Public events across the city — including a march-past in Port Chalmers to welcome home troops returned from the ongoing Boer War — were postponed or cancelled.
On the evening of January 21 Mayor Robert Chisholm convened a public meeting at the Agricultural Hall "for the purpose of offering up prayer on behalf of her Majesty the Queen in consequence of her illness".
The mayor explained that as a patriotic and loyal people it was the duty of Dunedin’s residents to meet together, show sympathy, and "ask God to bless her in her declining years".
Her Majesty only had hours to live, not years, and on January 24 the ODT appeared with black borders on each page, an early visual clue that beyond the classified advertising which in that era was always printed on the front, that news of the death of the monarch would follow.
The Dunedin City Council had adjourned its meeting the previous evening and citizens gathered at St Paul’s and the Salvation Army Hall for the first of what would be many, exhaustively reported memorial services.
Among the many places mourning locals could pay their respects was Forester’s Hall in Port Chalmers, where Tussaud’s Royal Waxworks and Speciality Company were staging a short season displaying 50 or so life-size figures, which included one of the late Queen.
"Absolutely the first intimation that the citizens of Dunedin had of the closing of the most glorious reign that the history of the British Empire has ever known was contained in the display of the flag at the telegraph office at half mast high," a fairly breathless account of local reaction to the news began.
"That signal was capable of but one sorrowful interpretation."
If that reporter was mournful, the newspaper’s editorial writer was utterly grief-stricken.
"The death of the Queen makes an unprecedented break in the national life — unprecedented, at least, in the experience of every living person.
"Every British subject who thinks and intelligently feels at all must today be conscious of the startling change in his mental world, so to speak — a consciousness that cannot pass into realisation in a day or a week.
"We tell one another that the Queen is dead but as yet we say the words almost as a dream."
Despite the sense of otherworldly melancholy, life went on both in Dunedin and in the pages of the ODT.
"How to be happy though married" the advertisement for Book Gift Tea advised, saying that a wife’s husband was now in a good temper and that she had a happy home due to receiving the company’s free gift of a copy of Mrs Beaton’s work on cookery and household management.
Also promising happiness were the purveyors of Mansavita pills, which could allegedly cure both piles and eczema — female pills were 3s 6d, pile ointment 2/6 and eczema cream 1/6 per box.
The black borders persisted around the ODT’s pages until the following Monday, which contained extensive coverage of the memorial services at every city church, as well as a lengthy report of the event at the city’s synagogue.
"If the Jews have lived under beneficent laws and have been able to stand side by side with all others in supporting the Queen’s authority there is reason for us to mourn Victoria," Rabbi A. T. Chodowski said.
"Her noble heart is stilled forever, and throughout the old and new worlds many a tear will be shed in many a grateful Jewish household."
Although sharing his fellow citizen’s sense of loss, ODT columnist "Civis"concluded his thoughts on the matter by looking forward, not back.
"It is a great sorrow to lose a Sovereign whose virtues have endeared her to two generations; but those same virtues have ensured to her successor a stable throne and happy auguries.
"There is no reason why we should not unite heart and voice in singing, hopefully, GOD SAVE THE KING!"
