The Times, Tuesday, 12th January 1892
The Influenza
The Illness of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale
The announcement of the serious illness of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale caused universal regret yesterday, and this was shown by the large number of inquiries made at Sandringham House. In addition to personal inquiries, messages were received to such an extent as to tax to the utmost the powers of the private telegraph at Sandringham. With regard to the origin of the Duke’s illness, it is stated that after returning in Monday of last week from the funeral of Prince Victor of Hohenhoe, he did not feel well, but he went out shooting on Wednesday, and it is feared that he then aggravated his disposition. On Thursday he remained at Sandringham House all day, but the symptoms were not to be distinguished from an ordinary cold. He was worse on Friday and indeed felt so unwell that he did not leave his room and was not present at the birthday dinner given in his honour. On Saturday it was deemed necessary to call in the advice of Dr Laking, who, with Dr Broadbent, had been in attendance during the serious illness of Prince George of Wales. Throughout the whole of Saturday and Sunday the Duke suffered considerably from a severe attack of influenza, accompanied by pneumonia, but the doctors were able to report that his strength was ‘well maintained’.
‘Foreigners, bloody foreigners!’ Lord Johnny Fitzgerald was lying once more on the sofa in the sitting-room at King’s Lynn. Powerscourt noted that he had two large tankards of beer waiting patiently by his right hand. William McKenzie had a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits.
‘We’re all bloody foreigners round here,’ Fitzgerald went on, in pained tones. ‘I’m a bloody foreigner. You’re a bloody foreigner, Francis. William’s a bloody foreigner. In this part of the world you’re a foreigner if you come from Peterborough, for God’s sake. They look at you all the time. They stare at you as though you had two heads. If you buy something in a shop the rest of the natives all fall silent in case you’re an enemy agent.’
‘It must have its advantages, surely,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘If we are all marked men, then other strangers must have been spotted here before us.’
‘Indeed they have.’ Lord Johnny took a refreshingly large gulp of beer and wiped the foam from his chin. ‘Which brings me to my report.’ He lay back on the sofa and gazed at the ceiling. A large spider had escaped the attentions of the parlourmaids and was preparing an elaborate mesh for its victims. ‘Russians first. Those servants at Sandringham were right. There has been a party of Russians in the neighbourhood. But I’m sorry to have to report that they are extremely respectable Russians.’ Fitzgerald sounded as though he had difficulty in grasping the possibility of Russians being respectable.
‘There are six of them,’ he went on. It’s the same as the equerries, thought Powerscourt suddenly. Six of the best. Six good men and true. Half a dozen. Half a jury.
‘They come from St Petersburg,’ Fitzgerald went on, ‘from some Institute of Science and Technology at the university there. They’re led by a certain Professor Ivan Romitsev. His two assistants are called Dimitry Vatutin and Nikolai Dekanozov. Didn’t I do well remembering that lot?’ He looked around for applause and wonderment.
‘The other three gentlemen – please don’t ask me to remember their bloody names but I do have them written down somewhere – are technicians. All of this little band are concerned with advanced forms of printing. They are trying to modernize the facilities in some great industrial complex at a place called Vyborg in St Petersburg. They came by sea. They went to a big new plant at Peterborough to look at the new machines they have there, which were, I believe, imported from America. They are on their way to see more printing machines in Colchester and in London.’
‘How come they were spotted in Sandringham, Johnny?’
‘I’m coming to that. Will you let me finish my report now?’ In protest at the interruption, Lord Johnny took another giant’s mouthful of his beer.
‘They are all loyal subjects of the Czar, this lot. They planned their journey so they could have a look at Sandringham on their travels. Isn’t the Czar’s wife, Mrs Czar or whatever they call her, isn’t she related to Alexandra up at the big house? Once they heard there was a royal palace, as they thought, in the neighbourhood, they had to go and see it. I think these Russians expected some enormous structure like those huge palaces and things they have in St Petersburg. Summer Palaces. Winter Palaces. Do they have Spring and Autumn Palaces too? Maybe Sandringham was the British Winter Palace. If you’re a Russian, that is.
‘I have to tell you, Francis,’ Johnny laughed as he remembered his Russians, ‘they were very disappointed when they saw Sandringham. That isn’t a palace, they said as their carriage brought them up to the main gates to have a look. It’s far too small. It’s more like a big dacha, a sort of summer house in the country. I don’t suppose you’d better include that in your report to the Private Secretary and the Comptroller General of the Household, Francis. Not a palace at all. Far too small.’
‘Could you imagine, Johnny, in your wildest dreams that any of these gentlemen from the Institute of Science and Technology could be a secret agent, a revolutionary? Looking at printing machines by day, devouring anarchists’ manuals by night?’
‘No. Absolutely not. I got very drunk with these Russians the other evening. That is to say, they got very drunk, I got a little bit drunk. And I think they are as innocent as our own printers over there in Peterborough.
‘There are also some Irish in the neighbourhood.’ Lord Johnny continued his report. ‘And I don’t mean you and I, Francis. There are five Irish in a party of workmen extending the telegraph lines north and west of Sandringham.’
Telegraph lines, thought Powerscourt. In his lifetime he had seen the steady advance of these wooden posts across the length and breadth of Britain, like some enormous army being dressed across the parade ground of a nation, linked not by arm to shoulder, but by roll upon roll of wire. ‘Be not afraid,’ he thought with Prospero, ‘the isle is full of noises’. Messages of joy and despair were whispered along the uncomprehending cables. Births, marriages, deaths. He wondered if his brother-in-law the canny Mr William Burke had investments in telegraph pole companies or wire manufactories. Almost certainly he had. There were other inventions, stranger still. Voices, human voices, being carried down the lines. New vehicles that relied not on horses but on engines for power. Some brave new world – he went back to Miranda in The Tempest – is being born at the end of our century. No more the Age of Reason. No more the Age of Enlightenment. Welcome to the Age of the Machines.
‘Francis, hello-oh, hello-oh. Are you there?’ Lord Johnny had known Powerscourt for so long he had grown accustomed to these temporary leaves of absence. Compassionate leave, he always thought. The poor bugger’s brain has run away with him again.
‘Of course, of course.’ Powerscourt wondered if he shouldn’t join William McKenzie in a pot of tea. ‘The Irish, you were saying.’
‘I have talked to them too, of course. And I’ve got their names. They all play for the same cricket team in Skibereen. Can cricketers be revolutionaries, do you think?’
‘Charles Stewart Parnell,’ said Powerscourt, ‘God rest his soul, was the captain of the County Wicklow cricket team. But I don’t suppose he’d be classed as a revolutionary, do you think?’
‘Not quite, not quite.’ Fitzgerald started on his second tankard of beer. ‘Anyway, I don’t think any of these characters is our man. They work so bloody hard on those poles, drive them into the ground, make them straight, up you go to fix the wire on top, next one, please, hurry up there, – those foremen are slave drivers, I tell you – that they wouldn’t have the energy left to wander round the countryside in the middle of the night with a butcher’s knife in their pocket.’