CLASS OF 1968 REUNION
ON QUEEN VICTORIA’S MAJESTIC GRIEF :
IN RESPONSE TO LES NORTON
It is so important to remember Our Dear Queen and her great works, and I am
honoured to speak of her contribution to my specialty of psychiatry.
The Queen was the 19 Century prototype for pathological mourning reactions,
and this needs to be remembered. Forget that Austro-Hungarian Professor
Freud and his floozies. It was Victoria that was the very model of young
aristocratic women of grace, beauty and intelligence (oh yes, I am a loyalist!);
of women who suffer catastrophic bereavements and who either waste away, or
recommit themselves heroically to public life and good works. As Henry
Ponsonby, the Queen’s Personal Secretary says at the beginning of “Mrs.
Brown” – that great movie – “We are all prisoners of the Queen’s grief”.
She set the gold standard for how to grieve and we are still awed by her
example. Without her we would not have dressing in black, or BBC soap
operas, or perhaps, even, grief counsellors. Although of grief counsellors I’m
not sure : they get into everything. There is a New Yorker Cartoon. Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are on a hill looking down at a cloud of dust in
the distance. Butch points and says to Sandance: “Umm, could be buzzards,
could be grief counsellors.”
But this was not enough for our dear Queen. She did not appear in public for
2½ years after Albert’s death, and wailed and moaned without stopping,
refusing to see anyone but her children and close advisors. She ordered a
photograph of Albert’s corpse lying in State to be hung above his pillow on
their bed, wherever she slept, with a clean nightshirt of her husband’s placed
beside her. This continued until the end of her life. No object was shifted from
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its position in Prince Albert’s chamber, and servants were supplied with photos
of all angles of the rooms, so objects could be placed after dusting exactly as
before.
Her specialty was mourning jewellery, especially hair jewellery; she wore a
piece of jewellery made from Albert’s hair every day after his death. This
became very fashionable for widows. Surprisingly it has not lasted and
fortunately she did not use other body parts.
The 52 women who served her were all fitted in black, yards and yards for
dresses, scarves and ribbon. This revived the Manchester economy. She wore a
crinoline gown that never changed in design for the next forty years of her life.
This was grief on a heroic scale. I hesitate to call it pathological. Majestic is
more the word.
Not everyone thought so. Charles Dickens, noting the ever present memorials,
wrote to a friend: “If you should meet with an inaccessible cave anywhere in
the neighbourhood to which a hermit should retire from the memory of Prince
Albert, let me know of it”.
She was the ultimate challenge to grief counselling, and the whole of the
Empire participated, establishing a tradition that continues to this day. She did
seem to respond eventually to the rough ministrations of John Brown and
Benjamin Disraeli, but I would have just given SSRI’s, if I could find one with a
royal enough name. Or even ECT. She would have remained not amused.
But her grief reaction had a very positive side: she so identified with Albert,
that she became a master politician herself, overcoming a previous dislike of
politics. George Bernard-Shaw had commented that “nowadays a parlourmaid
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as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be
classed as mentally defective”. Irish swine, what could you expect. She
would have dismissed him just like she put the mighty Gladsone in his place.
“He speaks to me like I am a public meeting.” That finished him.
She continued Prince Albert’s political agenda and steadied the empire. After
he died she stated “my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision is that HIS wishes,
HIS views about everything are to become MY Law”. What a woman: where
do you find wives like that! However Albert, great liberal that he was, only
went so far … and a good thing too.
George V, her grandson recorded in his diary in 1924 after Ramsay McDonald’s
appointment as Prime Minister: “Today 23 years ago Grand Mama died. I
wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government”. What indeed,
except she never met Tony Blair.
Queen Victoria was the embodiment of the greatness of the British Empire, the
empire on which the sun never set, and it is fitting that we remember her here
tonight at the Royal St. Kilda Yacht Club, in her colony (the richest in the
empire), justly named after her, Victoria.
So we would like to honour her memory by inaugurating and award to the
member of the class of 1968 who has most upheld the Victorian values of
empire, loyalty, majestic respect, prodigious ability to work and good
fellowship. To Les Norton.
Les, if you could come up and receive your award from our class artist, Neil
Phillips. Neil has, this afternoon sculpted a delicate statue of Queen Victoria.
We treated her by microwave, which was the closest we could get to ECT, or
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, the latest treatment for depression. Neil
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didn’t have time to fashion the crinoline dress, so Les, you now have the first
and only nude statue of Queen Victoria. Congratulations and thanks.
Brian Stagoll
Royal St. Kilda Yacht Club
18th November, 2003