George VI Is Crowned King of the United Kingdom

On 12 May 1937, George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth were crowned at Westminster Abbey in a ceremony rooted in nearly a thousand years of English tradition. The date was no coincidence: it had originally been set aside for his elder brother, Edward VIII, whose abdication five months earlier had unexpectedly thrust the reluctant younger sibling onto the throne.

George had never wished to be king. He was a private man troubled by a stammer, far more at ease with family life than public ceremony. Yet when Edward gave up the crown in December 1936 to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, the duty passed to him, and he chose the regnal name George to signal continuity and stability.

The coronation was both a sacred anointing and a deliberate display of imperial pageantry.

The service was watched by enormous crowds and, for the first time, broadcast live on radio. Within a few years the diffident new king would become a steadying national figure, remaining on the throne throughout the Second World War until his death in 1952.