| On Saturday, the former Prince Charles will be crowned King of England, the first coronation to take place in London in nearly seventy years. As a little boy, Charles attended the previous ceremony, for his mother, Queen Elizabeth, and he is likely hoping for better weather this weekend. In June, 1953, The New Yorker’s longtime correspondent in London, Mollie Panter-Downes, published a vibrant dispatch about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. The young monarch had ascended the throne in a country still recovering from the Second World War, and her subjects appeared thrilled to have a reason to celebrate. To insure that they got a good view of the festivities, ardent admirers slept in the streets on the night before the crowning, “setting up housekeeping in the gutter,” Panter-Downes reported, “as handily as though they were back in the old blitz days of sleeping in the tubes.” On the day itself, honored guests included Churchill and Nehru, but “the person who, apart from the Queen, really stole the show” was another monarch, Queen Salote of Tonga. Panter-Downes, a British citizen, captures a mood that Elizabeth’s son surely wishes to replicate. “Everything turned out wonderful but the weather,” she writes, “and even that, Londoners loyally declare between their sneezes, could not spoil it.” | 
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