IT SEEMED as if the whole of Southampton had turned out to welcome Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Beatrice, and her husband Prince Henry of Battenberg.

The date was August 10, 1889. Crowds thronged the High Street, and vessels alongside Town Quay were dressed overall as the Royal Yacht Alberta arrived at the Royal Pier with the couple.

"All the way up High Street was a moving mass of well-dressed folk,'' reported the Daily Echo of the time.

"Fluttering above them were flags of all nations. Floral displays seemed to fight for attention and it was the same in Above Bar, where shop fronts had turned into bowers.''

The reason for the royal visit was for the Princess to lay a foundation stone for the new headquarters of the Gordon

Boys' Brigade at 6 Ogle Road.

Almost 100 years later, despite the efforts of the City of Southampton Society to save the building, the once elegant premises - the red brick and terracotta Phoenix Chambers - were bulldozed as part of a redevelopment scheme.

The Southampton Gordon Boys' Brigade and Parcel Delivery and Emigration Agency, to give the organisation its full title, was founded in 1888 as a memorial to General Charles Gordon, the Governor General of the Sudan during the 1884 uprising, who lived with his parents and sister at the family home, 5 Rockstone Place, Southampton. According to records from the early part of the last century, the brigade provided messengers and odd-job boys and helped youngsters find new opportunities overseas.

"The objects of the institution are to establish a registry, where the cases of boys of all classes are thoroughly investigated, and where steps are taken to provide them with employment, and when possible to emigrate them; to establish a corps of boy-messengers in uniform to receive parcels or messages in the street; to provide the services of boys for household work, gardening etc,'' said the archives.

For nearly 50 years the boys, in their distinctive uniforms and pill-box hats, were a familiar sight, until their numbers dwindled and finally the brigade closed down in 1937.

The Ogle Road building survived as offices for an insurance company until it was demolished in 1987.