3-034-858 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Illness of the Prince of Wales: posting the bulletin at the Mansion House, [London], 1871. '...copies of the bulletins, as they arrived at Whitehall by telegraph, have been dispatched to the Lord Mayor by the Home Secretary, and his Lordship has lost no time in having them posted regularly in front of the Mansion House, where they have been read by thousands of people...On Friday, when the condition of the Prince had produced such deep concern, an excited crowd lingered in front of the official residence of the Lord Mayor until long after midnight...the principal thoroughfares...[around] the Mansion House and the Royal Exchange - for the time centres of information - were thronged by crowds of excited people...As each placard was exhibited there was an eager struggle to read it, and those who succeeded in getting near usually repeated the intelligence to those who were less fortunate...Immediately on the receipt of one of these messages...the intelligence was instantly telegraphed to every police station within the metropolitan district'. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) suffered - and survived - an attack of typhoid fever (the illness of which his father had died 10 years earlier) while at his home at Sandringham in Norfolk. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.