Podcast transcript
INSIDE QUEEN MARY'S DOLL'S HOUSE
Hello, and welcome to a podcast from Royal Collection Trust, in this episode, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, Kathryn Jones, introduces Queen Mary's Doll’s house, one of the many treasures on display at Windsor Castle. Presented to Queen Mary in 1924, its approximately 1000 miniature objects were created by leading artists and craftsman of the day. More information about our program of events can be found on our website.
And so our speaker this evening, I'm delighted to introduce, Kathryn Jones, senior curator of decorative arts. She's always been a staunch advocate, and thank you very much.
Thank you, Richard, thank you. Well, welcome to Windsor Castle and particularly to those of you who haven't seen the doll’s house, I'm sure you all actually know it inside out, but it is one of my favourite things in the Royal collection and I get quite enthusiastic about it, so if I go on for too long please do stop me. I was one of those people that at the age of five, I told everybody I knew that I was getting a doll’s house for Christmas, from Father Christmas.
Very fortunately my granddad was making me a doll’s house, so I was lucky. Anyway, so I've always had a secret penchant for doll’s houses. But as Richard said, what I wanted to do first is really give you a bit of history of the doll’s house, a bit of context about it, obviously it's a very charming, very appealing object and for many people that's the reason they want to come and see it.
But it does have quite a lot of other serious purposes, so I wanted to bring out some of those, and then when we go and look at it, we'll look at some of the details. And the other thing I just wanted to mention was that about four or five years ago, the royal archives acquired several new documents relating to the doll’s house, which unfortunately it came into the archives just after Lucinda Lambton had published her new book on the doll’s house.
But the first point I really wanted to make was that in 1925 the doll’s house first came to Windsor, it was described in Country Life, by Sir Lawrence Weaver, who was the editor of the magazine and he said, "It is because the Queen’s doll’s house shows a just balance between tradition and invention that it must be regarded not as an architectural whim, or as an elaborate nursery jest, but as a serious synthesis of the building arts of our generation." So right away, this is a very serious object and for many people it's not actually a doll’s house at all, it's actually an architectural miniature. As you know, there are no dolls in it, although we will see later on that there were supposed to be dolls and we might talk about that. The Queen's doll’s house was conceived in 1921 by this lady, Princess Marie Louise, who was a cousin of George V and she was a childhood friend of Queen Mary.
In her autobiography Princess Marie Louise described how she had been in Windsor Castle over the Easter period in 1921, and she spent a lot of time with George V and Queen Mary, and when she returned home to The Great Park she found her mother and her sister packing up some items of dolls furniture and put these two thoughts together and decided that the doll's house might be a lovely idea to present to the Queen in the aftermath of the First World War, it would be a charming gift that she knew Queen Mary would appreciate. One of the editors of the book of the doll’s house, which was published at the same time as the house was first put on display, wrote that the gift was to be one of genuine simplicity, sympathy and good will. But it was also something that should evoke individual care and trouble.
Princess Marie Louise must have known how much the doll’s house would appeal to Queen Mary, but also she knew what a prestigious collector Queen Mary was, as we all know. Queen Mary who throughout her life had a love of the diminutive and decorative, was an avid collector, particularly of decorative arts and she collected jade, lacquer, papier mâché, Fabergé, hard stones, pique, ivory, fans, ceramics, glass, silver, seals, jewellery, enamels and gold boxes, among other things. And she was also a very accomplished needle woman, and she had a great interest in textiles. So all of these ideas, sort of, gelled to create the doll’s house. There’s Queen Mary with some of her jade on display. This is a doll’s house that Queen Mary actually bought in 1920, at an exhibition held by the Royal School of Needlework, and, as you can see, it was made by a firm called Ashcroft of Liverpool.
And it had been made in the 1880s, but Queen Mary herself did all the furnishings, so you can just see one of the rooms here which she put together herself, including the textiles, which I think she had a hand in making. And it was then presented to the museum of childhood and it's still on display there.
And because it had been presented by Queen Mary, it became the model for tri-ang, who were one of the commercial producers of children's toys, to create this doll's house, and it was known as the Queen's doll’s house and was put on commercial sale. Princess Marie Louise was a very interesting character, she was very integrated into the cultural life really of the 1920s.
