Firstly a committee of administration was formed and then the Council allocated certain specific responsibilities to various individuals. As for the past four years I had been directing the state-sponsored theatres, I was given the artistic direction of the ceremonies and responsibility for the street decorations as well as for the interior of the coronation church itself.

It was a fearful task, for all sorts of reasons. At first it was planned to hold the coronation before Christmas: then it was postponed until 28 December … and then postponed again until the thirtieth. This was the last date possible for it seemed that for the country’s finance laws to be legally valid they must receive the royal assent, and, for the royal assent to be legally valid, the king must be crowned and in full possession of his prerogatives. We therefore had just twenty-six days in which to get ready, twenty-six days in the depths of winter, with snow, ice and frost and barely eight hours of daylight; and all this in wartime when the only available materials were those which happened by some chance to remain stored in the warehouses, and the labour was restricted to those artists too old or infirm to be defending their country upon some distant battlefield.

I was lucky with the artists and could not have wished for more willing or more competent assistants. Only at one point did I encounter any difficulty.

It was a tradition that at the coronation the country should offer the new ruler the symbolic gift of thousands of pieces of gold, the coins being placed for these purposes in an ornate coffer specially commissioned for each occasion (the gold itself appeared only briefly at the time of its official handing-over to the sovereign; it was returned to the state bank immediately after the ceremony). The case was ordered to be made by Bachruch the jeweller, and Professor Zutt, an art teacher, offered to provide the designs. His first sketches were dreadful, completely shapeless and undistinguished and no more Hungarian in style than if they had been done by some savage islander from Fiji. Of course Professor Zutt was from Switzerland and so probably thought that his ideas faithfully reproduced the old Hungarian local colour. Three or four times he was asked to produce new designs … and each time they were uglier than the last. After two weeks’ struggle the jeweller announced that on that very day he would not undertake the work. I had no idea what to do. From sheer necessity I sat down and made a design myself, placing special emphasis on two silver angels to be modelled in relief and which I had no doubts would be superbly carried out, on time, by my friend the sculptor Ede Telcs.

Zutt lost his temper and returned in a pique to Switzerland.

Our workshop was established in Disz Square, in one of those large storage buildings pointed out by the big toe of Zala’s statue of the angel. There, in front of the military memorial was our headquarters: workshop, offices, design shops, everything. It was unheated and very cold but magnificently lit from great high windows.

Inside life soon became quite unreal.

In the longest room trestle tables had been set up where the architects and designers Dénes Györgyi, Károlyi Kós, Pogány and sometimes Lechner made their designs and drew their plans on paper with giant rulers. On the high wall behind them young Lehoczky drew the outlines of coats of arms seven metres high. While all this was going on, the corners of the room were filled with craftsman kneading papier-mâché and making outsize plaster casts. In rooms nearby statues were being hurriedly run up on skeletons made of wooden lathes nailed together, and so quickly was the work being carried out that it seemed as if the figures were gaining weight as each day went by. At one end of the hall typewriters clattered without interruption. Nearby there were heaps of felt and samples of cotton and velvet and, beside them, boxes filled with modelling clay, slabs of plasticine, pails of plaster of Paris; and, to get from one doorway to another, one had to pick one’s way between piles of glue-smeared strips of paper.

It was a weird mixture of medieval sorcerer’s cavern and some disordered builder’s shed, and if anyone unfamiliar with our work had come in unawares he must have thought he had stumbled into an asylum where raving lunatics were incarcerated and where each and everyone of them were indulging in their own private manias, absorbed in drawing, modelling, and hammering away while no one cared what they were doing or attempted to stop them.

In this sorcerer’s kitchen my somewhat comic role was that of Head Cook who stuck his nose into every pan and sipped at every brew. This was all I could do, but do it I had to, for the ultimate responsibility for every detail rested with me, and I was sure to be blamed afterwards (as indeed I was) if anything did not go as planned. My task was to assemble and coordinate the whole, to bring harmony to every phase of the coronation, to provide the continuous frame in which the ceremonies were to be clothed. Accordingly I was obliged to put my finger into every pie, to meddle with every craftsman’s concerns.

During these four weeks I lived only for the work in hand and therefore knew very little of what was going on in the world outside. Despite being a member of parliament, I really know very little about all the discussions that raged over the appointment of the Palatine whose duty was to carry the crown until it was placed on the king’s head. This was not merely a battle of words. The opposition parties were so united in their determination that the post should not go to Tisza, who sprang from a family of the minor nobility, that they brought forth an archduke as a rival candidate. And when Archduke Joseph demurred and refused to be named, in view of the controversy, they put forward a hundred unexpected names, some of them of the most venerable elderly gentlemen of whose existence no one had heard for decades and who must themselves have been astonished to read their names in the newspapers in such a connection.

Tisza’s appointment was also attacked in other ways. Someone invented the slogan ‘a Protestant cannot hold the crown’ and learned historians and lawyers were mobilized to produce evidence to clinch the matter. Rumour had it that a ruling would come from the very highest ranks of the church and state to prove their point. As it happened it was the Prince-Cardinal Csernoch whose verdict settled the dispute; and decided in favour of Count Tisza.