Letting go

The collecting bug strikes early. First, for me, were cereal packets with cardboard animals that you cut out and constructed. I got most of them, but thinking back there was a single elusive one and I now wonder if the manufacturers only made a few of them, or maybe none at all, so that we children went on demanding more and more packets until we got it – and we never did.

I was interested in the Royal Family from my earliest days, which was considered bizarre in some ways. I remember my mother being cross when I wanted a Pitkin Royal Line of Succession: “Why are you interested in that sort of thing?” It was therefore with some hesitation that I confessed to my parents that I had bought James Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Queen Mary for 15 shillings in a second-hand bookshop in Windsor. That was the afternoon of Churchill’s state funeral in January 1965. I was 13. This time they appeared rather interested.

The floodgates opened, and I have been buying books ever since (four within the last 24 hours). It was a challenge to collect Whitaker’s Almanacks. I used to carry around a card with the missing ones listed, so that I could seek them in second-hand bookshops, but when the internet came along, it was easy to complete the set. I now have consecutive Almanacks from 1907 to 2014, the earliest dated 1878, and very useful they are in my work for contemporary information.

I longed for items with royal association. At school, I tried to buy a Christmas card signed by the Queen, from a boy whose father was her chaplain. His parents weren’t having that. But I had better luck aged 16, when one of the Queen Mother’s pages parted company with her 1967 Christmas card for £5 (he doesn’t like being reminded of this). I still have it, and I hate to confess I have a safe full of other such cards, including ones sent by the Queen and the Queen Mother to the Duke of Windsor.

The excitement of finding an elusive book is intense. In 1984, my hand darted out to grab a copy of Nicky Mariano’s Forty Years with Berenson. It was in a shop in Hay-on-Wye, priced 75p, and there was nobody else nearby, but I was taking no chances. All collectors have their mad moments of luck: a copy of Lady Cynthia Asquith’s diaries with the name ‘Nancy Rodd’ in the front turned up in Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1981 – I knew that was Nancy Mitford. Then there was the time I strayed on another Pope-Hennessy Queen Mary, inscribed to the present Duke of Gloucester from his aunt, the Princess Royal, in a Gloucester Road bookshop. (I think he had three more copies at home.) Not everyone would have recognised the Princess Royal’s handwriting.

I have travelled far and wide to buy them. In 1980, I sat in a freezing marquee in Rottingdean (rain pouring down outside) to scoop up 400 of Enid Bagnold’s books for £100. Among them was a first edition of Proust, which emerged from the box like an unexploded bomb. I was happier than another man that day, who found he had bought several hundred copies of the frankly unreadable memoirs of Sir Roderick Jones, director of Reuters.

In 1979, Sir Cecil Beaton asked me to become his official biographer. I had two lunches with him at his Wiltshire home, the second being on 15 January 1980. Two days later he died, so I only got to know him posthumously, working in his house with his secretary, talking to his friends and reading his copious papers. I am now his literary executor. Being surrounded by beautiful things made me interested in pictures. At the famous sale at his house in the summer after he died, I got everything I wanted at the maximum price I was prepared to pay for it. There is no greater excitement than bidding for something you desperately want, especially if you can only just afford it. In my experience you only regret the ones that get away, and anything you buy, however expensive, becomes excellent value with the passing of time.

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The problem is that eventually you can’t move. The house is full, so it is time to say goodbye to two Investiture Chairs I bought at the time the current King was made Prince of Wales (1969). I was secretary of the school heraldry society and a speaker, Peter Spurrier, alerted me to them. A boy in my house, Tom Vesey, was going to the ceremony (I was so envious – A-level revision was my lot). He was the nephew of Lord Snowdon, who was running the show. The chairs come apart. Only the VIPs actually sat in the chairs with legs –most of the guests sat on the seats with backs attached to long rows like benches. Guests could buy them after the ceremony – as can you, since they are among my treasures to be offered in Bonhams’ Collections sale this spring.

I am letting a few Coronation chairs go, too. At most Coronations, these are specially commissioned for the guests at Westminster Abbey, so all Coronation chairs have played their part in proceedings, bearing the monarch’s cypher. Again, distinguished guests could buy them afterwards, so you see them in many stately homes across Britain. Mine come from George VI’s Coronation in 1937 and the Queen’s in 1953 – chairs and also stools. Altogether I have 15, which I use as dining room chairs, since they were designed for people to sit in comfort for hours in extremely uncomfortable clothes. Some rather nice copies were made as replicas for the Silver Jubilee in 1977 (I have five of the smart copies at home, and there is one in the royal pew at the chapel at Royal Lodge).

The Cecil Beaton picture of the Duchess of Windsor is one of four existing from the day he spent sketching her in London on 20 November 1936. The Duchess had two in her house in Paris, sold for £97,696 and £73,368 respectively in the 1998 Sotheby’s sale in New York, and the other was bought privately by a Londoner. In 1983, I took Lady Diana Cooper to an exhibition of Beaton’s pictures. She looked at this one and said: “Not that anyone would be interested, but that is exactly how Wallis used to stand.” On the strength of that, I bought it.

The goblet was given to me on my 21st birthday. It is particularly special since it contains a silver coin showing Edward VIII actually wearing his crown, which of course he never did. And the little picture of Beaton photographing the Duchess the day before her 1937 wedding came from his collection at Reddish House.

I wonder how often Edward VII posed in a house party group or for a shooting party before heading off with his gun? One of the pictures illustrates the point made by the Duke of Windsor in his memoirs as to how royal visits needed to change. In Edwardian times, the King did no more than be driven to a town in a carriage for an engagement. He did not even get out of his carriage. He simply sat there, listened to some mayoral speech, snipped a ribbon to open something, and was driven back to Knowsley or wherever, to his sybaritic life and to his girlfriends. The Duke of Windsor deeply disapproved.

Hugo Vickers has written biographies of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Sir Cecil Beaton.