A Dolls’ House

I have finished The Quest for Queen Mary. There was one more especially enjoyable piece: James Pope-Hennessy’s visit to Copenhagen to meet Prince and Princess Axel of Denmark.

”They talked very frankly (‘between you and I and my sister and the gatepost’ said Prince Axel in his best English) and so did I, and it was all most useful to me. Coffee was followed by a sea of cognac – ‘not Hennessy, I’m afraid, ho! ho!’” Had J P-H’s diaries been published sixty years ago they would have attracted royal censure. Today they come across as, mostly, affectionate and amusing portrayals of European royalties. I much enjoyed them and now Bertie ditto.

There is a bat-squeak of connectivity between Queen Mary and the Lutyens’ biography I am reading (The Architect and and his Wife, Jane Ridley).

“Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is the largest, most beautiful and most famous dolls’ house in the world. Built between 1921 and 1924 for Queen Mary, consort of George V, by the leading British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, it includes contributions from over 1,500 of the finest artists, craftsmen and manufacturers of the early twentieth century. From life below stairs to the high-society setting of the saloon and dining room, and from a library bursting with original works by the top literary names of the day, to a fully stocked wine cellar and a garden, created by Gertrude Jekyll, no detail was forgotten. The house even includes electricity, running hot and cold water and working lifts. Each room is fully furnished and waiting to be explored.” (Royal Collection Trust website)

The library is 45 inches long, 21 inches wide and 15 1/2 inches high and there are 350 miniature leather-bound books hand-written by leading authors. The King’s miniature shotguns (four inches long) were made by James Purdey. The Queen asked why the pillowcases in her bedroom were embroidered MG and GM. Lutyens explained it stood for “May George?” and “George May”. To have risked explaining his cheeky joke reveals Queen Mary’s often forgotten sense of humour.

Crown Prince Olav of Norway “said her sense of humour ‘off duty’ was very pronounced and very amusing indeed”. On the other hand the Hon Margaret Wyndham (Woman of the Bedchamber to QM, 1938 – 1951) said she had no sense of humour at all. “What she had was a sense of the ridiculous, which I never think is at all the same thing. We often had some good laughs on our way back from some royal function, mind you, and sometimes I would catch her eye at one of them and we would wink at each other. But it was purely a sense of the ridiculous. Like all Royalty, as a matter of fact.”