On today’s date in 1953, the Coronation of Elizabeth II was one of the most spectacular public events of the decade. Thousands crowded her route to and from London’s Westminster Abbey, and at the Queen's own request the ceremony was televised live on the BBC.

For the event, the British composer William Walton was asked to write two new pieces. The first was a “Coronation Te Deum.” This was, in fact, a work that Walton had begun almost a decade earlier for a quite different occasion, namely the opening night of the 1944 London Proms. That choral piece got shifted to a back-burner after Walton was asked to work on Lawrence Olivier’s wartime film of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.”

For the new Queen’s Coronation, Walton returned to his abandoned score, writing to friends, “I’ve got cracking on the Te Deum. Lots of counter-tenors and little boys Holy-holying, not to mention all the Queen’s Trumpeters and side drum. You will like it, I think, and I hope He will too”—“He” was capitalized, so presumably Walton was referring to either the Deity… or Winston Churchill, perhaps.

Walton was also asked to compose a “Coronation March,” which he entitled “Orb and Sceptre” after a line, coincidentally, from “Henry V.” Walton’s March may have seemed a bit jazzy to the more conservative audiences of the day, but London was in a celebratory mood in 1953, and one critic’s assessment, slipping into Cockney slang, suggests, “It sounds like a right royal knees-up!”