In the winter of his 70 years King George received last week from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin these philosophic observations: "It is an inescapable fact of humanity, if life be prolonged, that one by one is taken away—brother or sister—one who shares those common memories of childhood, the home, and whose loss nothing in this world can replace. As we get older it is inevitable that the loneliness that so often comes with age must increase; and it must be a solemn day when the last one is taken from us to whom we could say, 'Do you remember this or that which happened in those early days when we all were young and carefree together?' "
This was sympathetic Squire Baldwin's bumbling way of conveying to His Majesty an expression of the Cabinet's grief on learning that not even Lord Dawson of Penn, who saved George V's life seven years ago, had been able to save the King's elder sister, H. R. H. Princess Victoria, who died last week (TIME, Dec. 9).
Favorite grandchild and namesake of Queen Victoria, the princess had been known all her life in the Royal Family as "Toria," suffered incessantly from various complaints, and had never married because, in the Victorian phrase, "her beloved was of less than royal station." King George called her his "sweetest sister." She gravely and dutifully aided that merry monarch Edward VII as his personal secretary until his death. Then, with her beautiful and imperious mother, the Dowager Queen Alexandra, she passed into even more dutiful retirement, became "Alexandra's shadow." Not until she was 57 did Princess Victoria ever have a house of her own, and then she bought it chiefly as a place of retirement for her late mother's faithful female servants. Last fortnight they were still serving the Sweetest Sister when Sister Maud, Queen of Norway, arrived to sit by dying Sister Victoria's bed. Of greatly beloved though little known Princess "Toria," the London Press recorded last week that she once played before Paderewski, that she said something to Mark Twain which made the great humorist laugh and that as a little boy the present Edward of Wales spoke of her as a "deucedly funny aunt."
Immediately upon the death of H. R. H. Victoria every flag in the British Empire went to half staff; the honeymooning Duke & Duchess of Gloucester canceled a shooting trip; peers put away their golden coronets, peeresses their tiaras and Parliament was opened in drab mourning. For the first time British historians could remember since the Guy Fawkes plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 those decorative warriors, the Yeomen of the Guard, did not make last week their traditional search of the cellars of Parliament before it convened to make sure that no explosives had been hidden there. Parliament opened quietly with the Lord High Chancellor, Douglas McGarel Hogg, 1st Viscount Hailsham, reading the King's Speech of grieving George V. This began: "My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, I deeply regret I am not addressing you in person."