In the past few weeks every news-paper has carried an article, or at least a mention, of the centenary of Queen Victoria's death. So, con-trary to what I wrote last week, I shall jump on the Victoriana bandwagon and offer a few items of, perhaps, not widely known trivia about the great queen.

On being told that she had succeeded to the throne of Great Britain, Victoria's first act was to remove her bed from her mother's bedroom, and bath her pet dog.

I cannot say with certainty the order in which these chores were done, but it is my guess that she washed the dog while the bed was being removed by her chambermaids.

The date of her death, January 22, 1901, was fitting. For she was a woman of the 19th century - when she reigned supreme - and the many technological and sociological changes, and her upset over the Boer War, occurring as we entered the 20th century would have caused her dismay, rather than amusement.

As it was, she shuffled off this mortal coil at one of the high points of her popularity. Her death was important news everywhere. Accounts of it were even written way out in what was left of the Wild West at the turn of the century. Well this is what we're led to believe by Don Siegel, in his movie The Shootist. A film that tells the story of the last days of John Book, a cancer-ridden legendary gun-fighter, aptly played by John Wayne, who arrives in town to provoke a series of gunfights with a trio of baddies and gets killed, rather than face the final ravages of the Big C.

As Book rides through town, he sees a newspaper headline proclaiming the death of Queen Victoria. A trick of Siegel's to heighten the drama of Book's inevitable end, by imaginatively marking the time of his death with that of a true icon of the age.

Now forward in time to the British Embassy compound in Bangkok, where stands a large imperious statue of Queen Victoria. It's been there for almost one hundred years and, providing we don't have a serious fall-out with one of our SEATO allies, it has a good chance of remaining there.

Mind you, it's had its ups and downs in the past. When it was first erected, broody Siamese (now Thai) women would touch the statue as they passed, or, if the usually vigilant Gurkha em-bassy guards weren't looking, would sit around it, in the hope that some of our great queen's fertility would rub off on them.

As far as I am aware nothing is recorded that would indicate that this resulted in any of them conceiving. But Thai women do seem to enjoy life to the full, for rarely do you see one without a smile of satisfaction upon her face.

In 1942, when the Japanese marched in unopposed, things were different. The remaining British Embassy staff and their local employees suffered internment, or worse, for the duration and the ambassador's residence and chancery buildings were probably taken into use by the occupation forces.

Contrary to what you might expect, the statue was not smashed, but was enclosed to form an ablutions facility for the Japanese troops, and throughout the Second World War Her Majesty's marble image was subjected to the worst form of vile abuse a monument can suffer. But, fortunately, it was damage that could be rectified when the war ended, by the use of disinfectants, scrubbing brushes and Thai elbow grease.

Twenty-odd years later, standing near the statue during an Armistice Day gathering of the foreign Military Attach Corps and the diplomats and staff of the embassy, it crossed my mind that Queen Victoria - being the forthright person she was - would have had something more than "we're not amused" to say about her statue's treatment to her beloved Albert in heaven.