After the Ball Was Over

For one glorious week, London had seemed to be the capital of the world. After the big day was past, thousands tramped the coronation route, through tattered paper arches and bedraggled festoons, while dustmen recovered tons of paper and empty bottles.

Queen Elizabeth, fresh as the morning dew, drove in her Daimler through the dingy streets of London's East End and was cheered by crowds that were ten-deep. Next day, with blowing of trumpets and banging of brasses, she showed herself and was cheered in middle-class Chelsea and Kensington. She conferred knighthoods on Colonel John Hunt, organizer of the British expedition that conquered Everest, and on New Zealander Edmond Hillary, who made it to the top. At week's end, the Queen watched England's greatest jockey, Gordon Richards, newly knighted, win his first Derby (see SPORT).

Then, all at once, coronation-tide was over and done with, and Her Majesty's subjects began counting the cost of the biggest splurge in their history. Net government spending topped $4,500,000--more than 25 times as much as the U.S. Treasury spent on President Eisenhower's inauguration last January. The public blew even more, withdrawing $25 million from private savings accounts in less than two weeks. Receipts from U.S. tourists brought in a useful $17 million, the equivalent of two weeks of British exports to the U.S., but the loss of coal production (over 1,000,000 tons) offset this gain.

There were sober second thoughts. "The British people have had a holiday from reality long enough," wrote the London Times in an editorial that started softly enough but ended with a ringing indictment of "a good people grown careless."

"The main reason why [postwar] Britain has not yet prospered sufficiently . . . is that the British people as a whole have not yet had the will to prosper. Neither government nor opposition dares allow itself to be disclosed fully facing the facts." What most worried the Times was the too-popular conviction that somehow, somewhere, "there is a formula that of itself will cure the country's ills ... A new Elizabethan Age," warned the Thunderer, "is in danger of becoming an incantation, a magician's hey presto, as if the nation's new stature could be established merely by proclaiming it."

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