And she had a great insight into the artistic world and she was a patron of a lot of arts organizations, she was involved in numerous musicians, writers and artists, and in particular, she was friends with the eminent architects, so Edwin Lutyens, who she called 'Sned', and when he wrote back to her, he always called her Mary Louse, which was, you know, particularly respectful.
So in the year that she had the idea for the doll’s house, which was 1921, she approached Lutyens at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy, and being Lutyens, with his slightly whimsical sense of humour, he immediately agreed to design the doll’s house, and also to oversee its decorating and furnishing and as we will see, that was incredibly crucial to the scheme.
And it was Lutyens who basically created a committee to oversee the creation of the house. He in particular brought in somebody called Sir Herbert Morgan, who was president of the Society of Industrial Artists, and Morgan hosted the first dinner to work out what they were going to do with the doll’s house at The Savoy.
And it was Morgan's idea that the doll’s house would become an object to be displayed in the 1924 Empire Exhibition, and that really became the spark for turning it literally into a showcase for British manufacturing. He was accompanied in the committee by Sir Lawrence Weaver, who, as I mentioned, was the editor of Country Life, who was in charge of the furnishing.
Percy Macquoid, who was also a furniture historian, some of you may know his work. Edward Verrall Lucas was very involved, he was a novelist, a poet and a biographer, and he was in charge of assisting with the library, and Lutyens other great friend was Gertrude Jekyll, who designed the garden.
And it was Gertrude Jekyll's sister, Agnes, who was put in charge of all the stores, so particularly the food and toiletries and of course Francis Berry of Berry Brothers became the honorary cellarer. We'll have a look at the cellar when we go in. So at the first of these dinners, which Lutyens in his usual way described as "Dollelujah dinners." These dinners were always very informal and the guests would all, sort of, move around the table and discuss what they were going to do. Lutyens apparently on the very first dinner was already sitting and sketching ideas for what the doll’s house was going to look like. But meanwhile all around him the committee were discussing what the house was going to look like.
And they literally discussed everything from the Anglo Saxon period to the contemporary and even to sort of fantasy houses; they thought about Tudor houses, they thought about ultra- modern, but eventually the entire committee decided that the house should be, what was described as where a King and Queen might live if they weren't on duty. And to me it always reminds me very much of Clarence House, I think it's got that townhouse feel but there's still a regal air to it. Benson who was on the committee later wrote about it, "A further purpose in the minds of those who designed, constructed and furnished the Queen's doll’s house, was to present Her Majesty a little model of a house of the twentieth century, which should be fitted up with perfect fidelity down to the smallest details so as to represent as closely and minutely as possible a genuine and complete example of a domestic interior with all the household arrangements characteristic of the daily life of the present time."
"It is an interesting and lifelike memorial for future times of the sort of way in which people of our own days found it desirable and agreeable to live." And there is essentially Lutyens' first sketch for the doll’s house, so the one he was drawing on his napkin while everyone was discussing what the house should look like, this became essentially the model for the doll’s house.
And I hope you can see here are the drawers, which we will see in a minute, with the garage at one end and the garden at the other and very faintly you can just see a tree there. So he's already essentially worked out all the elements of the house.
Just to give you an example of another great contemporary project that was going on at the same time as this doll’s house, and some of you may know this work, it was known as Titania's Palace and it was designed by an Irishman called Sir Nevile Wilkinson, for his daughter Gwendolyn, and it's an entire fantasy. Obviously it's outwardly renaissance in style, but it was designed for the fairies which Gwendolyn believed lived in her garden. And the rooms were named for Titania and Oberon, and you can see this slightly eclectic mix of objects. All very beautiful but no sense of, 'this is a real palace.' This was very much intended to be a fantasy. But it does have certain parallels with Queen Mary's doll’s house. Lutyens himself actually designed this whole bell tower at this end of the house.
So he was involved in the scheme and also Queen Mary was involved in it, she presented a number of the objects in the house to it, so they were both very much aware of this other project, there was no sense of competition between them. And actually Sir Nevile Wilkinson opened it two years early because he was worried that it was otherwise going to impact on what was happening with Queen Mary’s doll’s house. So even though his palace wasn't quite finished he asked Queen Mary to open it for him.
