My great-grandfather wrote a hit song for the Queen’s coronation – here’s what I know about it

Coronation Day 1953 was colder than a June day ought to have been. The skies over London were heavy, but on the streets a great party was playing out. An estimated three million jubilant people came to see the procession, with many camping overnight along The Mall and the rest of the route to catch a glimpse of the newly-crowned Queen in the Gold State Coach.

But I wonder if the real fun wasn’t to be found in the pubs that were filled to bursting, or at the street parties where neighbours crowded around newly- bought television sets and toasted the new Queen with cake and sherry. In accounts of the day, a song is often mentioned – a popular tune that could be heard coming from those pubs and parties.

It was just a ditty, a schmaltzy sort of ballad that was in the charts and had worked its way into people’s consciousness. It began: “In a golden coach, there’s a heart of gold, driving through old London town. With the sweetest Queen the world’s ever seen, wearing her golden crown…”

People of a certain generation may remember In a Golden Coach, made famous by Dickie Valentine and, later, Billy Cotton and his Band, who both had Top 10 hits with it. I have always known it as part of my family folklore.

To me, it’s the sweet old song that was written for the coronation by my great-grandfather, Jack Henry.

The story of how Jack Henry came to write the tune that rippled through the country in 1953, like Three Lions during Euro ’96, has been passed down to me in fragments. Every time a jubilee came around, my mum, Penny, or one of my great aunts would remind us of the sheet music buried in a box somewhere. “Don’t you remember, Grandpa Jack wrote that song for the Queen’s coronation?” At family dinners, whenever talk turned to stories of Grandpa Jack (of which there seem to be many – the man was what one might fondly refer to as “a character”), someone would get the song up on YouTube or dig out the old record, put it on and we’d sway to the strains of Dickie Valentine.

But family stories are flimsy things; they slip through the hands of each generation, changing with every retelling. It always seemed odd that this man who was a police inspector and ran a pub with my great-grandmother in Hampstead, could also have written a hit song for the late Queen’s coronation.

Stranger still is a discrepancy we have never been able to explain in the credits for the song. A quick Google names John Henry (his christened name) as the writer of the music and lyrics, but the sheet music we have, beautifully illustrated with the Gold State Coach pulled by white horses, states: “words and music by Ronald Jamieson” – thought, but never confirmed, to be his nom de plume.

With King Charles III’s coronation set for Saturday May 6 – an occasion that will be so different from the day his then 27-year-old mother made her way to Westminster Abbey – I decided to see if I could get to the bottom of how In a Golden Coach came to be.

If Grandpa Jack did indeed write it, I’d always wondered whether he’d been commissioned or simply came up with the tune and sold it. The original publisher is credited as Box & Cox, a music publisher at 7 Denmark Street in London’s West End. Back then, Denmark Street was known as the UK’s Tin Pan Alley, where all the music publishers of the day were based. Elton Box and Desmond Cox were an eccentric double act whose most successful song was I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts. The songwriter Bill Martin recalled in a 2013 book about Tin Pan Alley: “You would be invited to play them your song, and then afterwards, one of them would say, ‘What do you think Mr Box?’ and the reply would be ‘I’m not sure Mr Cox’. They then asked you if you had a song like I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts. They would do things for a laugh and give you money…”

Songwriter Guy Fletcher, who worked in Tin Pan Alley in the 1960s, says unknown writers often pitched up to flog a song. That, he says, is “the most likely beginning” to In a Golden Coach, which he deems “a straightforward, simple, waltz-time song – of its time”.

“Denmark Street worked in a very strange way in those days,” says Fletcher. “Very often people just walked in off the street with a song. And someone like Box & Cox would sign it up just on spec and maybe hand over a couple of quid.”

If Jack’s motivation was money, he wouldn’t have made a great deal, says Fletcher – royalties were minimal. “Very occasionally they’d give a small advance. If you were an unknown songwriter, you’d just get a contract and sign it and if they were reasonably honest they’d actually pay you.”

