Queen Victoria’s diary shows she also asked for ‘no fuss’ on record day
THE QUEEN is following the example of her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria with the insistence that there be no official celebration of her recordbreaking day.
Victoria surpassed her grandfather George III’s reign of 59 years, 96 days on Sept 23, 1896, when she was staying at Balmoral, as will be our own Queen.
On a day of atrocious weather, which carried on until late afternoon, Victoria spent the morning indoors then “took a short drive” before tea with her granddaughter Alix, Princess of Hesse and by Rhine.
She wrote in her diary: “Today is the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English Sovereign & the people wished to make all sorts of demonstrations, which I asked them not to do, until I had completed the 60 years, next June.
“But notwithstanding that this was made public in the papers, people of all kinds & ranks, from every part of the Kingdom, sent congratulatory telegrams & they kept coming in all day. They were all most loyally expressed & some very prettily.”
At dinner that night she was joined by 21 guests, all of whom she listed in her diary. They included relations, their ladies in waiting and secretaries, and four senior military men.
After dinner she chatted to some of her guests about “public affairs” and was told the “satisfactory news” by the Sirdar, or commander of the Britishcontrolled Egyptian Army, that he had occupied Dongola in Sudan and “the Dervishes had all fled on seeing the army approach”.
Victoria managed to avoid any sort of official engagements on the day she set her record, instead combining the occasion with her Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897.
Unlike the Queen, who remains fit and active at the age of 89, Victoria, who was 77, was so frail by then that she could not get out of her carriage for the celebratory service at St Paul’s Cathedral, which instead was held in the open air around her. Victoria also wrote in her diary about a train journey on the very same route that the Queen is travelling today as she opens a reestablished line from Edinburgh to Tweedbank.
On Aug 21, 1867, Victoria and her family travelled from Windsor to Kelso in the Borders to stay at Floors Castle, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe, where she stayed for two nights.
Victoria travelled on the Waverley line, which ran from Carlisle to Edinburgh, part of which has been used for the route of the new Scottish Borders Railway.
At Hawick, she wrote, “we slowed down, the people having begged this & where there were great crowds … the country everywhere, extremely pretty, finely wooded & rich cultivation”. It was, she said, “a beautiful morning, & very mild”.
Her beloved Prince Albert had died
‘The people wished to make demonstrations, which I asked them not to do, until I had completed the 60 years’
six years earlier, and she wrote: “The feeling of loneliness, & arriving as a poor widow, for the 1rst time on this kind of visit, reminding me so of former times, made me very low.”
Victoria’s diaries, which she began when she was 13, are contained in 124 books, of which only 13 originals survive.
The remaining 111 volumes, covering the entire period of Victoria’s reign, were edited and transcribed by her youngest daughter, Beatrice, who then destroyed the originals, on the instructions of her late mother.
She removed any material that she thought might be offensive to other family members or which was deemed trivial or not suitable for public consumption.
The task took her 30 years and she edited out so much material that the edited version was only a third the size of the original.