The senior cameraman at Westminster Abbey contributes this postscript:
I had a position high up in the triforium from which my camera lenses protruded just sufficiently for operational coverage, but not so intrusively as to be noticeable or distracting. I had to buy a grey shirt to match the colour of the surrounding stonework to complete the camouflage.
Every detail had to be considered and the most meticulous arrangements applied to every facet of this, the most important television broadcast yet undertaken. Behind the triforium, the Ministry of Works had set up a network of hastily constructed rooms or cubicles for operational requirements. I was in one of these – rather like a wooden cell, with the roof too low for me to stand up straight, but equipped with a box seat and an electric fan.
I used to enter with a sort of Groucho Marx straddle and make for the box seat where I could straighten up sitting down – a paradox this, but comfortably true. From this seat I evolved numerous permutations of kneeling and sitting positions from which to make necessary adjustments and operational manoeuvres to the camera. My sole contact with the outside world once the door was shut was through my camera microphone and headphones – a sort of umbilical cord keeping me in contact with the busy, beating heart of the television control room in some other claustrophobic corner of the Abbey.
In the cubicle over mine was Richard Dimbleby. He seemed to have more room than I, for I could often hear him striding his floor above my head. I envied him his head room. We knew each other very well by this time through many previous programmes. He always used to call me ‘Monty’ and this name has stuck ever since.
With the numerous rehearsals and tests which had to be carried out during the week prior to the Coronation, we were often unable to leave our positions for hours at a time. The cubicles opened out on to a main corridor which was virtually a gallery around that section of the Abbey, part of which led to an enclosure with seats for peers and their ladies.
An essential facility on this floor were some toilets which had been erected specially for the occasion and separately and suitably inscribed ‘PEERS’ and ‘PEERESSES’. For the purposes of this occasion, Richard and I were temporarily ennobled, as it were. But visiting the ‘PEERS’ was no ordinary matter. One could not just nip smartly away and come back at leisure. There were very strict security precautions and arrangements. You had to wait outside the door of your own cubicle, and in good time (if you were lucky and traffic was light) a uniformed official would arrive to escort you there and back. I shall always remember Richard waiting with patience and apprehension outside his cubicle, trying to catch the eye of this uniformed flunkey, just as one would hail a bus, and proceeding under escort to the ‘PEERS’ and eventually back again. This solemn ritual was carried out with all the dignity worthy of the occasion.