Lady Rosemary Muir was 23 when she received a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, informing her that she had been chosen as one of the six maids of honour to assist the Mistress of the Robes in the coronation of Elizabeth II. That was in January 1953. From then until the coronation day in June, the maids of honour were the subject of many excited articles. The press dubbed them ‘the Lucky Six… envied by every other woman in the land’.

Envied they certainly were, but luck had little to do with it. Lady Rosemary tells me it was no surprise to her that she was appointed to be a maid of honour. ‘I was a duke’s daughter,’ she says as we look through her hefty album of coronation photographs and cuttings. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

We meet in March, when newspapers are full of jumpy reports that the coronation for Charles III will be ‘stripped back’. The King will not wear breeches or silk stockings. There will be no coronets for the peers, no specially made coronation stools for the guests. There will be only 2,000 guests in Westminster Abbey, instead of the 8,000 who attended in 1953. Many commentators seem to have accepted that it’s fated to be a disappointment.

I ask Lady Rosemary what she makes of Hugo Vickers’s assertion, which concludes this year’s reprint of his book Coronation: The Crowning of Elizabeth II, that ‘the coronation of King Charles III cannot hope to match the magnificence of 1953’. ‘Yes, I’m sure he’s right,’ she says. ‘Nowadays everything is hit and miss.’

Lady Rosemary, the daughter of John Spencer-Churchill, tenth Duke of Marlborough, was brought up in Blenheim Palace. The household was run with military precision by her ‘very strict mother’. Everyone knew their role. ‘You were never allowed to be late for one minute. If you were told to do something you concentrated on doing it and doing it properly,’ she says. ‘When people ask me about the coronation they always ask me, “Weren’t you nervous, weren’t you this, weren’t you that” – no! We just got on with it.’ Her grandmother, Consuelo, had also just got on with it at the 1902 coronation, carrying the canopy over Queen Alexandra during her anointing.

At the 1953 coronation the chief role of the maids of honour was to carry the Queen’s 20ft velvet train and to remove and fold it before the anointing. The Dean of Westminster wrote afterwards that he was struck by how the maids of honour ‘moved with notable precision’. Their exact movements did not, Lady Rosemary recalls, require much practice: ‘You knew what to do, you didn’t have to be taught it.’ (At 93, her balance and posture make me, 60 years her junior, embarrassed by my slouching.)

Rehearsals in general were ‘all very light-hearted’, she says, partly because ‘everybody knew everybody else’. If any part had to be redone, the Duke of Norfolk, who oversaw all non-liturgical arrangements, would turn to the maids of honour, ‘wink at us and say “It’s not you, girls. I’ve got these old gentlemen to sort out.”’

Small vials of ammonia were sewn into the maids’ gloves in case they felt faint on the day, but Lady Rosemary says they found the whole ceremony ‘so relaxed’. (Later, at the recess, the Archbishop of Canterbury shook her hand and accidentally crushed her vial, spilling the ammonia into her glove.) When the maids of honour lined up with the Queen in the annexe to enter the abbey they were all as calm ‘as if we were out for an afternoon stroll’. ‘We did what we were told to do and did it to the best of our ability,’ she says. ‘That was life in general and the coronation was no different.’

This sentiment is echoed by Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, who was a page for the Lord Chancellor at the coronation at the age of 13. ‘One just did as one was told,’ he says. Discipline, however, has its limits. In the final rehearsal, the pages were given their ceremonial – but very real – swords. The temptation was too much. ‘As you can imagine, a lot of 13-year-olds clustered together, everyone drew their swords and started jousting away. The Earl Marshal sent in the Gold Staff officers to sort us out. We were cuffed around the ears. Nowadays that would be called assault or something.’ He still has his page’s sword, which sits proudly alongside his army sword.

Viscount (John) Eccles was one of the young Gold Staff officers – essentially ushers who reported to the Earl Marshal. His father David was the Minister of Works in 1953 and so worked closely with the Duke of Norfolk on the coronation preparations.

Although the day itself ‘came and went without effort’, Lord Eccles says that from watching the Duke of Norfolk and his father he could see the ‘tremendous amount of thought that went into it’. Richard Dimbleby, the coronation’s BBC commentator, later remarked upon the effort it takes to make something appear effortless. The Duke of Norfolk was a ‘man who carried the entire burden of arrangements on his shoulders, who knew every detail, and personally worked on every timetable. I do not think he could have had more than a few hours’ rest at any time during the eight months preceding’.

The great novelty of the 1953 coronation, as well as a further complication, was the fact that it was televised live. Lord Eccles says his father was ‘very keen’ on making the broadcast a success, and worked with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Norfolk – both of whom were at first uncertain about filming a religious service – to ensure it was ‘proper’. He understood that the new technology was a chance to ‘show the world we could do something like that really well, with tremendous attention to detail’.

Brigadier Parker Bowles, who will attend this weekend’s coronation, says it’s ‘slightly unfortunate’ that the seating is limited to 2,000 – ‘the whole thing is very different nowadays’. It is hard to imagine peers piled to the roof on rickety scaffolding in 2023. Seven decades ago, though, George Lawn was a 17-year-old Life Guards trumpeter and one of the 100 or so men from the Household Cavalry Mounted Squadron at Knightsbridge tasked with testing the seating arrangements on one evening in April. ‘We had to clamber up inside, on to all this scaffolding where all the lords and ladies were going to sit,’ he tells me. ‘There were hundreds of soldiers all standing there on the scaffold and this Welsh Guards sergeant major down below said “When I say ‘Jump!’ jump up and down.” So there we were, half the British army jumping up and down. It didn’t matter if we were all killed to see if this thing was strong enough for all these lords and ladies to sit on.’

As smoothly as things went for those inside the abbey on the day, not everyone involved in the coronation was so lucky. Major Hugh Cantlie was an Ensign in 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, at Chelsea. On coronation day he was bearing the Queen’s colour and was lining the Mall with his back to St James’s. ‘A police horse had come down the Mall and laid its breakfast right in front of me,’ he says. ‘Then there was the cry “Prince Margaret is coming down!” She was leaving the palace to go to the abbey. We had to do a royal salute, so I then dragged the Queen’s colour through the steaming mound. Then at the recover I got most of the horse manure over my face. So that was my lasting memory of the day.’

His luck didn’t improve. ‘When it was all over it was beginning to rain a bit, so we were ordered to put on capes. I turned round to where they were all rolled up behind us in the gutter and some small boy had been sick on mine.’ In the evening he changed out of uniform and joined the mob outside.

The day ended for Lord Eccles at Buckingham Palace. ‘The maids of honour were the focus of the party,’ he says. Lady Rosemary, sadly, couldn’t stick around. After a quick pit-stop at the palace (‘Prince Charles was rolling around with the Queen’s crown’) she rushed back to Blenheim because her mother was roasting an ox.

Parker Bowles, meanwhile, was taken with other pages after the ceremony to the House of Lords where they were treated to ‘an amazing spread of food one had never seen before’, including bananas, oranges and coronation chicken.

‘One hadn’t been to many public occasions,’ he explains. ‘There were no parties after the war. [The coronation] was a whole new experience. We had nothing to judge it against.’ On the day of the coronation, the news reached Britain that the first men had successfully climbed Mount Everest. ‘As young boys that really struck us much more than anything else. It was such a new world.’