And then it travelled round the world so that children could see it and it brought in a lot of charitable donations. It now lives in Denmark, it was actually acquired by The LEGO company, and they've put it on display in Egeskov Castle in Denmark.
And obviously the other parallel with Queen Mary's doll’s house is that it was designed to be seen in the round. So unlike the very traditional 18th century baby houses that were found in most country houses, which always opened up from the front, this is new development towards houses being seen in the round.
As we know, Queen Mary's doll’s house was designed to be utterly true to life, so very different in many ways to Titania's Palace, it was to include plumbing, wiring and lifts. And Princess Marie Louise later said that the only element that they hadn't been able to reproduce from modern life was the telephone.
And there's a wonderful hoover in there. Lutyens was particularly fond of the Palladian style of architecture, particularly after the war that was the style that he favoured and so he's very inspired by architects like Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren. And you can see that the style that he developed it's very beautifully symmetrical, there's a very nice rhythm to the whole architectural model.
As we know, he designed it so that it should be seen in the round, and the first tranche of letters that appear and these are among the ones that were newly bought by the royal archives. His main concern is how is the mechanism going to work because if you're going to design a house in the round where the shell moves up and down so that you can see inside it and everywhere, he was very worried about how exactly the mechanics of it would work. He keeps writing, "It must be made to work." But eventually what he did was there are counter weights in this area, which lift the shell up so that it’s beautifully balanced and of course now we always leave it open so everyone can see inside, so it doesn't get much use as a mechanism.
Of course electric lighting was included because it was part of modern life and the lifts also caused a bit of a headache because everything had to be exactly to scale, so the entire house is a 1:12 scale and there had to be something to lift the lifts which was strong enough for them to work, but fine enough that it didn't clog up the mechanism and eventually what they decided on was fishing wire, so that's what the lifts work on.
And then, as I mentioned, the drawers were added at either end. The other important thing that the committee decided very early on was that no individual should pay for the doll’s house, so that it was very much intended to be a collaborative effort and it should either be paid for by donations of money, or by actual objects.
And again it's A.C. Benson in the book about the doll’s house who said, "One of the pleasant things about the Queen's house is that it has not been got together by the over work and anxiety of a few, but the enjoyable and willing cooperation of many delighted designers, craftsmen and donors." And I think you get that sense that somehow there's something about working on it together; everyone put so much effort in.
As I said, Herbert Morgan then decided that the house should be put into the planned Empire Exhibition of 1924, and by exhibiting it, the house could become a showcase for British manufacturing. Obviously in the aftermath of the First World War, this was of incredible concern to the British and so everything was to be of the absolute highest quality and Lutyens, of course, was very concerned that everything should be exactly to scale.
Princess Marie Louise received a number of gifts very early on for the doll’s house and, again, in these new letters that have been purchased, Lutyens keeps writing, "Are they too big? Too big or not too big? That is the question." And Queen Mary also received a number of gifts directly for the doll’s house, and she's very concerned that if they're not of the highest quality is she going to upset people if she doesn't put them on display.
So there are a number of letters talking about how they're going to deal with this. And one of the things that Lutyens did was he brought in specialist model makers, called Twining’s, to help with the creation of a number of the small objects in the house.
But actually all the British manufacturers wanted to do it themselves and so Twining's are actually very little use, they do appear in the lists of donors, but it's quite few and far between and you can see all these British manufacturers are vying to outdo each other with the perfection of their objects.
And I think the overriding thing that always strikes me every time I look at the doll’s house, is the incredible attention to detail. Everything is beautifully, perfectly made and I've been lucky enough to catalogue the entire contents of the doll’s house. And so I've handled pretty much everything in there.
And it just takes my breathe away, just the incredible detail and so these are just a few things that I brought out, but you can see that this chair is properly caned, the springs on the mattress, which no one is ever going to see, are all perfectly made and even the under sheets tie underneath the mattress so they sit perfectly.
