On 20 May, 1910, Edward VII is buried at Windsor and in Sussex, a best-selling author and poet writes to his son, at school. “Dear old man, This has been one of the most wonderful days that ever I remember. In the first place it was the first day of real summer weather – hot but not too hot with a wind that drove away the thunder-clouds.
“In the second place it was more of a Sunday than anything you could imagine. Last night was hot and sultry with bright white lightning, winking and flashing far away towards the East; now and then one heard (I was up about 2am to listen to it) a low growl of thunder and then the rain fell as a steady warm drip,” he writes in Oh Beloved Kids: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to His Children, edited by Elliot Gilbert (1983).
“I was afraid it might turn to storm by daylight and so spoil all the arrangements for the funeral procession through London but it all cleared away by morning and from eight or nine o’clock everything was as perfect as it could be.”
But, he goes on: “The stillness all over the fields and in the air was much deeper than the ordinary stillness of a Sunday. Nobody was in the fields; no one was driving sheep or cattle so one did not hear any distant lowing or bleating; nobody was driving a horse or getting a fallow ploughed or packing pigs into market carts.
“It was absolute stillness. I listened long and often but except for the bees there was nothing. You see, all England – literally all our Empire – was getting ready for the King’s Burial.”
