Word: abbey
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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After a 15-month buildup, with an exciting interlude last winter while a new hero was substituted, the biggest news story of 1937 (so far) last week finally reached its climax on Coronation Day in Westminster Abbey. The element of conflict, without which no news story is great, lay between the reverent, laborious effort of the British people to stage a tremendous spectacle and perform a solemn ritual without any hitch, harm or boggle, and the implacable forces of Chance, innocent or vicious, which might suddenly transform their great drama into farce or tragedy, as a little spark did last...
Newspapers. Above and behind Queen Mother Mary, the young Princesses and the rest of the royal ladies, high in the Abbey's Triforium Gallery whose normal gloom was dispelled by bright new lights, seats were provided for some 300 eyewitness newshawks from all over the world. In their seats at 6:30 a. m. these writers scribbled furiously for eight hours. They dropped their copy in "takes" (installments) down a specially built chute to the Abbey's cellars. There 40 telegraphers tapped it out unceasingly. In newspaper offices all over the globe, editors and press crews stood...
...still photographers and two movie cameramen were the eyes of the world. The still plates were handed out through a hole to a waiting messenger, sped in cars to the Central News Agency, headquarters for all services, to be flashed over the world by radio. In New York, the Abbey pictures were ready for reproduction within two hours, but were not very clear. Next evening Aviators Dick Merrill & Jack Lambie took off from Southport, Lancashire (see p. 23) with sets of Coronation prints, 46 in each. Among those waiting for them were TIME and LIFE who took one set with...
Newsreels. Immediately after the King's broadcast from Buckingham Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Norfolk went to a private projection room in London's West End to view the 7,000 ft. of film made in the Abbey. A close-up of Queen Mary weeping they promptly cut out. News of this excision soon spread, and thousands of British cinemaddicts who flocked to the movies were bitterly disappointed to see how little of the Abbey ceremony had been left in. Audiences vented their spleen on the Archbishop by sniggering when he was shown examining...
Radio. Like the newsreel cameras, 28 radio microphones were strung by British Broadcasting Corp. along the seven miles from the Palace to the Abbey and return. Into a central control room at Broadcasting House, through 472 miles of wire and twelve tons of equipment, poured a Babel of sounds-trumpets, cheers, tramping, coughs, prayers, commentaries-to be sifted and unified, put on the world's ether waves. In the Abbey alone were 30 microphones-one of them, supersensitive, was hung high in the vaulted roof over the chancel-to catch every syllable of the historic service. Radio officials later...