It rained all day, but I’ll never forget the thrill of Lilibet’s ‘Coronaggot’

65 years on, Prince Michael (aged 10 at time) tells ITV documentary...

IT WAS the glorious pageant that ushered in the reign of Elizabeth II 65 years ago. And even the appalling weather couldn’t dampen the delight of Prince Michael of Kent as he took part in the 1953 Coronation as a ten-year-old boy.

Recounting his memories of the ceremony for the first time in a new ITV documentary to be screened tomorrow, the Queen’s cousin reveals how he and his friends dubbed it the ‘Coronaggot’.

The date for the Coronation of the Queen – known to family members as ‘Lilibet’ – was set as June 2 in the hope of fine weather. But the Prince says: ‘It was a foul day. It rained the entire day long. It was cold, it was miserable, it was wet.’

The young Prince had to dress up in a kilt, black jacket and white lace jabot for the Royal Family procession into Westminster Abbey.

Then a boarder at exclusive Sunningdale School in Ascot, Berkshire, he remembers the build-up: ‘The Coronation was the most extraordinarily exciting thing for a small boy. When we all knew the Coronation was going to take place I was at prep school and we all talked about the Coronaggot and how splendid it was and what fun it was.’ Watching film commissioned by the Queen to record the atmosphere inside Buckingham Palace on the day, he says: ‘Imagine the buildup and the excitement. A great deal of hustle and bustle and fiddling around making sure things were put on the right way round. I remember how glamorous the Queen looked, this radiant figure.’

In one sequence, a line of carriages in the Palace courtyard prepare to transport members of the Royal Family and VIPs including Winston Churchill to the Abbey.

The Prince recalls the journey in a carriage with his mother, Princess Marina, his sister, Princess Alexandra, and brother, the Duke of Kent. ‘There was an enormous crowd and they had periscopes, a lot of them, which were strangelooking devices where you looked through a viewer, and it then went up and you could look over the heads of the people in front of you… So you had a forest of these strangelooking things which were sticking out from the crowd.’

The sight of the Queen’s four-ton Gold State Coach with eight grey horses also transfixed him.

‘I don’t think there are very often occasions where eight greys pull a coach. You have to have as many as that because the Coronation coach weighs so much.’

The Prince, 75, adds: ‘It was a wonderful occasion and it’s amazing to think we are here all these years later.’

The Queen’s Coronation In Colour is on ITV tomorrow at 9pm.