Life-long friendships: Treasure them, for they are rare and wonderful

“'Tis the set of the sails / And not the gales / That tells the way we go”

By any measure, 50 years of friendship is something — something to cherish, to nurture, to celebrate. I am fortunate to have a friendship that has endured over five decades. Jennifer and I met in high school (in Edmonton) where I was the new kid, just moved from England, a bit gawky and awkward with my big glasses, goofy hair, and strong British accent. As I recall it, she opened the conversation, I responded, and we have been friends ever since.

Fifty years is a long time, but not as long as 72 years.

Last Thursday evening, I was in the company of three women who met in 1953 and who remain friends to this day. They were part of the "coronation girls" — 50 young Canadian women, sponsored by Garfield Weston to attend Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in London. They came from all across Canada, meeting on the train that picked them up from west to east. Then the transatlantic voyage on the "Empress of France", disembarking in Liverpool for the coach trip to London where, on Coronation Day, they saw the Queen ride past them in her golden carriage.

After London, their 7-week trip continued with visits to Scotland, Ireland and France jam-packed with dinners, museums, art galleries, theatre, and opera. It was Weston’s way of opening the world for the young women, just 16 or 17 years old at the time, wanting them to be “part of something bigger than [themselves]”. “It was like a fairytale,” said one of them — “magical, life changing”. Another said, the experience touched her deeply, though she didn’t process the whole of it until later.

That is often the way enormous experiences go, I think. The young women came together by chance, each selected as an outstanding contributor to their school, but were bonded by their common experience of the extraordinary trip.

When it was over, they got on with their lives — marriage, children, work. Until 50 years later, when one of them organized their first reunion in 2003 to mark the 50th year since the trip. They’ve had many more since then, with 25 of the original 50 “girls” still in touch with each other today. In 2023, 12 of them returned to London for a reunion tour. They even had tea at Buckingham Palace! It’s a remarkable story, captured in a new documentary titled Coronation Girls, to be released in Canada in October (currently viewable via PBS in the States). Last Thursday, I attended a preview of the film, when Manitoba’s Lieutenant Governor hosted an evening with the film’s director and three of the “girls”, now in their late 80s.

The film brought me to tears, not only because of what the young women experienced on the original trip, but because of who they became over time, in large part, because of the expansive experience of that trip. I am not referring to professional accomplishments, though they are plenty, I’m sure, including Eleanor Duckworth, who became a professor at Harvard. No. What I am referring to is the nature and the value of the relationships formed and maintained between them over the decades. We should all be so lucky as to have friends who know us over seven decades: “Our bonds of friendship grew over the years,” one of them said on Thursday, then quoted this about friendship: “It is the purest of endeavours. One’s journey into the heart without ever knowing the destination.”

Douglas Arrowsmith, the film’s director, is fascinated by memory and friendship, saying that the film is about “how friendship saves us, transports us…. It's the long friendships and those little constellations of long friendships that we surround ourselves with that keep us together as individuals.” One of the women said, “Together, we remember and are the younger versions of ourselves.”

And, I think, that is the magic and the mystery, maybe, of long-lasting friendships: While Jennifer and I are now in our mid-sixties, we know each other, also, as our 16-year-old selves putting on plays in high school, learning how to smoke (her mother’s pilfered menthol cigarettes) and driving our parents’ cars (sometimes not that well). We bring all that knowledge, all the forgiveness afforded over time, and all those memories to bear when we see each other these days.

Coronation Girls captures a piece of Canadian history, the country's connections across the Atlantic, and the deep loving that the women who met in 1953 continue to experience for each other in 2025, more than seven decades later. Now that is friendship, indeed.

Watch a CBC News piece here. Follow the film on Facebook or read about it here and here.

NOTE: The caption under the photo (top) is from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox; the words are engraved on the medallions that were presented by Garfield Weston to each of the "coronation girls" at the beginning of their trip. The medallion was maybe easier to wear than those words were to live up to. One of the women says in the film that she has "felt guilty about not achieving what we were supposed to until later in life". That is something to ponder, I think: the expectations laid out for us (however innocently) and our ability (or interest) to realize them over time. At what price do we keep in view a horizon not chosen by ourselves...

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash