THE SEA KING'S DAUGHTER

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 57, 8 March 1923, Page 6

THE SEA KING'S DAUGHTER

Sixty years ago the Royal yacht Victoria and Albert steamed up the Thames to Gravesend. The shores of the river were black with people to see it approach, and everything that would float was filled with people, too, as the yacht came to its berthing. All eyes were fixed upon a girl, not yet 19, simply dressed in white. As she landed the cheers were deafening. Sixty young girls, all niaidens of Kent, strewed flowers in her path from the steamer to the train, and an English earl drove the locomotive to London. There hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets, and the cheering as her carriage passed was, as chroniclers record, like the roaring of the sea. The young girl was the Princess Alexandra, daughter of Christian, King of Denmark. She was on her way to be married to Albert Edward, who became King of England and Emperor of India. That was all sixty years ago. What great changes that gracious ladyhas witnessed is common knowledge, and some of them changes unthinkable on 7th March, 1563. There is something pathetic in the stepping out of a princess from the comparative cpol and cloistral life in which she dwells into the fierce glare of publicity in which queens move and have their being. But Queen Alexandra, doomed as she was from that day sixty years ago to a life of symbolism, has always retained the popularity, one might say affection, of the English people, so freely given her when she landed at Gravesend on her way to the altar rails. She has had her share of sorrow, and her cup of joy, at times, must have been full and running over. She was one of the best of wives, and the way in which she discharged her duties as a mother are to be s,een reflepted in her son, and.seem to have been passed by him to his sons. Queen Alexandra, although she does not look it in person and in her portraits, is 78; nevertheless, she ,still holds the respect and admiration for her high personal worth of people of every section in the British Empire.