IT WAS A WINTRY MORNING IN THE PALE SUN AND HIGH CLOUDS THE LAST TIME THE NATION MOURNED SO DEEPLY. THE WEEPING CROWDS TURNED OUT FOR THE FUNERAL OF THE SHY, STAMMERING KING WHO HAD SHARED ALL THE HARDSHIPS AND DEPRIVATIONS OF WAR. HE, TOO, WAS A PEOPLE'S ROYAL. - Daily Mail (London)

Byline: ANGELA LAMBERT

FEBRUARY 15, 1952 was a wintry day of pale sun and high clouds.

Bitterly cold - 'real royal weather' people grumbled, as they always do.

Yet the chill in the air and the decorum of the silent crowds lining the streets seemed perfectly attuned to the funeral cavalcade of George VI: this shy, modest monarch who had never really wanted to reign at all.

The body of the King had lain in state for four days, from February 11 to 15. The great draped bier stood on a dais in the centre of Westminster Hall, the vast historic space that is by far the oldest part of the Houses of Parliament.

It was covered with the Royal Standard and surmounted with the emblems of State: the Imperial Crown, the glittering Orb and Sceptre. At each corner of the coffin stood officers from the Household Cavalry, motionless, while an estimated 305,000 people filed past.

Among the last mourners to walk past the bier were his widow and his daughters - the elder of whom, aged 26, had been proclaimed Queen Elizabeth II. These three women - so small in stature, yet always dignified and impassive in grief had lost a beloved husband and father, but the country had lost a sovereign, and it was as a sovereign that his obsequies must be conducted.

At 9.30am on Tuesday, February 15, precisely as the chimes of Big Ben rang the half-hour, the coffin began its final journey. Big Ben continued to toll for almost an hour: a sonorous 56 times, a beat a minute, one for each year of the King's life.

The actual funeral service was not to be held in London but in St George's Chapel, Windsor, last resting place of so many of his royal ancestors. But first, the solemn cortege would be drawn at a slow marching pace to Paddington station, there to board the royal train for the journey to Windsor.

George V, the King's stern, distant father, had died in January 1936 and been succeeded by Edward VIII, the eldest of his three sons, whom his mother Queen Mary had tried to groom for the throne. But the new King was never crowned and did not even reign for a year.

For love of Wallis Simpson he abdicated on December 12, 1936, in favour of his reluctant brother, the middle one, the sensitive one, always known by the family as 'Bertie' but henceforth by his people as King George VI.

His reign would last just more than 15 years - of which by far the most important were those of World War II. Always in frail health, he was sustained by the energy and immense popularity of his wife - today the Queen Mother - and the attentive love of his adored daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose.

Their family life and childhood had been very different from his own, when he and his brothers were terrified by the sternness and sudden rages of their father.

Bertie was determined that his children's upbringing should be gentler, happier and filled with affection.

George VI was anxious to be seen as the people's King: someone who shared their hardships and privations during the war and whose home life was the source of his strength.

The public had felt some sympathy for his disgraced brother, but when George VI suddenly found himself King, they gradually warmed to him, despite his diffident manner and incapacitating stammer. These disadvantages - which he struggled to overcome - could not conceal his genuine longing to be of use, to make contact with his subjects, to share their wartime hardships and to love and be loved by them.

By the time he died, on February 6, 1952, after a long struggle against lung cancer, people had come to feel that, as someone in the crowds lining the streets put it, 'he'd done his best and made a pretty good job of being King'.

Without question he left the Monarchy a far stronger and more successful institution than he had found it.

At 9.30am, then, on that pale winter morning 45 years ago, the King's coffin - a simple oak casket - was carried by a bearer party from the Brigade of Guards and placed on top of a gun carriage drawn, not by horses, but by 200 naval ratings.

A circle of dazzling white flowers from the Queen Mother, his widow, had been placed beside the priceless emblems of State.

Slowly, carefully, the procession moved off.

THE naval ratings were there for two reasons.

One, because at the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901 the plumed and caparisoned horses - startled perhaps by the crowds - had reared and one broke away.

