HIRING OF TIARAS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 2, 4 January 1939, Page 2

HIRING OF TIARAS

OLD PRACTICE STOPPED LONDON, Nov. 12. It is an old English custom for peeresses to hire tiaras for State functions. This week, when members o£ the nobility were preparing for the State opening of Parliament, many of them discovered that jewellers were refusing to lend these jewelled headdressings. The practice is to be stopped, states a London correspondent. At these State functions—coronations, courts, and so on—there are never enough private tiaras to go round. Some have been lost or mislaid. Impoverished members of the nobilitymay 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 retail jewellers. The letter announced that the lending of tiaras and other ornaments had been discontinued. The result this week was that peeresses 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 loan of spare tiaras.