NO MORE TIARAS FOR HIRE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 16 December 1938, Page 6

NO MORE TIARAS FOR HIRE

ACTION BY LONDON JEWELLERS OLD CUSTOM AT STATE FUNCTIONS [By Air Mail—Special Correspondent] LONDON, 12th November. It is an old English custom for peeresses to hire tiaras for State functions. This week, when members of the nobility were preparing for the State opening of Parliament, many of them discovered that jewellers were refusing to lend these jewelled head-dressings. The practice is to be stopped. At these State functions—Coronations, Courts, and so on—there are never enough private tiaras to go lound. Some have been lost or mislaid. Impoverished members of the nobility may have sold them. Others are thought not good enough. New peeresses may have neglected to get theirs. But when this time the peeresses went to the jewellers who were accustomed to do the lending the jewellers pointed to a framed letter hanging in their shops from their association of aetail jewellers. The letter announced that the lending of tiaras and other ornaments had been discontinued. The result this week was that peereses without tiaras who had been lucky in the ballot for invitations to be at the opening of Parliament were inquiring among their uninvited peeress friends or relatives begging the lone of spare tiaras.