The Wedding Ring

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18378, 21 April 1934, Page 10

The Wedding Ring

| ADY' Mount Temple, the wife of a former Minister of Transport in Britain, has original ideas about jewellery and particularly about wedding rings. She expressed those ideas with conviction last month when she was the guest of honor at the annual banquet of the London Wholesale Jewellers and Allied Trades’ Association. | In her speech, Lady Mount Temple. Called the gold wedding ring a “monstrosity,” and appealed for its deposition in favor of the much more beautiful gem-set eternity ring or the plain platinum circlet. The platinum band was less trying than the gold, she said, lo other rings, which to-day were almost entirely sol in. platinum. “Why cannot we have a really beautiful ring as the symbol of the most important event in u woman’s life? The gold wedding ring has retained only one good point, that, being all one piece, a circlet, it symbolises eternity. But it is an eternity of exIrciue ugliness, and it has no basis of historical precedent. 1 “When, during excavations at Ur of the Chaldees, the skeleton of Queen Shu-Bad, who was buried about 4000 years ago, was discovered, she was found to be wearing only two rings, j One of these was a narrow band with , a cloisonne wavy line round it, into which was set at regular intervals a number of small gems, “In other words, the wedding ring of Queen Shu-Bad was almost identical with the modern gem-set. wedding ring. Lady Mount Temple said that with the exception of a string of pearls, which had its own intrinsic value, jewellery should be subservient to the personality of tho wearer and the frock with which it was worn. “Women often abuse their jewellery by wearing it on the wrong dress and at the wrong*’ moment. It; apparently does not; occur to some of them that diamonds do not look well in alliance with tweeds, and pearls and pyjamas must always slrike a wrong note. Pearls are very full dress and one cannot describe pyjamas as such.”