There is a particular kind of Australian who leaves the country a farm boy and returns a legend, and does so without ever losing the flat vowels or the disinclination to make a fuss about it. Jim Frecklington was one of these. He died on Friday, aged 76, in Manly, the harbourside Sydney suburb he made his own for half a century, and the news has landed with the quiet thud of an era ending. For the better part of sixty years, Jim was, by any reasonable measure, the finest coachbuilder in the world. He would have been mortified to hear it put so plainly, which is rather the point.
He was born in 1949 on a farm outside Parkes, in the flat gold country of central-western New South Wales, a long way from Windsor Castle in every sense that matters except, as it turned out, the professional one. After school at The Scots College, he did what a certain kind of restless young Australian man did in those days: he went to the Arctic, and then, having presumably decided that the cold had not been bracing enough, he went to England. It was there, at Windsor and later at the Royal Mews in London, that he found his life’s work — caring for the Royal ceremonial horses and driving the carriages at state occasions, a job description that sounds like something out of a children’s book and was, in fact, entirely real.
In 1977 he came home to manage the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Exhibition as it toured Australia, and it was around this time that the coachbuilder in him properly emerged. He built a replica of Edward VII’s 1902 State Landau, and then, in 1988, the Australian State Coach — presented to Queen Elizabeth II for the Bicentenary and built, fittingly, out in Dubbo, a fair distance from anywhere one might expect to find a state coach under construction in a top-secret workshop. It is the kind of detail that tells you everything about how this country does grand things: with enormous skill and very little ceremony about the skill itself.
The coach that will secure his reputation for good, however, is the Diamond Jubilee State Coach — the ‘Britannia’, as it is sometimes known — which Jim conceived and saw built, and which first carried the monarch at the State Opening of Parliament in 2014. It rolled out again for King Charles III’s coronation in 2023, gliding past Buckingham Palace with all the weight of history and rather more in the way of modern engineering than anyone watching would have guessed. Jim had a habit of hiding twenty-first-century ingenuity inside eighteenth-century silhouettes, and getting away with it entirely.
He was, by the time of his death, at work on a new coach for King Charles — The Commonwealth Coach, its roofline carrying figures representing all fifty-six member states, its cabin quietly stuffed with artefacts including a Churchill coin and a fragment of timber salvaged from Westminster Abbey after the Blitz. The whole enterprise was conducted, as ever, with the secrecy of a minor state operation, out of his discreet workshop in Manly. Members of the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy were fortunate enough to get a preview in 2025, when Jim and his wife put on tea and a tour, showing off work that was, by then, very nearly finished. Every piece of every coach he built — this one included — he crafted or commissioned himself. No committees, no subcontractors, just one man’s extraordinary and slightly obsessive hands.
Those who knew him in Manly describe a man impossible to miss and equally impossible to intimidate — forthright was the word used by his old friend Darren Jones, a former Warringah Shire mayor, and it is exactly right. Jim was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order and awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, honours that sat, one suspects, rather lightly on a man who introduced himself as a bloke from Parkes who’d learned to build carts.
It falls to remarkably few tradesmen to shape the pageantry of an entire monarchy, fewer still to do it twice, across two reigns, from a shed on Sydney’s northern beaches. Jim Frecklington managed it with a craftsman’s patience and, from everything one hears, a very Australian refusal to be impressed with himself about it. The Commonwealth Coach he leaves nearly finished will, when it finally rolls out, carry rather more than fifty-six nations’ worth of symbolism. It will carry Jim too — and Manly, and Parkes, and a great deal of Australian cheek, dressed up in gilt and doing an excellent impression of solemnity.
Vale, Jim. The realm is considerably better upholstered for your having been in it.