Funeral of Queen Victoria (1901)

Hyde Park
1 Jan 1901
Silent
2m

The crowds stand silent as the nation says goodbye to Queen Victoria in February 1901.

These two scenes from a longer film of the funeral procession - mostly lost - capture Household Cavalry, military bands, Coldstream guards, representatives of military high command and foreign dignitaries. Closed carriages carry members of the royal family. The first shots are filmed near Hyde Park at the Apsley House corner; the cobbled street seen later is probably Windsor High Street.

Queen Victoria's Funeral was covered by all the major filmmaking companies operating in 1901 - the Lumière Brothers, Pathé, Warwick Trading Co., Gibbons Bio-Tableaux, Paul 's Theatrograph, Hepworth, Biograph and Harrison. Few examples have survived. These two short scenes are all that we have of over 900ft shot by Mitchell and Kenyon, who had secured permission to film the event from two positions: Apsley House corner and at turn of the road in Windsor where the procession turned up to enter St George's Chapel. The missing shots apparently included a famous moment where the bluejackets took up the gun carriage bearing the Queen's coffin. The horses that had pulled it had to be uncoupled because they had been left standing in the cold too long.

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From the collection

The Great and the Good

Royals, military heroes and sportsmen compete in the Edwardian fame game.

Mitchell and Kenyon's films suggest a company that was most at ease filming ordinary people at work and play. But the Edwardian era, just as today, had its public figures who could draw an audience - and audiences were M&K's business.

Edwardian celebrity culture was narrower than today's: headed by the King and other royals, followed by military heroes of the Boer War, politicians and a host of mayors and other local dignitaries. But an increasingly professionalised world of sport was already making its own stars: early signs of the new celebrity order of the later 20th century.