Coronation of King George VI - May 12, 1937

With the recent news about the announcement of a royal wedding, I thought it would be a good time to visit a curious disc set in my collection that featured another royal event in the news. In the middle of the unrest in Europe, Great Britain faced an upheaval in the monarchy with George VI's ascension to the throne.  George's elder brother, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the socialite Wallis Simpson.  The story received considerable coverage here in the US and the networks carried the BBC's coverage of the coronation of the new king.

This disc set includes the ceremonies leading up to the coronation, the coronation itself, along with the new monarch's first speech and sounds as if it was recorded either direct from the shortwave feed or from a network line carrying the shortwave broadcast.  It's unclear to me if the coverage is continuous or represents various excerpts from the broadcast. The origins of the disc set are obscure, but it appears to be produced by a small company as a souvenir of the event for US listeners.  It gives a good idea of what listeners heard stateside that tuned in to a royal event that only happens once a generation. Our digital file was transferred from an original blue shellac 8-sided 12" 78 rpm set on the General Sound and Transcription Company label, matrix numbers AT1210 through AT1217.  The style of the pressing and matrix numbers indicates it may have been pressed by Columbia. Update, 11/20/2010:  Date corrected.