Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - Ministerial 'Red Boxes'

Tomorrow is a big day for me. After nearly 18 years, it will be my last day as a civil servant. I’ve spent most of that time advising ministers on their policy ideas and helping turn them from ideas to reality – it’s been a job that I’ve (mostly) loved, although it can be demanding, exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure.

But what does that mean for the Cabinet of Curiosities, I hear you ask? Well, the object I’d like to include this month is a symbol of my time as a civil servant: the ministerial Red Box.

Ministerial 'Red Box', made by Barrow, Hepburn & Gale

The Red Box is exactly that: every minister in government has one (or rather several, to allow for times when one is in transit): bright red ‘boxes’ – essentially oversized briefcases. The outside is red leather with a gold crest and lettering, lined with darker leather. They’re made from wood and lead (depending on who you believe, so that they would sink if thrown overboard from a ship in time of war and/ or to stop them from being x-rayed) and so weigh a ton. (They are also sturdy enough, in contravention of many health and safety rules I’m sure, to be used as a handy step-stool for vertically-challenged civil servants needing to get something off the top shelf.)

The idea of a ‘despatch box’ (as they are officially known) apparently goes back at least to Queen Elizabeth I, and the same company has been making them for the government since the eighteenth century. There seems to be a debate about whether the red colour again came from Elizabeth I’s reign, or as a result of Prince Albert’s preference, but it is clear that the ‘red box’ has a long and distinguished pedigree. They’re used to transport sensitive papers securely (you can get less obvious black ones if a minister needs discretion e.g. if they are travelling by public transport). The most famous one is Gladstone’s, which the Chancellor has traditionally held up on Budget day before the assembled press – although the original is now too fragile to come out each year.

Gladstone's famous red box, held up outside HM Treasury 

by many a Chancellor on Budget Day. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But for a civil servant, ‘The Box’ is a concept as well as a physical object. When submitting papers to a minister, the ‘box time’ is all-important. ‘When does the box go’ means ‘what’s my deadline for getting this to you?’ Sometimes it is just that – a euphemism for ‘deadline’ and no more. But often it still is a reality. Papers really do get put in ‘The Box’, and once it is gone, that’s that. On Fridays, the Box can be sent to the Minister’s home address by post (there are special arrangements with the post office to make sure they’re secure). Alternatively, The Box leaves with the Minister, or can be taken to


 wherever she/ he is. Of course, the most urgent things can now be sent by secure email, but for routine work, The Box remains all-important.

‘The Box’ is therefore also something that the Minister ‘does’. It is their homework, the decisions that need making, the papers that have to be read, between one day and the next. Whatever your views on individual politicians, most ministers work incredibly hard; long hours in the office and in Parliament, and then home with a box full of papers to look at overnight. I’ve seen official papers come back covered in curry (‘I didn’t get home until after 10 so I got a takeaway and ate while I was working’) and jammy handprints (‘I was doing the box at breakfast and the five-year old got hold of it, sorry’).

And of course, it also means that ‘The Box comes back’. Decisions – sometimes partially obscured by curry or jam – are typically handwritten across the papers, and private secretaries diligently decode their ministers’ handwriting and email out to the relevant officials in the wider department for them to be taken forward.

It’s a system which may seem a little old-fashioned, but it works. There’s evidence that people take in more information when they read on paper, rather than on screen (see for instance https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/) – so it makes sense to me that The Box should stay to help ministers make the best decisions they can.

They’re decisions that I won’t be as directly involved in, in the future. It is something I’m both sad about and relieved by – I will no longer be clock watching, wondering if I’ll make the box deadline or not, ruled by the tyranny of when a briefcase will leave the building - but nor will I have the undoubted privilege of helping ministers to make decisions which impact us all.

Goodbye to Whitehall - the gift traditionally given to

departing Private Secretaries, signed by the Ministers 

you worked directly for. Mine - from earlier in my 

career - includes the Rt Hon (now Lord) Alistair Darling

Queen Victoria's first railway journey by Janie Hampton

Exactly 175 years ago this month, Queen Victoria, who had then ruled Britain for five years, was the first British monarch ever to travel by train. The first railway line in Britain had been opened in 1830, between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, when Victoria was 11 years old. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, loved new inventions, and persuaded her to try this new form of transport.
On June 13, in 1842, the 23-year-old queen and her family took a horse-drawn carriage from Windsor Castle to Slough railway station, four miles away. There they boarded the royal saloon carriage, specially designed like a grand home. It had a padded silk ceiling, blue velvet sofas, matching silk curtains, fringed lampshades, fine mahogany wooden tables and thick carpets. The Times described it: "the fittings are upon a most elegant and magnificent scale, tastefully improved by bouquets of rare flowers arranged within the carriage." 

Imagine traveling from Slough to Paddington in this carriage!

