GEORGE V said: ‘Abroad is awful. I know. I’ve been.’ He much preferred holidaying up the road from us, at Sandringham.
Although Lady Macclesfield wrote that ‘it would be difficult to find a more ugly or desolate-looking place: the wind blows keen from the Wash and the spring is said to be unendurable in that part of Norfolk,’ George’s mother, the dowager Queen Alexandra, adored it. The estuary mud reminded her of her native Denmark. COUNTRY LIFE would report in 1902 that ‘the exquisite kindness which permeates all she does finds constant expression in her love of animals’.
I’ve managed to get through life without a chalcedony model of a corncrake. In 1907, however, Alexandra was to commission the London outpost of the House of Fabergé to depict the animals on the Sandringham estate. At about £75 a throw, they made charming gifts and the list of semi-precious stones from which they were fashioned reads like the Book of Revelation.
Fabergé’s sculptors produced an opal stoat, an aventurine quartz sow, a silver woodcock, an obsidian shire horse, a jasper cat, a purpurine bantam, a jet Norfolk Black turkey and a sheep, modelled from a beloved royal pet that had been rescued from the lunch menu on a Nile cruise. (Abroad is awful.)
This story is from the November 1, 2017 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the November 1, 2017 edition of Country Life UK.
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