Geoffrey Cox, will be heard interviewing some of his fellow-country-men in the crowd in Trafalgar Square. Some Coronation programmes which have been mentioned in The Listener in recent weeks will be heard from various stations during Coronation week, and among special programmes to be broad‘east for the first time music will predominate. The National Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum, under Warwick Braithwaite, will be heard in a recorded concert; and the Wellington Baroque Chorus, under Stanley Oliver, has. recorded music from Coronation Services. Three NZBS programmes will present poetry and music of the first Elizabethan age. Five madrigals from The Triumphs of Oriana, a collection written in honour of Elizabeth I (the Oriana named in them), will be sung by the Roy Hill Madrigal Group; and in a second programme of madrigals-a representative selection from the period-the Southern Singers’ Madrigal Group, directed by J. Morris Scobie, will be heard. In a third programme a group of ayres-the other popular musical form of the period-is sung by the baritone Donald Munro with the Alex Lindsay String Quartet. Finally, in Kings to Their Crowning, an NZBS programme written by Oliver A. Gillespie, there is a peep at Coronations of the past-and at some ‘of the things that went wrong at themand a goodly slice of English social history. : The Ceremony of the Coronation: YA and YZ stations, 9.15 p.m., June 1. ‘ National Orchestra: YC stations, June 3. Wellington Baroque’ Chorus: YC stations, June 1; YZ stations, June 6. The Triumphs of Oriana: 1YC, 2YC, June 2; 4YC, June 6; and later from YZ stations. Madrigals: 1YC, June 1; 2YC, June 4; 3YC, June 5; 4YA, June 7; and later from YZ_ stations. Elizabethan Ayres: 3YC, June 2; 1YC, June 3; 2Y¥C, June 6; 4YC, June 7; and later from YZ_ stations. Ni Kings to Their Crowning: 1YC, 3YC, 4YC, ‘this Saturday (May 30); 2YA, this lay (May 31); all YZ stations, June 7. g