As women broke new ground, having a queen was wonderful Rachel Cooke

The past is sometimes less of a foreign country than you might imagine. Last Friday morning, when my husband wondered aloud if we should get a new television “for the funeral” (ours is comically small), my mind turned to the coronation, the generations connected, even now, by the allure of an outside broadcast.

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In 1953 , the question of how and where events at Westminster Abbey might be watched was, for most of the population, somewhat pressing. As the year began, fewer than 2 million people owned a television set .

If every one of the more than 500,000 sets sold in the six months before the coronation told a story of aspiration, for many women this stretched far beyond the material. When the Queen was crowned, women could not take out mortgages in their own name, nor could they be fitted with a diaphragm without producing a marriage certificate. No wonder, then, so many were half in love with the new Queen. Her youth, her beauty, her glamour. Was a different future about to be possible? In her memoir The Centre of the Bed, Joan Bakewell , then a Cambridge undergraduate, recalls the dreamy effect : “ A woman on the throne and one not much older than ourselves. There was a sense of lightheartedness about that: it felt, well, sort of contemporary .”