To avoid any more such accidents, it had been decided that young serving men from the Forces should replace them. The other reason was the late King's well-known love of the sea. He had entered the naval training college at Osborne when he was only 14, going on from there to Dartmouth two years later.

He passed out at 17 and became a midshipman aboard HMS Collingwood. During World War I he had served at the Battle of Jutland, but the ill health that dogged him all his life put a premature end to his naval career.

Nevertheless, it was especially fitting that young naval ratings such as he had once been impeccably turned-out, flawless in their synchronicity - should pull the carriage on its last slow journey through his capital.

As the procession left the precincts of Parliament and emerged into Parliament Square, its shape and order revealed itself.

The gun carriage on which the coffin lay was followed on foot by four royal dukes: the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Gloucester (the late King's younger brother) and his elder brother the Duke of Windsor, wearing the full-dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. His visits to London since his abdication had been rare indeed, possibly because he knew his wife was not welcome. On this occasion, out of respect for his grieving family, she did not accompany him.

The fourth royal Duke was the young Duke of Kent, George VI's nephew. Aged 17, this was his first great public occasion, and from photographs taken that day it seems clear that the royal funeral and the long march past thronging crowds was an ordeal for this shy boy whose upbringing had hitherto been so secluded and private that few in the crowd would have recognised him.

Immediately behind the royal Dukes came a black carriage with darkened windows. Barely visible inside were four royal women.

First, the new Queen - and many a child along the route was ticked off for calling her 'Princess Elizabeth', as she had been until nine days ago.

As she left the portico of Buckingham Palace to step into the carriage, the new Queen had looked isolated and fragile. Her slenderness was accentuated by a full-skirted, narrow-waisted black coat, her frailty by the high heels she always wore to add inches to her height.

With her in the carriage sat her mother - only 52, yet already a widow - her sister, Princess Margaret, and her aunt, the Princess Royal, Princess Mary. All four royal mourners were heavily veiled, yet at moments throughout the day their features could be glimpsed through the folds, poignantly darkened by grief.

Then, as now, it would have been unthinkable to weep in public. Restraint, self-control, dignity, reticence: these were the qualities they prized, whatever their private emotions.

Queen Mary, 85 years old and the mother of George VI, had been advised by her doctors not to attend. She was to die the following year. Later, as the funeral procession made its way along the Mall past her home, Marlborough House, she could be seen standing at a first-floor window: rigidly upright as always, a formidable but not a lovable figure.

Behind their carriage came members of the Royal Household - the usual bewildering courtiers with titles like Gold and Silver Stick in Waiting - followed by eight people whose association with the late King had been especially close, including Earl Mountbatten of Burma and his favourite equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend. He was already, though few were aware of it, beloved by the dazzlingly beautiful 22-year-old Princess Margaret.

AFTER this contingent from the Royal Family and their household the people most personally intimate with the King came members of foreign royalty.

They included seven reigning sovereigns, among them the kings of Sweden, Greece, Denmark and Iraq; three heads of state, three crown princes including a young, infinitely dignified Crown Prince of Ethiopia and Hussein, the young Crown Prince of Jordan.

Then came heads of state including General Eisenhower well-known to the British people for his war role - and members of the British Government (Churchill was Prime Minister; Clement Attlee leader of the Labour Opposition).

Troops lining the route, shoulder to shoulder, presented arms as the cortege passed. Behind them, orderly, silent crowds stood in the cold, paying their final respects. They knew that being a monarch had not come easily to the late King and by their demeanour and presence, caps doffed, heads bowed, hands clasped, children hushed, they were showing their gratitude and - it may not be too strong a word - love.

Many people in the crowd, anonymous but various, united by their desire to pay tribute, to watch the solemn pageantry - in those days before widespread television - to feel patriotic and British, had waited all night to secure a good position, just as they were to do for the Queen's coronation 15 months later.

The following year, in June 1953, I was one of thousands of schoolchildren who lined the coronation route, though I doubt if it ever crossed my mind that, 42 years earlier, my father had watched the coronation of Edward VII, while his father had been alive for that of Queen Victoria.

Thus do our Kings and Queens span the generations, and this perhaps is what draws us to great ceremonial occasions - the sense that we, too, can claim our little piece of history in the great pomp and panorama of ceremonial life.