And then, I hope you can see here all the beautiful dove tailing of the carpentry. So everything is just incredibly perfect. Some other examples, for example, on the copper pans in the kitchen, they're all tinned properly inside so you don’t get verdigris. And I'm sure you all know that food jars and the bottles of wine are all filled with real food and real wine. I can't tell you how many bars of soap there are in the doll’s house, I think they're in the cleanest family in the world. And just the level of concern there was to get the perfection right. For example, the Worcester factory provided quite a lot of the little vases and they made models in plaster of Paris and they sent them to Lutyens for approval before they created the final one.
If you go to the Worcester Museum, you can see on display, it's one of the first things you see when you go in, is this tiny little vase that was made as a replica of the ones in the doll’s house because they were obviously so proud that they'd managed to scale down their work so beautifully.
Here are just a few more objects, there's the Worcester vase in fact, obviously when they're blown up on the screen you can't really tell how tiny they are, but for example, this fountain pen, which was made by Mabie Todds, is about the size of a grain of rice. And I don't know if you can see, but it is properly engraved here with the name of the company.
And you can see it's got a proper nib and everything. Agnes Jekyll, as I mentioned, was in charge of filling the store cupboards of the house and she was the one who decided that she should get in touch with every royal warrant holder in existence at the time and ask them to contribute something.
And as you know, many of the household names who are still working today, offered objects. So we have things from Boots, WHSmith's, Cooper's Marmalade, Rowntree's, Huntley & Palmers, Fry's chocolate, Tiptree and Chiver's jams, Coleman's mustard, Twining's tea, the shotguns come from Purdey's, Wisden made the little cricket bat. The bicycle was from Rudge, the cars are from Vauxhall, Lanchester, Rolls Royce and Daimler. Kodak provided a photograph album and Windsor and Newton made the little paint box which is in the Queen's sitting room.
So you can see that there's seeming frivolity of the idea of a doll’s house was actually overturned by the outpouring of all these British made goods for display, and obviously for the empire to see. Perhaps more importantly what the doll’s house is, is a unique reflection of contemporary life in the 1920s.
And I think I can say that it's probably unrivalled as a repository for the artistic, musical and literary output of the day, so Princess Marie Louise, as I mentioned, she was very involved with a lot of artists and musicians and Lutyens as well, he knew a lot of the people of the cultural world.
So between the two of them, they managed to persuade 700 artists and 600 writers to donate their work to the doll’s house. Lutyens wrote to them saying, "The library will be as representative of the best art of the period as is possible." So as you probably know, the library contains obviously the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible and the Quran. But it also contains scaled downs versions of the books by authors from Albanesi to Francis Young and just to give you a few names which I'm sure you recognize, J. M. Barrie, Hilaire Belloc, John Buchan, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Robert Graves, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Aldous Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, A. A. Milne, Vita Sackville-West, Somerville and Ross, and Edith Wharton.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. So it gives you an idea. I don't think now if you wrote to every author working in Britain and asked them to provide a book for the doll’s house, you would get any kind of response like that. And some of you may know that two years ago we reproduced one of the books from the doll’s house in a large size, so we scaled it up again and it's still for sale in the shops if you're interested in it.
The only thing that's actually been removed from the doll’s house is the print room material, any works on paper, because actually once they were mounted they didn't quite fit in the doll’s house, so they now live in the royal library where they're in air-conditioned circumstances.
But they do get lent quite a lot, because they're obviously of great interest so we have watercolours, pencil, ink and chalk drawings, etchings, engravings and a linoleum print. And if anyone's studying the cultural life of the period, it's an incredible record of artists, most of whom are no longer household names, they've been lost to history. But there are a few, I hope some of you have heard of Paul Nash for example, Mark Gertler, Laura Knight, MacDonald Gill, so again it's an incredible array of work of the period, it's like a little time capsule of cultural life. The furnishing of the house, this is something again that's perhaps more of a recent discovery.
Lutyens was really involved himself in the furnishing of the doll’s house, and I just wanted to give you an example, this is actually a design that's in the Royal Institute of British Architects in the V&A and this is actually a design for library furniture, and I'll show you again the sheet in a minute, but I've blown up the detail at the top there to show this chair.
