The loss to my father was unspeakable. Their forty-five years of married life had been years of the closest intimacy and the deepest affection, and they had hardly ever been parted. But here again character asserted itself, and he refused to spoil the lives of those around him by giving way to expressions of grief or by brooding over his own sorrow. " Sorrow is always selfish," he one day said.
He very soon took up the threads of life again, and for the next seven years continued the same quiet, useful existence which had satisfied him in the past. His happiness was now centred in the three daughters who lived with him, clever, capable women, who made life interesting as well as comfortable, and of whose devotion he would sometimes speak in terms of the profoundest gratitude and affection.
And so he lived on in his country home, loved and appreciated by all with whom he came in contact, and there he died in March 1898.
It has been difficult, almost impossible, to give an adequate idea of a life in which there were few events of a public nature, but which was a gradual development of a character of singular nobility and strength.
The following extracts from the obituary notice which appeared in the local paper, and from the funeral sermon preached by the Vicar of St. Andrew's, Uxbridge, will give a good idea of how Sir William Stephenson spent the last years of his life, and of the impression he made on those amongst whom he lived.
From the " Uxbridge Gazette,'* March 5, 1898
" Sir William Henry Stephenson, K.C.B., died on Tuesday morning last at a quarter-past nine at his residence,The Chestnuts, Uxbridge, at the age of 86.... It was remarkable in Sir William's case how comparatively little people thought of him as old; even now it is not four years since he was asked, and indeed pressed again and again, to assume a new public duty, a duty involving a considerable sacrifice of time, a considerable expense of energy, and undoubtedly a great tax upon the nerves and temper of men in the very prime of life. W^e refer to the invitation extended to Sir William Stephenson as Chairman of the expiring local board to become Chairman of the new Urban District Council of Uxbridge. He declined, and anyone will now say that he declined naturally and of course; yet it is within our recollection, and in this statement we shall be borne out by the memory of all those who are familiar with the circumstances of the public life at that time, that the refusal was then by no means taken as a matter of course, but that, as we have stated above, it in the first instance only led to a further pressure by way of invitation. Yet Sir William was then 83 years of age. Nor did his retirement from the local authority of Uxbridge mean the complete cessation of his public career, for as County Councillor of the Uxbridge Division he had become Chairman of the local centre of the Technical Education Committee, a position which he retained to the last.... His chairmanship was not viewed by him at any time as a merely nominal one, but he looked upon it as involving duties which needed careful, prompt, and skilled discharge. So too his work at St. Andrew's Church was continued zealously by him... showing how completely he retained, till his final illness, the possession of his bodily and mental faculties.... Those who knew his history would probably be inclined to say that public service had become with him if not an essential of his life at least an overmastering second nature. Trained to it in its very centre — that is, in the service of the State — from his sixteenth year, and pursuing it without intermission in the capital of the land for over half a century, habits mental and physical must have formed themselves in him that only a continued sphere of action amongst large bodies of his fellow-men could ever satisfy.... Sir William came to The Chestnuts some twenty years ago, and, as will be surmised, it was not long before his help was sought in the management of many local matters. In 1882 he was appointed Chairman of the Local Board of Health, and sat as such continuously till December 1894, but elected to resign the chairmanship when the old Board of Health became, after the Act of 1 894, the new Urban District Council.... When any distinct and marked act of town life had to be done, Sir William was looked to as peculiarly the one to be made its president and leader."