ENGLAND’S GIPSY QUEEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 September 1933, Page 17 (Supplement)

ENGLAND’S GIPSY QUEEN.

Upon the occasion of the funeral of Mrs. Levi Boswell, the Gipsy “Queen” of England, who died recently in her little bungalow on Brimley Common in Kent at the age of 81, more than 200 gipsies from fair grounds, commons, and encampments all over England journeyed in their caravans to Farmborough to pay their last respects. For Mrs. Levi Boswell was one of the last of the great “Gipsy Lee’s” family and was as much a queen in the Romany quarters of Seville, Warsaw, or Prague as on the open heaths where gipsy folk gather in her adopted country of England, says an overseas paper. As befitted a queen, she had a royal funeral. Six black horses drew a magnificently plumed hearse, and a postillion in his traditional livery of black velvet jockey cap, blue broadcloth coat with four rows of brass buttons, blue cnish breeches, and riding boots mounted the near leader. Two carriages for her two sons, Herbert and Kenza, who have been cripples from birth, and other relatives who could not walk the distance followed the hearse, but the majority of her -clansmen followed on foot. ' Levi, her youngest son, Georgina, a daughter, and old Job Lee, her brother and the last of Gipsy Lee’s family, were also there, but Nora, her favourite daughter, remained in Bromley Hospital. Although many might. think that Nora’s illness hastened her mother’s death, gipsies do not, because by the portents which enabled her to read the future of so many people who met her at race meetings, Henley Regatta, and elsewhere, she had foretold her own death. When her husband, old Levi Boswell, died in the same bungalow in 1924, she said, “I shall die in nine years and it will be cold.” “And believe me it was cold yesterday morning at 7.20 when she died,” said old Job Lee after he had recounted the prophecy of his sister at her husband’s funeral. It was not the only portent. He pointed to a young oak, just bursting its buds, that stood in silhouette against a threatening April sky. “On Friday,” he went on, “my sister said that the storm thrush would sing before her death. It sat in that tree there and sang all Saturday. My sister heard it. On Sunday, when she died, it left and it has not been back since. Nor was it here before Friday. “I knew, too, that her death was not many hours off when I heard the death bird crying in the night of Saturday. You might say it was an owl, but it is a different bird, and you would never see it. No, not if there were 20,000 of you, you wouldn’t see that bird, because it cannot be seen. It is the death j bird.” He paused a moment as if wondering what further confirmation were needed for the mystic prescience of the gipsies. Then he said, “We have not told anyone, yet do you know that we have had telegrams from all over the country saying that people are coming to thfe funeral ? They know when she died. They did not need to be told.” Mrs. Boswell was buried with her dresses, but she herself was in a shroud, only, with her black and grey ringlets falling over her shoulders. Old as she was, her hair was far from white. Yet she had many troubles and pains in her life.