The train was pulled by a locomotive engine powered by coal and steam, and took only 25 minutes to reach Paddington Station in West London. (Today the fastest journey from Slough to Paddington takes 14 minutes.) The engine was called Phlegethon of the Fire Fly class and had been built in 1840. A replica of the original Fire Fly is now at Didcot Railway Centre in Oxfordshire, just up the Great Western Line from Slough. On the footplate was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous engineer who had designed Paddington station, the railway line from London to Slough and the world’s first iron ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean the SS Great Britain. The young queen wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, that she was ‘quite charmed by this new way of travelling’. However, the Queen worried that the normal speed of 43 miles per hour would affect her health, so she insisted that her trains never went more than 30 miles per hour. Later a signal was fitted to the roof of the royal saloon in case the Queen wanted to tell the train driver to slow down.
The next day The Times newspaper reported: "Yesterday Her Majesty the Queen, for the first time, returned from her sojourn at Windsor Castle, accompanied by her illustrious consort, Prince Albert, Count Mensdorf, &c.by way of the Great Western Railway. The intention of Her Majesty to return to town by railroad was first intimated to the authorities at Paddington on Saturday afternoon, and in consequence preparations on an extensive scale were ordered to be made for the transit of the Royal pair from Slough to the Paddington terminus, which were carried into effect with the greatest secrecy."

Queen Victoria and her family of 11 children spent every summer holiday at Balmoral Castle, 500 miles north of London, near Aberdeen in Scotland. To travel by road from London to Scotland took several days by horse and carriage. But by train it took only one day, or a night sleeping on the train.

After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria went even more often to Balmoral, always by train. The local railway station, Ballater, had a special platform long enough to accommodate the royal train made up of a locomotive, coal truck and up to eight carriages. Queen Victoria’s royal saloon carriage was the first in the world to have a lavatory. Another carriage had a fully-equipped kitchen and separate dining room. At night time, servants prepared the beds with fine linen sheets. Each sleeping compartment had hinged sinks that tilted into the panelled wooden walls. Next to each bed was a special hook to hang one’s watch, with a suede-leather pad to prevent the watch-glass from breaking as the train rattled over the points or swerved round corners. One carriage carried the servants – dressers, valets, footmen, maids and tutors. There were special carriages for the royal horses and another carriage for the royal luggage. The royal dogs went too, among them greyhounds, Skye terriers and pomeranians. Even the royal waiting room at Paddington station was designed like a palace with a marble fireplace, gold painted furniture and glass chandeliers.

Queen Victoria’s grandchildren ruled seven of the European monarchies, so dukes, princes and aristocracy often came from all over Europe to visit Balmoral Castle. The men wore Scottish kilts, and went shooting deer or grouse on the heather moors. Pony carts carried baskets of fine food and wine for picnic lunches, with special treats such as grapes grown in glass houses.

From The Home Alphabet Book, 1857 Dean & Son, London

In 1897 Queen Victoria had been on the throne for sixty years. After a grand procession through London for her Diamond Jubilee, she went by royal train to Balmoral. For this special occasion, the engine trains were not their normal black: from London to Crewe they had been painted red; from Crew to Carlisle, near the Scottish border, they were white; and from there to Balmoral they were red – all the colours of the British flag! By then trains could travel from London to Edinburgh in less than ten hours.

Queen Victoria's funeral train took the same
journey as her first trip.

Queen Victoria was 82 years old when she died in 1901 on the Isle of Wight. Her coffin was transported to the mainland by sea and then transferred onto a train to London. From Paddington in London it went by train to Windsor – the same journey she had made 61 years earlier. She was buried in the Royal Mausoleum in Windsor.

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated the anniversary of her great great
grandmother's train journey by opening the new electric
train line to Paddington on 13 June 2017.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport

Photo by Pete Ware

HELEN RAPPAPORT is an historian and Russianist with a specialism in the Victorians and revolutionary Russia. Her books include Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs and No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War. She lives in Oxford. For more information, please visit her website www.helenrappaport.com.

We welcome Helen to the History Girls today with her sadly topical piece about the death of Prince Albert. You may remember Essie Fox's post on this subject last Christmas.

In the history of royal anniversaries, the one that took place last December – 150 years since the death of Prince Albert – seemed to me a perfect tie-in for a book I had always wanted to write. Victoria has been extensively written about and Albert too has had his biographies, but I wanted to take a close-up look at a particular point in their fascinating 21-year marriage, the effect his premature death had on Victoria’s continuing ability to rule and how the British monarchy changed as a result of that.

by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

My book Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy was published by Hutchinson on 3 November 2011 in good time, I hoped, for some media comment on what seemed to me to be a significant anniversary. Albert of Saxe-Coburg may have been a relatively obscure German prince when he married Queen Victoria; he may not have been king but only consort; but in every respect, by the time he died he was king in all but name.

