A Diamond Jubilee is a celebration held to mark a 60th anniversary in British and
Commonwealth usage or a 75th anniversary in American usage.
In the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth
Realms such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, a Diamond Jubilee is held in the 60th year of a monarch's reign. The current Queen's Diamond Jubilee, should she reach it, will be in 2012.
On 22 September 1896, Victoria surpassed George III as the longest-reigning monarch in British history. In accordance with the
Queen's request, all special public celebrations of the event were delayed until 1897, the Queen's
Diamond Jubilee. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, proposed that the Diamond Jubilee be made a festival of the British
Empire. Thus, the prime ministers of all the self-governing colonies were invited along with their families. The procession in
which the Queen participated included troops from each Dominion, British colony and dependency,
together with soldiers sent by Indian princes and chiefs (who were subordinate to Victoria, the Empress of India). The Diamond
Jubilee celebration was an occasion marked by great outpourings of affection for the septuagenarian Queen, who was by then confined to a wheelchair. The celebrations also coincided with heightened
security prompted by the assassination plot on her life by Irish nationalists on her
Golden Jubilee 10 years earlier.
Throughout the rest of the Empire, celebrations took place despite the physical absence of the Monarch herself, with parades
and festivals organized in major cities and towns in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and
other Dominions and British territories. In Canada, streets were decorated and the Prime Minister, then Sir Wilfrid Laurier, toured parts of the country to take part in the fetes.[1] Canada issued a Diamond Jubilee series of stamps on June 19, 1897, with two
depictions of Victoria on them. Commemorative envelopes were also manufactured, with Victoria's portrait and a poem on the
front:
- Queen, that from Spring to Autumn of thy reign
- Hast taught thy people how 'tis queenlier far
- Than any golden pomp of peace or war
- Simply to be a woman without stain.[2]
Rudyard Kipling wrote his somber Recessional in honour of the Jubilee; Arthur Sullivan
wrote a ballet, Victoria and Merrie England; and Arthur Conan Doyle referred to it in a Sherlock Holmes
story.
References
See also
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