Friday 9th May 2025

I was honoured to accompany Rufus Pitman to the Sandringham Exhibition at the King’s Gallery… which for some reason is wrongly announced as the ‘Edwardian Exhibition’. The sight of the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland produced in us a great deal of noise. Had there been the opportunity we’d surely have dropped to the floor in a dead faint. The tiara element was staggering – like a rare sacred showing, the Queen Alexandra Koloshnik and the Delhi Durbar tiara also blazing forth.

Those who have been in the presence, upon whom those diamond rays have shone, must for sure be elevated above other humans in ways yet to be known.

So many photographs of the family. Queen Alexandra had a box brownie. All their little vital bibelots (what is a bibelot?), the Fabergé must-haves ranked in glass cases. Outstanding was what I call a boudoir cupboard, curly and Frenchified, painted and gilded, glass panels. Obvs so plain and dreary there was nothing for it but to surmount with a porcelain monkey orchestra in many colours.

Rufus Pitman made two important remarks. I mentioned that I have always been mystified by the attribution of great beauty to Alexandra as Princess of Wales and later Queen. To me, she seems bug-eyed. Rufus said that whoever is Princess of Wales is a great beauty and that’s that. Which is so true. His other remark concerned a former Vicar or whoever of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge who unfortunately referred to his back bottie as an entrance. The doctor he was consulting at the time said, ‘Most people would call it an exit.’ The vicar once entered the pulpit on a Holy HIgh day and began his sermon: ‘Do you like what I’ve got on? ‘ He then gave fashion notes at some length.

Afterwards we lunched at Rufus’s club which can’t be mentioned of course. There were two very old men there who were identical twins but only one had a cough. The coffee room is a hundred metres long. Rufus talked of Ivy and her descendants. His dress on this occasion was not glaringly German but firmly anchored in the German tradition.

Some days later it emerged that Robert Nevil had also been at the exhibition for the purposes of condemning it in Joshua Baring’s publication. There must have been a moment of madness in the editorial mind. I am Sandringham. But Robert Nevil is a big name, especially now with his compendium of toilet stories in the post-War era. Robert Nevil didn’t even like the Tuxen – Queen Victoria and her Family in the Green Drawing at Windsor – which is adored and the artist only recently revealed to the public as existing at all and immediately adored.

In the next episode I go in person to actual Sandringham, although it’s hardily as if I, Adrian Edge, need to prove what is well-known: Sandringham, C’est moi, Ich bien Sandringham, Sandringham, sono io