And here's the actual model of the chair that's in the doll’s house that was made from his design. And here you can see Lutyens, in his own version of this chair, and he absolutely just adored this chair, he called it a 'Napoleon chair', because apparently he'd seen a painting of Napoleon sitting in an a-symmetrical chair, which I've never managed to track down, so I don't know if it was just Lutyens own imagination that he saw it as a-symmetrical. But he rather wonderfully writes on the design, which I don’t know if you can see, it's just up here. It says, "The most comfortable in the world. Recommended." So clearly they were to be included in the doll’s house. One of Lutyens' biographers has written that, "Lutyens had an amazing capacity to project his imagination into every space of whatever he was building so that he lived the life of the people who would ultimately inhabit it. More vividly perhaps than they ever would themselves."
And I think again that you can see Lutyens' mind at work in the doll’s house. So here is that sheet from the RIBA, and I've split it up so it's no longer half upside-down. And you can just see he's going crazy with wonderful designs, and I particularly love the tiger skin rug, which sadly never made it into the doll’s house.
But there's wonderful details like this here is a soda siphon, and there's a stereoscopic machine down here. So he's just experimenting with all sorts of things and you can just see his mind at work as he's designing. But I think the other thing that’s important about Lutyens is that he has the ability to create layers of history.
So even though the house was made in 1924, he includes antique furniture in it so it's very like a real house. Very few houses are built with entirely brand new furniture, so he deliberately includes earlier works of art in there. And this is a wonderful example and I love this story, this was one of Lutyens most famous and favourite designs, he created what he called the Princess bed and you'll see it in the Princess Royal's room in there.
And it was made complete with a small pea to go under the mattress of course. But in typical Lutyens way, he said he based it on this painting by Carpaccio of the 'Dream of St. Ursula', and you can see there are similarities although clearly he's made the arch of the bed instead of having the flat part.
But this is actually a full scale bed that Lutyens also designed, which was in 15 Queen Anne's Gate, and one of the amazing things about Lutyens is because he knew the editor of Country Life very well, a lot of his work was really well documented in Country Life, so there are photographs of a huge number of his projects.
And actually one of the things I've managed to do in recent years is match up a lot of the objects in the doll’s house with projects that Lutyens had worked on in this country. And you can see he's drawing ideas particularly of antique furniture and bringing them into the doll’s house. So again I'll try and remember to point them out to you as we go round. Not to forget below stairs, Lutyens was very involved in the furniture for the practical rooms as well. So in the kitchen I love these pine tables, but they clearly mirror the designs he did for the kitchens at Castle Drogo, which is in Devon/Cornwall.
Anyway, National Trust property. I hope you can see the exact same table there, and there's a similar table is also up in the housekeeper’s room in the doll’s house. And the same thing in the servants' bedrooms, so this is one of the beds from the doll’s house, but you can see it's very close in design to those staff bedrooms at Castle Drogo, sohe's just constantly reusing ideas as he goes round.
The servants' rooms are one of the delights of the house because you get an insight not just into how the King and Queen live but also how the servants live. So you can see they're quite well off, they get quite nice hand stitched blankets, they are well supplied with pears soap, and they get their own little ceramic toilet services in each room. And they also have quite personal things, so the house maids all get little photographs of soldiers clearly who they've lost in the First World War, it's all rather touching. And the nanny, who is clearly a bit older, she gets a portrait of Queen Victoria. It's quite nice. One of the things that I was quite surprised by when I was cataloguing the house is that actually very little of the furniture is actually directly copied from any of the royal palaces, and I don't think Lutyens ever intended that that should be the case. But this is one of the few examples where he directly copied an existing object.
So these sconces are in the dining room, little silver sconces, but they are direct copies of some silver sconces which are in the Royal Collection as an example on display upstairs in the castle, and these were made for Whitehall Palace in 1686, for James II, so it's one of the few examples where there's a direct correlation between the Royal Collection and the doll’s house.
But he did borrow some smaller items like linen and the King's despatch boxes they were beautifully copied, but I think because they were small and mobile they could be taken away from the palace and copied. Whereas obviously the larger objects of furniture are much more tricky.
