As a couple we have witnessed the celebrations of The Queens Coronation, The Silver Jubilee (which Lewis spent the whole day filming) and The Golden Jubilee - we had street parties for all of them.
Lewis shared…. I was 15 years old when it was the Queens Coronation and I joined the Royal Navy the next day aged 15 and 3 months. I was on HMS St Vincent in Gosport for the Spithead Review (this is when a new monarch comes to the throne and reviews the fleet). The Queen arrived in her own boat and everyone was very excited to see her. There were Royal Navy fleets from all over the world there.
I was also lucky enough to be on the Royal Yacht at the opening of St Lawrence Seaway. (Only by chance as I had taken someone else’s place for 6 weeks who’d been kicked off for bad behavior).
We celebrated the Silver Jubilee together at Mears Drive, Stechford, Birmingham. We spent a few days clearing the field by our home and had a marquee put up, the local MP Andrew McKay came along to open the party for us and we also had Less Ross and his team from BRMB Radio Station there. We started the event at 10am with games for all the children and had a catering team in to prepare a hot meal for everyone in the afternoon. We had a live disco in the evening that went on until way past midnight. We have lots of video footage of this day.
Irene shared…. I was 13 when The Queen was crowned and we all wore red, white and blue dresses for our street party in Erskine Street, Vauxhall in Birmingham. The party was planned for months and my dad was on the planning committee. They had to have lots of collections to get the money together for all the food. On the day I remember it started to rain at midday just as they were putting the tables out and they had to ask the owner of the local pub if we could use their upstairs rooms to avoid the weather spoiling all the paper tablecloths and accessories so then everyone was split into smaller groups to go inside for food. The party carried on into the early evening and luckily the rain stopped, one of the neighbours bought their gramophone outside and everyone partied into the evening. It was a great day. There were hardly and TV’s about back in those days so we only saw the official event on the news reels at the local cinema - back then it was Pathe news (you’d probably find it on the internet).
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