I was a student in London at the time of the Coronation. I was training to be a secondary school teacher and the King died. And I remember that day, particularly because our lectures where at what had been a great house at Elton Palace. Although it had been bombed during the war, so there wasn't a lot of it left. And we were going through college, back across the park for lunch. And somewhat to our surprise, one of the lecturers was in the little kitchen with the cook and they were both in floods of tears. And it was because the king's death had just been announced.

It was my last year of college when the Queen and the Coronation happened. None of us students were yet 21 so we had to get letters of permission from our parents to stay out all night. They insisted we had our evening meal before we went up to town. We found a good place in the Mall and we stayed there all through the night in the rain. We were near a group of young medical students from one of the local hospitals. I don’t remember that we slept very much because we were all too excited. And it was raining. With it being June it got lighter early and the newspaper boys came up the Mall calling out the newspaper headline which was “Hillary conquers Everest.”

We saw the procession. The person I remember most of all was the Queen of Tonga. I mean, the Tongans are quite big people, she was well over six foot tall, with the most beautiful smile you could imagine. It was pouring with rain by then and she had her umbrella up but she wouldn't have the carriage hood up. She was beaming all over her face and smiling and waving at everybody. She was lovely.

And then at lunch time one of my friends collapsed. I don’t know whether it was tiredness or what. And there was a tent, a hospital tent in James's Park. So we took her off there and they told us to come back in an hour. After the hour they decided that she was still really quite ill. And they sent her off to hospital. And by then, of course we'd lost our front row seats. But we’d seen the procession go, we've heard the whole coronation service over the tannoy. So we didn't actually see the queen with her crown on because we all decided we’d had enough. We got on the underground and went back to college.