Oh perhaps before I go onto this, I should just say the entire furnishing of the doll’s house, as we've said, is not by one particular firm, so the building firm of Parnell and Sons in Rugby had been chosen to create the actual structure of the house and they helped fit up a number of the rooms but then numerous other craftsmen were brought in and one of the purposes of the 1925 book that was published, when the doll’s house first went on display here at Windsor, was that all those craftsmen should be listed.
And if any of you know the Lucinda Lambton book about the doll’s house, that list is reproduced because we felt that it's really important to show exactly who was working, and the number of craftsmen involved in it. The other point I wanted to make was that although in many ways the design of the house was very static, Queen Mary, who at first was slightly reluctant to get involved in the house and she kept saying, "Oh no, use Marie Louise, yeah we'll go through her."
She obviously couldn't resist getting involved. And increasingly she goes to Lutyens' studio when the house is there and she starts playing with the furniture and rearranging it. And there's an inventory of the doll’s house that was created at the same time as it was finished, but Queen Mary clearly carries on adding objects to the house.
And I just pull out two, but one of them is this amazing, miniscule, Fabergé mouse with a diamond eye, which I hope you can see was a gift to Queen Mary from Grand Duchess Xenia of Russia. And then this is one of my favourite things in the doll’s house, this is an absolutely miniscule little silver gilt tea chest and on the top it's got engraved the coat of arms of the family of Hanover.
And inside is the smallest tea service I've ever seen. This is about a millimetre high, just to give you an idea, and this fits inside here. And when I first picked this up I could hear something rattling inside it and I was determined to get in there. And I was working with a colleague and she said, "No, no, there's nothing in there." There's a bit of silver dip here, which had jammed the drawers shut.
Anyway, I got in there and this was the result. And I'm very proud of it. So this is all made from copper. And this was either a gift to Queen Mary, or she inherited it from her mother, so it was clearly a very personal thing but ideal for the doll’s house. And quite surprisingly, she puts it in her bedroom in the doll’s house so it obviously has quite significance to her. As I said, Lutyens is very clever in layering the history, so you get layers of antique furniture as well as the contemporary, but the other thing that’s quite interesting, and I think plays quite a strong part in it, is that Queen Mary's not interested in art nouveau even though that's going on in the 1920s, or even art deco by then.
She's got a very old-fashioned taste and that is what you see in the doll’s house. Lutyens does edge in the little odd hints of more contemporary design but essentially it's an Edwardian house. And I think that it's again something to bear in mind when we're looking at it. The other thing that Queen Mary insisted on was that when the doll’s house was first put on display you paid separately to go and visit it and she said that the money from that should be contributed to various charities of which she was patron.
And even though we don't pay separately to go into the doll’s house, some of the money that is paid for your entrance fee to Windsor Castle still goes to those charities that Queen Mary insisted on. And I think she very much had that philanthropic idea in her head. So I just wanted to show you these two objects. They're not particularly enthralling, but interestingly made by the league of remembrance, which was obviously founded in 1915, during the First World War and she has this very close relationship with it and eventually she becomes patron of the charity.
So I think there she was very much aware that she wanted to show off their work as much as the craftsmen of Britain. So that's another thing to bear in mind when we're looking round. And, perhaps surprisingly, until 1923, it was proposed that there would be dolls in the doll’s house, and again Lutyens letters, there's going to be an entire royal family: king, queen, a prince and a royal princess.
But also pages, footmen, and a Gold Stick-in-Waiting. But eventually the dolls were abandoned, and I haven't managed to find out exactly when that happens or why. Several people have said to me, "Well, dolls spoil a doll’s house, because they always tend to stand slightly rigidly in front of all the objects. Or maybe they just felt that actually recreating a royal family as dolls was a bit disrespectful.
One of the other purposes of the doll’s house was that it was intended to show something of the increased accessibility of the royal family. It's not a real royal palace but you are seeing inside the way the royal lifestyle worked. So although it's a fictional residence, the precise details of the works of art on the royal dining table, or the quantity of linen needed in a royal household with six servants is followed exactly from real instructions, from the real master of the household.
