WEDDING PRESENTS CATALOGUE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 84, 8 April 1922, Page 17

WEDDING PRESENTS CATALOGUE.

Royal wedding gifts were not always so caretuily dealt with and tended as they are nowadays, says th>> London

"Daily Chronicle." Visiting a curio dealer's shop in Aberdeen in the early days of her widowhood, Queen A'ictoria discovered there one of her own wedding presents —a piece of silver given by a servant of Stockmar, the Prince Consort's friend and physician. "Perturbed and wounded," the Queen instituted an inquiry und found that many things given her at her wedding were carelesslystored in odd rooms at Windsor, in cellars at Buckingham Palace, at Osborne, and at Balmoral: lack of control in the household had allowed others, including pieces of plate and various costly gifts, to be spirited away, and some sold. At once she put in hand the work of cataloguing and photographing her wedding gifts, the catalogue being afterwards extended to all her personal possession. The same system was afterwards applied in the case of wedding gifts to King Edward and King George, and the catalogues now fill many big leatherbound indexed volumes.

It was not until the marriage of King George that an attempt, was made to induce giving on "sensible" lines in connection with a Royal wedding. Some of the earlier gifts were not only useless, but must have proved very burdensome for Court officials. King Edward, for instance, once told Admiral Lord Fisher that his wedding presents included 800 cloth caps of the double-peaked type fashionable for men when he got married. He and Queen Alexandra also received about a thousand silver teapots and something tike fourteen hundred cruets.