Dressed In Their Best

It began with a dress for her first baby – and grew into a unique evocation of upper class nursery life in what Angela Lynne calls the ‘Christopher Robin to Prince Charles’ years. Now her collection is a delight of dainty smocked frocks and romper suits and tiny, sturdy button-bar sandals

- Rowan Mantell

TINY, EXQUISITE dresses fill the room. Each has a rounded collar, short puffed sleeves and a smocked bodice glowing with intricate stitching. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of hand-made frocks in delicate pastel silks and light-as-air cottons, sprigged with flowers and prettied with intricate embroidery and no two are the same.

Standing, almost swamped by the rails of these jewel-like dresses, is Angela Lynne. She has created this extraordinary collection of English nursery clothes and equipment in the 45 years since her first baby was born. It is probably the only collection of its kind in the world.

It began with a single dress, bought for her eldest daughter. She went on to have another four daughters and finally a son, and her collection of nursery clothes and equipment, toys and books, is still growing.

The attic rooms of her home in Shropham, near Attleborough, are now entirely given over to the world of the upper class English nursery of the early to mid 20th century. And the collection is spreading throughout the house.

Guest bedrooms on the first floor have a couple of extra vintage cots apiece, or toys first played with a century ago, or a trunk of tiny romper suits. Downstairs, alongside the main furniture of the dining room, there are child-size tea-party tables and chairs. Prints and paintings of children line the walls and the collection includes prams too. Dolls lie in the toy prams and there are also the old-fashioned coach-built prams once used by Angela and her children.

Rooms which might once have been nurseries are laid out as a traditional day nursery and night nurseries, complete with beds, baths, books, glass bottles of medicines, mother-of-pearl backed hairbrushes and all the other accoutrements of childhood for babies who wore silk for best and were packed off to boarding school at seven or eight.