The Performing Right Society has six different records of In a Golden Coach, all of them with different songwriters credited, apparently with no telling which came first. John Henry is credited on one iteration, Ronald Jamieson, his possible nom de plume, on another. Two are credited to an entirely different set of names, and a further two are attributed to Jack Henry, with a co-credit for a man called Harry Leon.

Leon was a pianist with whom Grandpa Jack is also said to have written the song Hopalong Cassidy a year after the coronation. Leon is best known for writing the Gracie Fields classic Sally, used in the Sally in Our Alley. Wikipedia describes him as “a Jewish musician from the East End of London who played in pubs in Denmark Street’’. There is a fantastic photograph of him playing in a Camden pub “for his rent money”, as the caption reads. It can’t have been far from the Belsize Tavern, where Grandpa Jack lived and worked when he left the police, with my great-grandmother, Eleanor, who I’m named after. I have a romantic image of Jack and Harry meeting in the bar and writing the song while Great Nanna Eleanor pulled pints, but don’t imagine I’ll ever know whether that truly happened.

The royalties department at Sony Music Publishing was able to establish the version that generated the most income was the one composed by Jack and Harry. Sony merged with EMI Music 10 years ago, and EMI bought up most of the companies on Denmark Street like Box & Cox in the 1960s. “Usually the commercial deal involved giving a little piece of the action back to the original owners,” says Fletcher. My mum recalls her grandmother getting modest yearly royalties for the song until she died, just a few weeks before I was born in 1991.

The name on the sheet music has always been a puzzle. However, a glance at the family tree provides the most plausible explanation – his eldest son, also Jack, had Ronald for a middle name. His second son, my great uncle Jim, was christened James. Perhaps the story holds up, then, and Ronald Jamieson was an amalgamation of his sons’ names, though I’m still unsure why he needed a nom de plume at all. A nifty way to get around the tax, perhaps?

It still seems an unlikely career move for a man who had been a Scotland Yard detective, though I’m told his patch was at one time the West End. Showbusiness may well have suited him – an obituary in the Daily Mail refers to him as the “Evening Dress Detective”. Family legend has it that he held the record for the highest number of murders solved in a single year, which later formed the basis for a series of detective novels he wrote. There’s also some talk of “secret war work” after he left the police – he served as a gunner-observer in the Royal Navy Air Force in the First World War, and in the Second World War is said to have helped airmen escape from Lisbon under the cover of being a diplomatic courier.

His obit, from 1956, reads: “He died after a heart attack in his public house in Hampstead last night. He was 62.”

That’s the most extraordinary part, to me, that he packed in so much in so little time. When he died, he left behind four grown-up children and six of his seven grandchildren. If he’d been alive five more years he’d have met my mum; perhaps he’d have written more songs too.

The Mass Observation Project reported that on June 2 1953, people were singing In a Golden Coach in pubs. A story in the Daily Mirror says the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were serenaded with it by a choir of East End boys as they went through Poplar on their first drive in public after the Coronation. And it appears to still have something of a life today. There are renditions on YouTube recorded just this summer for the Platinum Jubilee. Even Lulu filmed a version on TikTok; she remembers singing it sitting on her father’s shoulders at a street party: “The first reaction I got from an audience.”

In the comments, people share memories of singing it as children and ponder why there hasn’t been an attempt to revive it. Perhaps now’s the time, with a coronation on the horizon, to refresh the lyrics for a new King. The “wise King” rather than the “sweetest Queen”, perhaps. There are also a couple of people who think their own relative had something to do with the song. Perhaps they did – perhaps mine was just one of many who had a hand in In a Golden Coach. Or perhaps he was the first.

Perhaps one afternoon in 1953, Jack Henry strolled down Tin Pan Alley, a sheet of music under his arm and a pitch in his head for Mr Box and Mr Cox – a few lines of a ditty that might just do for the coronation of Her Majesty the Queen.

Do you remember the song from the 1953 coronation? Do you know any more about its creation? Share your memories in the comments