A DANGEROUS sight for half-believers in magic’ was the verdict of The Times on Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, following its public unveiling a century ago at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London. Queen Mary herself—formidable, acquisitive, but much loved as ‘Britain’s Domestic Queen’—regarded it more simply as ‘the most perfect present that anyone could receive’. Before putting it on display, she had requested that she and her husband, George V, be left alone with the house.
For four hours, the King-Emperor of more than 400 million subjects looked on as his wife rearranged the house’s miniature contents. Made with fantastic ingenuity and scant regard for budget, these included two dozen silver oyster forks, copper warming pans and, on the Queen’s dressing table, a mirror in a frame set with diamonds. A tiny gramophone was concealed in an 18th-century-style walnut case; its manufacture had involved no fewer, and , in addition to , and, of course, the National Anthem. For all who beheld such wonders in 1924, this was indeed akin to magic. Nevertheless, Queen Mary requested the gramophone be banished to the nursery. The King, she wrote, hated gramophones. More to his taste was the saloon’s giltwood Broadwood grand piano.
