On Thursday, October 28, 1954, nearly 18 months after her Coronation at Westminster Abbey, Queen Elizabeth II made a state visit to Bradford with her husband.

It was part of a nationwide tour, and followed state visits lasting nearly six months to 11 Empire and Commonwealth countries.

On the Wednesday, the royal couple had been in South Yorkshire. They arrived in Bradford just after noon by car, a maroon Rolls Royce, via Morley and Wakefield Road. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, had been in town five years earlier, to open Bradford Grammar School’s new buildings on Manningham Lane.

The sky was grey and blue when he returned with the Queen. Thousands had been waiting on bunting-lined streets and smoke-blackened rooftops since 10am. Street traders couldn’t sell enough Union Jacks.

Bradford was used to big crowds. On May 4, the world’s biggest-ever crowd for a rugby league match, 102,575, had filled Bradford Northern’s Odsal Stadium to watch Warrington beat Halifax 8-4 in the Challenge Cup Final replay. Bradford Corporation’s chief engineer Stanley Wardley had dreams of turning Odsal into the “Wembley of the North”.

Preparations for the royal visit, the first since 1942 when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth toured wartime Bradford, had been going on for weeks. The Town Hall, as it was called then, had been scrubbed and cleaned and the silverware polished. Lunch had been laid on a horseshoe of flower-topped tables for 50. They were having turtle soup; roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, peas, asparagus and potatoes; fruit salad and cream; cheese, biscuits and coffee. While the guests chatted and ate, they were serenaded by the Bradford Schools’ Chamber Orchestra.

Such was the splendour of the table that the following day the public was invited in to gaze at it. The small admission fee was donated to the United Nations International Emergency Fund for Children.

The visit must have been cheering, coming at a time when the memories of austerity, principally rationing, were still fresh. Some goods were in short supply due to a protracted dockworkers’ strike over working hours and working conditions. At its height, more than 42,000 dockers from Southampton to Hull were idle.

In spite of the cost of emergency measures, the country’s balance of payments was £154 million in surplus. Perhaps a tribute to the regime of Sir Winston Churchill, in his last year as prime minister before a stroke forced his retirement from public life; although historians say the grand old man was more concerned about the survival of what was left of the Empire and the Commonwealth.

Among the people in town that Thursday was 17-year-old David Hockney. In 1954 he was in his second year at Bradford Art College, dropping in at the subterranean Students’ Club near the Alhambra in the evening and attending concerts at St George’s Hall on Saturday nights.

Fifty-eight years ago, Bradford people lived in a world of Burton tailoring, washed their clothes in Omo and paid their annual rates either to Bradford City Council or one of the unitary Urban District Councils.

On Manningham Lane, 18 years before decimal currency came in, Busby’s store was offering Easiclere electric washing machines for £34 and 16 shillings (£34.80). Brown, Muff’s store on Market Street, ‘the store for men’, was selling Smedley’s Plumbline winter underwear. For eight shillings and sixpence (42.5p) a man could buy a pair of Byflex crimp nylon and wool stretch socks.

Swan Arcade, the Mechanics’ Institute, Exchange Station (where the Crown Court building is) and all of historic Forster Square looked out on the occasion. The 1956 Clean Air Act, which was to remove a vast amount of darkening, bronchitic sulphur dioxide from the atmosphere, had not yet revealed the pale gold beauty of Yorkshire sandstone.

It was a world in which local affairs were administered locally and the fur-robed Lord Mayor of Bradford was an alderman, H J White. The education committee agreed that its capital budget for the financial year 1955/56 should be £653,000.

Bradford City’s chairman, Herbert Munro, had announced a trading profit of £2,570, reducing the club’s overall deficit to £5,394.

After lunch, the royal party was driven to the cricket ground at Bradford Park Avenue to be sung to by 30,000 schoolchildren. The adjacent professional football ground was the home of Bradford Park Avenue, who finished the 1954/55 season in 16th place in the Third Division North. Bradford City were to finish five places below them. The national side suffered its biggest-ever defeat, 7-1 away to the ‘Magical Magyars’ of Hungary.

The final stop of the royal visit was Perseverance Mills, Dudley Hill, where several hundred millworkers gave the Queen and Duke “a cheering reception”, according to the evening edition of the T&A (a broadsheet costing twopence, or 1p).

The paper reported: “Sheep pens had been built in the mill and a special tank sunk in the floor, and there the Queen and the Duke watched while three sheep were dipped and new marking fluid applied. A marked fleece was put through a scouring machine to show that although resistant to rain, the fluid was easily washed out.”

Five-and-a-half hours after it began, the state visit ended. The Queen and Prince Philip were driven to decorated Manningham Station to catch the royal train, where they were greeted by 55-year-old stationmaster Arthur Allott. Mr Allott, 41 years on the railways, was attired in new uniform, top coat and peaked cap.