Celebrating its centenary this year, Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle showcases an array of tiny treasures, from a fully strung miniature grand piano to a mini set of Crown Jewels inset with real diamonds
Words by Felicity Day
TheRoyal Collection might include Old Masters the size of a whole wall, toweringly tall sculptures, and dining tables long enough to seat a small army, but one of its best-known and best-loved treasures is a masterpiece on a miniature scale: Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, which celebrates its centenary this year.
The history of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House
Complete with everything from a grand saloon to a wine cellar and scullery, and filled with a thousand tiny but incredibly realistic fixtures and fittings, Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was the brainchild of Princess Marie Louise. A childhood friend of Queen Mary, cousin of her husband, King George V, and very much at home in artistic circles, it was she who, in 1921, convinced the most eminent British architect of her age, Sir Edwin Lutyens, creator of London’s Cenotaph, to oversee its design, decoration and furnishing as a gift to the Queen from a grateful nation – a gift whose playfulness might bring a smile to the faces of a people scarred by the horrors of the First World War.
Always known as a dolls’ house despite the fact that no dolls ever took up residence in its grand rooms, the project gained momentum when it was decided that it should go on show at 1924’s Empire Exhibition – a sort of postwar successor to the Great Exhibition of 1851, held at Wembley Park and intended to promote international trade and boost economic growth. “It became a literal showcase for British manufacturing,” says Kathryn Jones, senior curator at the Royal Collection Trust, who cares for the dolls’ house and its contents, and has overseen a special centenary display at Windsor Castle, its home since 1925. “I believe it’s for this reason that so much attention was lavished on each individual piece to produce an exact miniature replica of a full-scale work,” she explains.
What’s inside Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House?
And lavished is the word. Working to a scale of 1:12, over 1,500 craftsmen – everyone from Royal Warrant holders like Cartier, to veterans of the war – laboured for three years with love and astonishing skill to recreate miniature versions of everything a house for the Queen might require. There is a red velvet throne, and a despatch box, overflowing with tiny sealed letters for the sovereign’s attention; champagne bottles filled with real fizz using tiny pipettes, glittering chandeliers modelled on those in great stately homes and fully monogrammed bedlinen.
“Every room contains a new delight or something of interest,” enthuses Kathryn, who has examined the contents up close in a way that few have been able to – until now, that is. For the Royal Collection Trust have shot a series of videos of the house from ‘a dolls’ eye view’ for the centenary, showcasing the incredible artistry like never before. And for those able to visit Windsor Castle in person this year, a selection of the house’s contents have gone on display in the splendour of the Castle’s Waterloo Chamber. Pieces like a tiny Singer sewing machine and scissors that really cut, a grand piano with functioning keys, and a scaled-down version of the Crown Jewels, studded with real diamonds, are all too easily underappreciated in situ, but shine under a spotlight.
They were certainly just the things to enchant a Queen whose passion for collecting diminutive items of decorative art, from fans to Fabergé, was legendary – so legendary, in fact, that it spawned the unjust rumour that whenever she paid a visit to an aristocratic house, her hosts scrambled to tuck their most treasured trinkets out of sight, to avoid being obliged by her profuse admiration to offer them up as gifts. She naturally declared the house “the most perfect present that anyone could receive”.
But there was not simply charm in the project’s miniature proportions. From the start, Queen Mary’s Doll’s House was viewed as a valuable opportunity to leave ‘a memorial for future times’ of British domestic and cultural life in the 1920s – albeit life in the sort of home where the inhabitants had inherited suits of armour and antique furniture, had scores of servants, and could afford cutting-edge modern conveniences. The house not only has electricity and an operational lift, but a Hoover and a functioning lawnmower; and is crammed full of goods from the era’s most venerated brands: tea from Twinings, jams from Tiptree, sweets from Rowntree’s and biscuits from McVitie’s.
In many ways it is a house rooted in the Edwardian era rather than the Roaring Twenties, when Art Deco was gaining ground in design, and the servants who appear to occupy the attic rooms, and to toil in the downstairs quarters, were seeking more attractive employment in offices and factories. But it serves its purpose as a time capsule nonetheless, showing us not just what our forebears were eating, drinking and doing with their time, but their challenges and concerns. “In the night nursery are some tiny, padded pneumonia jackets,” says Kathryn, by way of example – miniature replicas of those used to regulate the body temperature of sufferers before medical advances made them obsolete.
The pinnacle of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in terms of posterity was the library. On its tiny shelves rest nearly 600 beautifully bound books, many containing original works specially created for the house, and handwritten in infinitesimally small script by their authors, among whom were some of the period’s most prominent writers: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A.A. Milne and Thomas Hardy to name but a few. “I doubt even if you could find the counterpart of these in the real Buckingham Palace,” wrote one contemporary. Of course you could not, though their like does now exist, for as part of the 100th birthday celebrations, the book-loving Queen Camilla has overseen the creation of twenty modern-day equivalents, providing a similar snapshot of literature today.
All such artistry on the inside was matched by innovation on the outside. The world’s largest dolls’ house is, unusually, three-dimensional, made to be gazed upon in the round, with an exterior shell that, thanks to a cleverly hidden mechanism, lifts clean into the air.
When it was exhibited at Wembley in 1924, 1.5 million people queued up to peer in. A percentage of the admission charge went to charities chosen by the Queen, a condition of her permission for its display and “something which still continues to this day,” notes Kathryn. It moved to the specially designed display room at Windsor, where it still resides after a short stint at 1925’s Ideal Home exhibition, its first warden an ex-army officer appropriately named Mr Gulliver.
It was undeniably a wonder of its age, though the house’s creators weren’t entirely sure if those in the centuries to come would appreciate the craftsmanship that went into this most remarkable of miniature buildings. They may rest assured that in 2024 we still do.
Penned by a queen
To mark the 100th anniversary of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, a new initiative championed by Queen Camilla has added to its miniature Library. Twenty tiny manuscripts, ranging from short stories, poetry collections and illustrated tales to plays, articles and recipes, have been written and decorated by hand by leading writers and illustrators. Her Majesty The Queen has contributed her own miniature book to the collection: a handwritten introduction to the Modern-Day Miniature Library project, in which the Queen writes: “For me, it is the library that is the most breath-taking space in the house” and pays tribute to the “many outstanding writers, whose work brings joy, comfort, laughter, companionship and hope to us all.”
Bound in the Royal Bindery at Windsor Castle, the book features a gold-tooled miniature version of Her Majesty’s cypher, measuring just 7mm tall. It was created using a specially made cypher tool, which was modelled on the tool used to apply Queen Mary’s cypher to the original Dolls’ House Library books in the 1920s.
The Royal Collection Trust’s ‘dolls’ eye view’ videos can be found here.
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