So even though it's not a real residence, there's some element that they’re seeing behind the scenes in the royal family. And I think in the 1920s this is a very new kind of idea. And in 1923, Queen Mary was described in The Times as Britain's domestic monarch, so there's an idea that she's becoming more approachable, even if it's only a little vaguely. I just wanted to pull out some things that we won't be able to see when we go round because either they're too small or they're hidden away, but I just thought you might be interested because they're not very well known. This chest lives in the main entrance hall and it's wonderful, it's got a little note inside from Queen Mary herself saying, "Made in 1550." Well, I can't tell and I'm not enough of an expert to know, but clearly it's had a bit of a life, and you can see it's got a bit damaged here, but it's certainly not one of the objects that's in the inventory, so I think it's a Queen Mary addition.
This is quite fun, this is a kettle in the kitchens and I hope you can see, that's George V, it's made from a penny, so he's been beautifully kept intact on the bottom and then they've raised up the rest of it around him. And also down here this is one of the coal scuttles in the servants' bedrooms, made from a shotgun cartridge – quite fun.
This is in the royal library, this is actually a real penny, just to give you an idea of scale, this is a little box and inside it's got a set of Maundy money, because obviously if you're in a royal house, you have to have Maundy money to hand. And then this really charming thing, which I cannot find any information about, I think this is actually 18th century, I think it's a genuine 18th century little doll, probably from a doll’s house.
And it's tucked away inside one of the chest of drawers because it's so fragile and I'm sure you all know, textiles as soon as they see light they start to fall apart. And you can see it's a bit damaged but I just thought it was really intriguing and I just thought you might like to have a look at it.
So just to sum up the house, it's a showcase for British craftsmanship, it's a gift with charitable aims, it's a glimpse of royal life, and most importantly of all, it's a record of an Edwardian house in all its detail. So here it is on display at the Empire Exhibition and you can see here the party, so Lutyens, Queen Mary, George V, Queen Elizabeth, George VI, and other members enjoying the sight of it.
It's a rather odd photograph because obviously it's in its beautiful Pilkington glass case, which it still has, but unfortunately it reflects all these things here. These are actually made by Cauldon porcelain, and they're copies of the doll’s house, and you can buy those as souvenirs of your visit.
Amazingly when it went on display in its first year, it had one and a half million visitors, so as a boost for British manufacturing it's incredibly successful and The Times goes into ecstasies about it saying, "Everything is British made and in the best British taste." And then the following year it was put on show in the Ideal Home exhibition just because it was so successful at the Empire Exhibition. And while it was on show there they were recreating this room, which we're about to go into to house it, so I'm sure you know it came in here 1925, and the walls were painted. Lutyens designed the room but the walls were painted by the artist Philip Connard. This just makes me laugh because the first warden who was in charge of the doll’s house was a former army sergeant called Mr Gulliver, which I just think is very, very appropriate. So Queen Mary, when she technically received the doll’s house, obviously she'd seen it in its contributions.
She wrote personally to everyone who had been involved in it and said it was the most perfect present that anyone could receive and who can deny that? And Lutyens himself said that, "The doll’s house is being prepared as a gift for the Queen and incidentally as a historical relic, which we are hoping may result in the most complete reproduction in miniature that has ever been achieved. My design is an English home of today, such as the King and Queen might live in."
Lucinda Lambton calls it 'The last great hussar of the Edwardian period." In the years immediately following the Great War the committee were aware of the fragility of their way of life and their concern was to preserve it for the sake of future generations. So the house is really an archive of careful attention to detail with its accompanying books and images of works of art, precise arrangement of each room with its carefully chosen colour schemes, furnishings and the inclusion of every possible contemporary artist, writer or composer. It’s a record of a disappearing way of life. In a letter to Lord Hague in 1923, Lutyens wrote, "This is a miniature mansion such as the King and Queen might live in, in every detail complete. It is a present of a considerable importance since all the leading craftsmen are assisting and also a historical monument, which will increase in value every year."
His sentiments were echoed by A. C. Benson in his essay on the doll’s house where he said, "We may be sure that our successors will look at it in astonishment and wonder that men could ever have disdain to live in so laborious and cumbrous a way, but at the same time, they will value the house as a historical document." Thank you very much.