Word: coffin
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Next morning the state funeral procession brought the body to Westminster Abbey, amid the booming of minute guns and the strains of Handel's dead march from "Saul," which changed to Chopin's funeral march as the Abbey was reached. The coffin was again borne on the gun carriage, draped with the Queen Mother's royal standard. But this time detachments of the Royal Air Force, the Life Guards, the Horse Guards and the Royal Marines took the place of the lone cavalry officer of the. day before...
Throughout the week an unpretentious oaken coffin lay in the small chancel of Sandringham Church, where the Dowager Queen Alexandra had so often worshiped before her death (TIME, Nov. 30). As the days passed, thousands of mourners arrived in motor cars and on foot, giving silent testimony to how completely the onetime Princess Alexandra of Denmark had won the hearts of her English subjects. Meanwhile a light and powdery snow sifted down upon the Sandringham estates, famed country retreat of Edward VII and Alexandra. At length the same gun carriage which had served King Edward on his last earthly journey...
When the short service within the church was concluded, ten tall Coldstream Guardsmen bore the coffin on their shoulders to the gun carriage; and it was drawn at a walking pace to Wolferton Station, two miles away, where a funeral train waited to carry it to London...
...desired to avoid the assembly of large crowds until the state funeral next day, the very station at which the train would arrive was kept secret up to the last moment. Eventually the locomotive thundered into King's Cross, and although all haste was made in transferring the coffin to the Royal Chapel of St. James's Palace, where the body was to rest over night, a crowd of some 1,500 persons gathered before the auto-hearse before the royal motors could be got under...
High upon a magnificent catafalque, surrounded by six tall candles, the coffin was eventually left for another night. As it lay in public state, nearly 100,000 Britons are estimated to have filed sorrowingly through the Abbey...