Remembering another coronation 70 years ago

Malini Samarakkody, like many other Sri Lankans, spent the afternoon of Saturday, May 6th watching the grand coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla unfold at Westminster Abbey, the solemn ceremony cloaked in tradition and ritual hallowed through the centuries.

It was some 70 years ago – June 2, 1953, on a grey and wet London morning that Malini, then barely out of her teens was herself in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of a young Queen –Elizabeth II, the mother of Charles. The years have passed, but seated in her Polhengoda home, Malini remembers the day.

Malini was accompanying her uncle, none other than the Prime Minister of Ceylon Dudley Senanayake. How she came to be part of the distinguished Sri Lankan contingent is still faintly mystifying to her. “I was lucky,” she says. Her maternal grandfather F.R. Senanayake and Dudley’s father D.S. were brothers and Dudley being unmarried, Malini as a bright and beautiful young family member fresh out of school was often enlisted to help out at official functions. “I had just finished school – I was waiting for my HSc results.”

When the invitation came for Dudley to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth it was a significant moment– Ceylon though having gained Independence from the British in 1948 was still a Crown Colony with the British monarch as its head of state.

129 nations and territories were officially represented at the Coronation service, and when the question of who should accompany the Prime Minister arose as he had no wife, Malini’s mother Phyllis (Dudley’s cousin) flatly refused (“Amma’s nature was that she would never go”) and her aunt Neela Senanayake was pregnant (she had married her first cousin Robert) so it fell to Malini. “Fortunately or unfortunately I’ve been chosen for these things,” she says. “It was thrown at me.”

She was already doing “little little things” – some semi-official duties when the occasion demanded it, like giving out prizes for her father, Siripala Samarakkody, himself a Member of Parliament, she remembers.

It was quite a big delegation from Ceylon, all staying at the Dorchester. She shared a room with Governor General Sir Oliver Goonetilleke’s daughter ‘Aunty Sheila’, who kindly helped drape her strawberry pink saree ‘embroidered with gold thread’ for the coronation service. She is hazy though about where exactly she sat in the Abbey but recalls that the service itself lasting almost three hours was perfectly coordinated and the music was spectacular.

That service was watched by over 7,000 spectators within the Abbey, and televised to millions around the world. The coronation procession that included Church leaders, also had the Commonwealth Prime Ministers with Ceylon’s Dudley

Senanayake, members of the Royal Household and civil and military leaders.

A more vivid memory is of the grand dinner at the Dorchester, the ladies in their crinolines where she was at the same table as her uncle. In that post-war era, things were in short supply and all the chocolates served after dinner were very kindly sent her way. “I was the baby of the set,” she laughs. There was a visit to Buckingham Palace for a tea party– and the invitees had to arrive by taxi. “I thought that was not quite right.”

Then there was Ascot where amongst the British aristocracy in their spectacular hats vying for attention, was the tall young lady from Ceylon in an eyecatching ‘wine-shaded saree’. She had a grand time, she recalls, and left her seat to go to the paddock to see the horses, encountering on her way Princess Margaret who was also heading in the same direction. The Princess was very beautiful, Malini recalls. Malini’s Ascot visit though was to earn her a reprimand. “I got scolded from Sir John (Kotelawala),” for a British newspaper ran a headline about the ‘bareheaded and barefooted’ beauty. In fact, Malini was wearing a lily of the valley flower piece created by the floral expert Constance Spry but it was her lack of a hat and stockings that the headline writer had seized upon. She wasn’t barefoot, Malini hastens to add – she had on a very beautiful pair of slippers that she had bought from Himalayas in the Savoy building!

Born on January 27,1934, to Phyllis Nedra Samarakkody and Siripala Samarakkody, Malini was the eldest of three girls. Her father, a Cambridge educated lawyer too was in politics – serving as member for Narammala of the second State Council of Ceylon. The family lived at Grasmere (today occupied by the Goethe Institute) in Gregory’s Road –

now R.G. Senanayake Mawatha and Malini attended Bishop’s College with her sisters Rukmani and Surangani. “We were a close family,” she says, ‘Dudley Maama’ very much a favourite of the clan, of whom she has many warm memories and hilarious stories, including of his hearty appetite, and his fondness for taking them for drives in his car in a sarong, totally unconcerned that he was PM.

She had some dreams of studying to be an architect but that discipline entailing many long years, her grandmother Mrs F.R. Senanayake was not in favour and she ended up doing a course with Constance Spry, the legendary floral designer who created the lavish flower arrangements for the Queen’s coronation. She married and lived in the UK for 17 years, before returning to Sri Lanka, with her five children.

Not surprisingly she is still very interested in politics, though she cannot help remarking on the calibre of politicians then and now.

Educationist and author Goolbai Gunasekera, a longtime friend from her Bishop’s College days says that Malini “always a very sweet person,” would downplay her family connections, but was called upon very young to undertake some duties and hence had a lovely wardrobe of ‘Kashmir sarees’ for those formal occasions. In those days, a regular fixture for their gang of Bishopians who all lived close to each other in Colombo 7 was their early morning bicycle rides that wound up with them sitting on the steps of the Women’s International Club, enjoying breakfast chatter.

And with all the focus on another coronation, it was Goolbai - an ardent admirer of the Royal Family from her schooldays, who took Malini back to the time when she was present at a historic occasion.