The world marvelled that all this was realized so vividly by humble village people all over the Empire. They put it down entirely to the influence of the wireless; and if I had not re-read my diary of 1901, I too should have said that never before had we experienced anything at all like it. But I found that what I then wrote might almost have been a record of those days in January thirty-five years later. In 1901 I wrote that every cottage seemed plunged in personal sorrow, and that Mrs. Gale, a woman of eighty years old living in an almshouse, said to me: ‘I think the Queen wer’ just overwhelmed wi’ this war, and seeing Lord Roberts last week brought it all home to her.’ She had spoken as if Queen Victoria belonged to her own family. And then, when George V died, in 1936, an old-age pensioner said to me: ‘It’s hard to lose a dear friend.’
I am horrified to discover how much older I am than most writers. I seem to be completely out of date. Almost everyone who wrote about the death of King George was either a child or a baby in arms when he succeeded; and none of them knew Queen Victoria except by hearsay. They made up their minds that when the Queen died, the world would doubtless have felt her death to be the end of an epoch, but they were convinced that her people as individuals had no sense of personal loss. They said that this had to be, because the Queen for many years had lived in such retirement that nobody could possibly have thought of her as anything but a crowned and honoured mummy.
My diary in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign gives a very different impression. We were all very much aware of the Queen. A year or two before her death I said to my father’s old friend Sidney Meade that I could not bear to think of outliving the Queen: to which he replied, rather heartlessly as it seemed to me: ‘ Then you’ll have to die pretty quick.’ I remember being welcomed when I went to visit a racy old Wiltshire woman with the words: ‘I couldn’t be more pleased if ’ee wer’ Queen Vic herself.’ It was the natural phrase which leapt to her lips. And when the Queen died three weeks after the beginning of the twentieth century, an old farmer said to me: ‘The end of the century seemed to mean nothing at all. The end of the Queen is the end of everything.’
We first heard that the Queen was ill on January 19th, when the papers said that she was not well and would stay indoors, but that afternoon Lord Pembroke went to Osborne because she was much worse. After that, we somehow got news many times during the day, for I wrote in my diary on Sunday that ‘the Queen’s illness was hanging over us like a dark fog’ and that she ‘varied every hour’. All the 21st we were ‘in a ferment of anxiety about the Queen’, and on the 22nd, ‘we tried not to believe the bad bulletins that came’. That evening, just after eight o’clock when we were having dinner, we very surprisingly got ‘ a telephone message’ (from whom I cannot say) telling us that the Queen had died at six-thirty. Telephones were then evidently looked upon with great suspicion, for we refused to believe the invisible speaker, till a telegram came from Lord Pembroke with the same news, ‘and then the church bell began to toll at once’. I wrote that night: ‘It is impossible to believe. Impossible. Will people in after days ever realize a quarter of what those awful words mean to us? The Queen is dead.’
The next morning every man and woman in Wilton from the highest to the lowest appeared in mourning—such deep, overwhelming black too. In these days no one has ever seen such blackness.
Only a few of these black-robed people stood round the market cross to hear the Mayor proclaim King Edward VII, which he did in ‘a melancholy voice, ending with God Save the Queen.’ The crowd shouted ‘King’ but nobody knew whether they ought to cheer or not, till a doleful cornet struck up the National Anthem, and then everybody joined in.
Queen Victoria was buried on February 2nd, and on the previous day her coffin was brought from Osborne to London. We watched the beautiful sea pageant from Southsea Castle. The day was absolutely still and the Solent was veiled in a thin frosty mist such as Turner would have liked to paint. An avenue of huge black battleships indicated the funeral route, and in the still air the smoke from their minute guns hung overhead in billows of golden brown. It was late afternoon and the sun was already low in the sky, its pale rays throwing upon the sea a miraculous path of faint gold light upon which the procession was to pass. A dense crowd stood on the beach. Everyone in black. Everyone completely silent. They seemed not human. Down the golden way came eight destroyers all dead black; and following them, came alone
