The King and I

What a Coronation! There were lots of loos, Emma Thompson saved a choirboy – and I stole Lionel Richie’s seat

Our new king is a Shakespeare buff, so quite familiar with the famous line spoken by Francisco on the ramparts at Elsinore at the beginning of Hamlet: ‘For this relief, much thanks.’

This line was repeated by quite a few of us oldies lucky enough to be invited to the Coronation as we arrived at Westminster Abbey and found the ancient building almost surrounded by portaloos.

There had been a rumour that ‘facilities’ would be in short supply at the royal peculiar. People were upping the pre-crowning bladder panic by repeating apocryphal tales of ‘accidents’ that had occurred at the last Coronation in 1953. The Daily Mail called me to ask if I would contribute a feature they were hoping to headline ‘The Royal Wee’.

I declined, and how wise I was. Every aspect of the Coronation was brilliantly organised. The Dean and his ever good-humoured and consistently courteous team had thought of everything. There were ramps for the wheelchairs, smelling salts for the faint, defibrillators in the side chapels and clean and classy, unobtrusively placed toilets at every turn.

When things went awry on the day, it certainly wasn’t the fault of the organisers. We were invited to take our places from 7.30am and advised that we shouldn’t expect to leave until 1.30pm. I cut it a bit fine arriving at 8.30am and took what I thought was my place – only to be told, moments later, by the great Lionel Richie that, actually, it was his.

In the event, amazingly, I found myself seated at the end of a row of hugely distinguished old soldiers – all recipients of either the George Cross or the VC – and just behind the actress Dame Emma Thompson, who deserves an extra gong for services rendered on the day.

As the 14-year-old Child of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, Samuel

Strachan, began to address the King, someone halfway along Dame Emma’s row began coughing. And went on coughing. Loudly. And more loudly still.

Emma reached for her handbag, found her packet of Bronchostops and passed them down the line.

Happily, I don’t think there were any medical emergencies on the day. Had there been, there were plenty in the congregation ready to come to the rescue.

After the service, walking towards Victoria Station, I fell into step with one of them. She was a retired nurse, she told me – and then, seeing her medals, I realised she was Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, the UK’s first sickle-cell specialist nurse and the first nurse to receive the Order of Merit since Florence Nightingale. An hour before, she had been carrying the Orb of Sovereignty in the Coronation procession. Now she was walking on her own along the Embankment in the rain with me. I felt proud to be British.

I felt proud, too, of my buttonhole.

To my surprise, it was the only one I noticed in the Abbey. It was made up of four miniature, cream-coloured roses I had pinched from a beautiful arrangement of flowers the day before and kept fresh in the fridge overnight.

My Coronation buttonhole came from Coronation Street. Truly, it did. I am a regular on ITV’s This Morning and, naturally, our Coronation Special came from Salford, from the set of the longestrunning soap in the kingdom.

At the end of the broadcast, as William Roache (aka Ken Barlow), 91, who has been in the series since it started in 1960, led us in three cheers for King Charles.

I discreetly dismembered the floral arrangement that was decorating the bar of the Rovers Return.

I have been partial to a buttonhole since I was a boy.

One day in the mid-1950s, as I was walking along the Strand with my father, we caught sight of an elegant gentleman getting out of a London taxi and stepping in to the Savoy Hotel.

‘That,’ said my dad, ‘is the great Nubar Gulbenkian – he wears a fresh orchid in his buttonhole every day.’

He also wore a monocle, a long bushy beard and (can I have invented this?) spats. Born in the Ottoman Empire in 1896, he was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, inherited a fortune and made another one, did good stuff for British intelligence during the Second World War, and behaved as he felt an English gentleman should.

My dad called Gulbenkian ‘the Armenian Noël Coward’ and collected his quips. Gulbenkian owned two converted taxis and said of them proudly, ‘They can turn on a sixpence –whatever that is.’

He enjoyed fine dining, claiming ‘The best number for a dinner party is two – myself and a damn good head waiter.’ He was married three times: ‘I’ve had good wives, as wives go, and, as wives go, two of them went.’

On Coronation Day, I channelled my inner Nubar.