Two weeks before Christmas 1936, plans for the coronation were rewritten. The king had just abdicated. A low-key affair had been planned, without a procession through London the following day or a great dinner with dignitaries. The country was in the depths of the greatest depression it had suffered since the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1929, seven years before he cancelled his coronation, Edward, then Prince of Wales, had been photographed visiting miners to empathise over their poverty and the huge fall in wages earlier that decade. Wages would not recover until 1931, at which point the National Government cut the benefits of insured workers by 10 per cent. Inequality was high. The richest 1 per cent of people took home almost a quarter of all income in the country.