On June 22, 1897…

…the Diamond Jubilee of the reign of Queen Victoria, 78, is celebrated.

In London, before her procession through the streets begins, the monarch visits the central Telegraph Office to send a message to her subjects across her empire.

Queen Victoria Jubilee’s procession in front of Buckingham Palace

Siblings Virginia, 15, Vanessa, 18, and Thoby Stephen, 16, watch the parade from the window of the hospital where they are visiting their half-sister who is ill.

But in at least one part of the Empire, Dublin, Ireland, there are organized protests.

Poet William Butler Yeats, just turned 32, is there with his much beloved Maud Gonne, 30, political activist. She has been involved in the resistance to celebrating the ‘Famine Queen’s’—as Gonne calls her—60 years on the throne.

At the National Club in Rutland Square, Yeats has the doors locked to keep Gonne inside until she can explain to him what she is going to do. ‘How do I know until I get out?!’ Gonne asks.

The Irish La Pasionaria races out into the square and delivers a memorable speech demanding, ‘Must the graves of our dead go undecorated because Victoria has her Jubilee?’ Riots ensue.

Maud Gonne

That evening, Yeats goes to the local newspaper to tell them that he had done his best to keep her inside. He later writes that Gonne ‘was very indignant at my interference. I refused to let her leave the National Club. She showed magnificent courage thru the whole thing…She is now the idol of the mob and deserves to be’

The next day, Gonne leaves to recuperate in France; Yeats heads off to travel through the north and west of Ireland with friends.

This year, we’ll be telling stories about these groups of ‘such friends,’ before, during and after their times together.

100 years ago this month, December 1914…

In Ireland…

…Poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, 49, has started selling some of his manuscripts to his Irish-American friend, collector John Quinn, 44, and using the funds to support his dad, painter John Butler Yeats, 75, living near Quinn in Manhattan. Dad refuses to come home to Dublin.

Yeats’ ‘Hostess’ for many years, Lady Augusta Gregory, 62, back from the Abbey Theatre’s third tour of America, has rented out her stately home, Coole Park in the west of Ireland, for shooting parties.

Coole Park

In England…

…Virginia, 32, and Leonard Woolf, 34, married two years now, are celebrating Christmas in Marlborough, near their Bloomsbury friend, writer Lytton Strachey, 34. There is a big party planned at the Lackett, the cottage Lytton is renting. He has introduced his lover and cousin, painter Duncan Grant, 29, to David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, 22. They seem to hit it off.

In France…

…British King George V, 49, has recently visited the frontline troops.

American writer Gertrude Stein, 40, and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, 37, have taken to walking around Paris with their friend, painter Pablo Picasso, 33. On the Boulevard Raspail one night, as Alice tells it later in her Autobiography, they see their first camouflaged cannon. Picasso stops:

“He was spell-bound…It is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified”

Big Bertha cannon, used in Pari

In America…

…The New York Stock Exchange, having closed except for bond trading when war broke out in Europe, has reopened. The Dow Jones Average drops 24%, the largest one day drop in its history.

Recently married, and recently fired from his personnel job, Harvard University alumni Robert Benchley, 25, has given the speech at the dinner following the Harvard-Yale game. His parody translation of a description of football from the Chinese earns him the reputation as ‘the greatest humourist of all time at Harvard.’

In New Jersey, Rev. Sylvester Beach, 62, has been the subject of gossip, even in New York publications, for having an affair with one of his parishioners. His wife Eleanor, just turned 53, preferring to live apart from her husband, tells him that she’ll take their daughters back to Europe, where they had lived before, to benefit from the travel experience. Her only regret, she writes, is that her daughter Nancy, 27, who prefers to be known as ‘Sylvia,’ will be ‘lost to this country.’

Sylvia Beach

 

 

 

All are looking forward to 1915, feeling that the war will be over soon…