A right royal Mrs Smith...
QUESTION Did Queen Victoria use an assumed name when she stayed in European hotels?
Queen Victoria often used a pseudonym when travelling unofficially — usually the Countess of Balmoral or sometimes the Countess of Lancaster.
It’s said that when at Balmoral, she would fantasise she was an ordinary person and so instructed the servants to act as though she was part of the furniture if they encountered her.
In her journal, Queen Victoria describes how, in September 1860, she and Prince Albert used pseudonyms on a journey to Grantown-on-Spey. ‘We had decided to call ourselves Lord and Lady Churchill and party, Lady Churchill passing as Miss Spencer and General Grey as Dr Grey!
‘Brown once forgot this and called me Your Majesty as I was getting into the carriage; and Grant on the box once called Albert Your Royal Highness, which set us off laughing, but no one observed it.’
Albert’s death a year later sent Victoria into a deep depression. She rarely appeared in public and wore black for the remaining 40 years of her life.
In 1868, in an attempt to restore her mood, she decided to take a tour of Switzerland. This destination was chosen because Albert had a deep fondness for the country — in 1855, he had famously imported a replica Swiss chalet to Britain for their children to play in.
The trip took years to plan and Victoria used the name the Countess of Kent. Her nom de plume did not pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. The ‘countess’ arrived with an extensive entourage, three of her children, mountains of luggage marked ‘VR’ (Victoria Regina) and her close retainer, a kilted John Brown, in tow.
By the time she arrived at the railway station in Lucerne, there were hundreds of well-wishers. Adoring crowds followed wherever she went.
Victoria’s five-week trip is credited with kick-starting the Swiss tourism industry, and there are still more than 20 hotels called Victoria across the country.
From the 1880s, it became Victoria’s habit to take a spring holiday on the Continent, leaving in March and returning three or four weeks later. Her favourite destination was the South of France: Aix-les-Bains, Biarritz, Grasse and, in later years, nice.
In 1891, she travelled to Grasse with an entourage of 39 that included Princesses Beatrice and Louise, Prince Henry, her doctor Sir James Reid, private secretary Major-General Sir Henry Ponsonby, courtier Arthur Bigge, Lady Churchill, Woman of the Bedchamber Marie Adeane, a detective and various servants — Highlanders, Indians, dressers, maids and a French chef.
On other holidays, Victoria was accompanied by 100 companions and servants.
The novelist Samuel Butler felt there was an inner yearning in Victoria to be incognito: ‘The Queen travels as the Countess of Balmoral and would probably be very glad, if she could, to travel as plain Mrs Smith. There is a good deal of the Queen lurking in every Mrs Smith and, conversely, a good deal of Mrs Smith lurking in every queen.’
Cathy Harris, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.
QUESTION Were words later set to Tony Osborne And His Orchestra’s tune The Windows Of Paris?
MY FATHER Tony Osborne’s composition The Windows Of Paris was the theme tune of the BBC Light Programme’s popular daily drive-time show Roundabout in the late 1950s.
It was an instrumental, but words were later written by no less a lyricist than the brilliant Johnny Mercer. He rhymed Paris with Polaris. The song was reportedly recorded by Bing Crosby, but I’ve never been able to track down a copy.
Mercer wrote the lyrics to more than 1,500 songs, many of them u.S. classics such as Moon River, Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive, Days Of Wine And Roses, Autumn Leaves and Hooray For Hollywood. They are collected in Knopf’s The Complete Lyrics Of Johnny Mercer.
Dad’s tune won him one of two Ivor novello Awards — the other was for The Secrets Of The Seine. When I later won an Ivor novello for my lyrics on Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, we became the only father-and-son winners.
Gary Osborne, Angmering-on-Sea, W. Sussex.
QUESTION What is the lowest number of votes received by a candidate in a General Election?
DR FReDeRIC Richard Lees was a temperance advocate and vegetarian. In 1860 he stood for election in Ripon on a Chartist ticket, but failed to register a single vote, the only candidate to have achieved this unwelcome feat.
The Chartist movement called for political reform at a time when less than 10 per cent of the population were eligible to vote. The number of registered electors in Ripon was just 343, with 187 voting for the Liberal candidate.
In 2005, singer-songwriter Catherine Taylor-Dawson, standing for the Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket party, polled a single vote in the Cardiff north by-election. She did not vote for herself as she was not registered in the constituency. She lost her £500 deposit, but gained publicity by singing on stage.
Bobby Smith, a fathers’ rights activist and founder of the Give Me Back elmo party, polled just three votes in June 2017, standing against Theresa May in her Maidenhead constituency.
At the 2019 General election, William Tobin, a retired astronomy lecturer, stood against Boris Johnson in uxbridge and South Ruislip to promote voting rights for expats.
He did not vote for himself because he was aiming to gain publicity for receiving no votes. However, he got five votes — fewer than Lord Buckethead (125), Count Binface (69) and Yace Interplanetary Time Lord Yogenstein (23).
K. Murray, Darlington, Co. Durham.
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