Imagine my disappointment, when, aside from some lovely press reviews and thankfully some coverage on Radio 4, Albert’s anniversary seemed to evoke as little interest as ever in the UK, despite the enormous contribution he made to the cultural life of this country. And it is one we are constantly reminded of whenever we head for our great national museums in South Kensington. As a historian and writer I’ve always wondered why we pay so little attention to the life and achievements of the man who devoted over twenty years of unstinting, punctilious duty to the nation as husband and Prince Consort of Queen Victoria. But the fact is that even within 15 years of his death, when the great gilded statue of him was finally positioned inside the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, people had already begun to forget him. As Flora Thompson recalled in her memoir Lark Rise to Candleford: by the 1880s villagers in her kind of rural community saw no visible reminders of him, and only knew that ‘he had been the Queen’s husband, though, oddly enough not the King, and that he had been so good that nobody had liked him in his lifetime, excepting the Queen, who “fairly doted”.’

The simple fact is, that despite Victoria’s concerted campaign to impose blanket memorialization of her beloved husband across the country for decades after his death, Prince Albert has always languished in his wife’s far more imposing shadow.

When Prince Albert died at Windsor at the age of only 42, Victoria’s response, as we all know, was to retreat into a state of relentless, catatonic grief that crippled and disempowered her as a woman and which, as the years went by, tainted her popularity as queen, turning the public against what had, when her husband was alive, been a popular monarchy into a deeply unpopular one where criticism of the queen’s dereliction of public duty was mounting and some were even calling for her abdication.

When I was researching Magnificent Obsession I was surprised that so little had been said about the country’s response to Albert’s death – coming as it did only ten days before Christmas 1861. No one had expected it, the official bulletins on Albert saying little to suggest how seriously ill he was at the time. All the papers had gone to press when he died at 10.50 pm on the night of Saturday 14th December, with only a few special broadsheets in London carrying the news the following day. The nation awoke that morning to the mournful sound of bells tolling the news across the country, as people made their way to church. On Monday, 16th the full impact of Albert’s death began to sink in. Florence Nightingale was proved right when she said that ‘the English will value him better now he’s gone’, which is precisely what happened. For days afterwards acres of heavily black-bordered newspaper space was devoted to eulogistic obituaries, all of them now lauding in the most hagiographic manner a man whom few had liked and even fewer had ever known, let alone understood.

For the British people Albert’s death was nothing less than a national calamity of biblical proportions. Churches were festooned with black crape, shops were shuttered, steamers on the Thames stood idle, flags were at half-mast, theatres closed and commerce in the city at a standstill. Everywhere the blinds of private houses were drawn down, the brass plates on doors surrounded in black, and mirrors and lamps covered. Omnibus drivers tied scraps of crape to their whips; in the countryside even the beehives were draped in black, as part of the age-old superstition of telling the bees of a death in the family. Everyone, from the highest in the land to the poorest cottager, donned some form of mourning, even if only a black armband. Across Britain the mourning warehouses were besieged with desperate customers anxious to put themselves and their children into mourning. Stationers’ shops selling cartes de visite of the Royal Family were packed, with copies of the last photographs of Albert selling at wildly inflated prices.

With Christmas only ten days away the government was anxious that the funeral should be held as soon as possible, to allow the public to recover in time still to enjoy the festive season. But as Elizabeth Gaskell recalled, ‘No one wishes each other “a merry Xmas” this year.’ Accounts of the funeral across the press were exhaustive and heartbreaking in their detail. But few people today realize that it was held in private – at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. There was no lying in state at Whitehall to allow people to pay their last respects and the ceremony itself was attended by an all-male congregation. Queen Victoria did not go – she was far too traumatized and could not face it, and Victorian funeral convention at the time generally excluded women, for fear they might break down and make a spectacle of themslelves.

Even though she did not see Albert’s coffin lowered into the crypt, Victoria had at least wanted to stay at Windsor until it was all over. Instead, she was bullied by the royal doctors (out of a totally bogus ‘fear of infection’) into going to Osborne, her house on the Isle of Wight. The chief mourners on her behalf at the funeral were two of her four sons: Bertie, Prince of Wales aged 20 and his 11-year-old brother Arthur – poignant shades of William and Harry at the funeral of Princess Diana. There are further echoes of that other, tragic royal death: then – as in 1997 – people were distraught at the sudden and unexpected loss of Prince Albert; his death, like Diana’s, felt like losing a member of their own family.

Christmas 1861 was an unutterably bleak one in Britain; for the royal family the date 14 December became talismanic thereafter, even more so when Victoria and Albert’s second daughter, Alice, died of diphtheria 17 years later, on the very same day as her father. A century and a half on from Albert’s death it is a shame that history continues to pay so little attention to a gifted and dedicated man who contributed in countless ways to the cultural life of this country. The role of consort is not an easy one – as our own Prince Philip has shown. The ultimate irony, perhaps, is that Albert, who found the role of consort difficult and clearly longed for power, had been building a position of unchallengeable influence at the queen’s right hand that sooner or later would have come into conflict with government. His death, in many ways, saved the monarchy and ensured that it became the figurehead, ceremonial one that we have today.



Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy, published in paperback by Windmill.

And Helen is appearing as a talking head in a 3-part BBC2 documentary 'Queen Victoria and Her Children'  that discusses  some of the issues raised in her book. Transmits 1, 2 and 3 January 2013, 9 pm.


© Helen Rappaport, 13 December 2012