The Boy from Titchmarsh and the Queen's Tiara by Laurie Graham

 I was delighted to see the Queen’s choice of tiara when she entertained President Michael D. Higgins at Windsor Castle last month. Not that I’m particularly a connoisseur of tiaras, but I happened to know a bit about the Vladimir from researching my just-completed novel, The Grand Duchess of Nowhere. 
 

The Vladimir tiara can be worn one of two ways, either with its original pendant pearls or, alternatively, with emeralds.  Her Majesty chose the emerald version, in honour of her Irish guest. I hope he noticed.

How the Vladimir came into the possession of the Queen is quite a saga. It was originally the property of Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. Grand Duke Vladimir was an uncle of Tsar Nicholas II. The Grand Duchess was known familiarly as Miechen, and she was an Olympic-standard collector of gems, dropping into Faberge and Cartier as you and I might swing by the supermarket. She also had a very generous husband who understood that after giving birth the thing a woman most longs for is a parure of diamonds or sapphires.

Miechen had three sons and one daughter, all intended to be the eventual recipients of her jewel collection, but history took a different turn. By early 1917 Miechen, along with many other Romanovs, had headed south to Crimea, away from what they supposed were temporary political disturbances in St Petersburg and Moscow. That Miechen left behind most of her jewels in the Vladimir Palace is evidence enough that she believed she’d be going back.

As the revolution gathered pace Miechen began to accept that she was facing exile and with it the pressing need for ready money. She needed her jewels, but how to retrieve them from a city now under the control of the Petrograd Soviet? Enter stage left Bertie Stopford, an Englishman who preferred to speak French, a vicar's son from Titchmarsh in Northamptonshire, neither soldier nor diplomat but somehow free to move around wartime Russia and be an entertaining friend to women like Grand Duchess Miechen.

A plan was quietly hatched. Stopford and Miechen’s son Boris, dressed as boiler repair men, entered the Vladimir Palace by the tradesman’s entrance, made their way to Miechen’s boudoir and sprang her jewels, including the pearl drop Vladimir tiara, from her safe. The precious items were taken out of the palace in tool bags. How they were spirited out of Russia is still unclear, perhaps by diplomatic courier, courtesy of the British Embassy, perhaps concealed in someone’s clothing. A tiara would certainly have been difficult to secrete in one’s bloomers.

However it was done, Miechen’s jewels made it out of revolutionary Russia. Their value though was greatly diminished in a market flooded with gems belonging to exiled Romanovs. Cheaper pearls were becoming available too, from Japan. Fortunately for Miechen she didn’t live long enough to feel the pinch of their devalued worth, but after her death her children had to get whatever they could for them in order to pay off her debts. They were disposed of discreetly. Wealthy potential buyers were approached. Psst. Want to buy a diamond and pearl tiara, one careful previous owner?

The Vladimir was acquired by Queen Mary, the wife of King George V, and it was her idea to use some emeralds she had lying around and have them mounted as alternatives to the pendant pearls. 'To ring the changes', as the fashion editors say. When Queen Mary died her granddaughter, our present Queen, inherited the Vladimir tiara, with its two sets of pendants, and it was the emeralds that were aired at Windsor in April.

As for Bertie Stopford, I don’t know if he was rewarded for his derring-do. Perhaps the gratitude of a Romanov Grand Duchess was all he ever wanted. He lived out the rest of his life, mainly in Paris, with no visible means of support except lots of dinner invitations and the occasional commission from buying and selling antiques. He was a gadfly and name-dropper par excellence, but when he died in 1939 his estate only ran to the cost of a 30 year lease on a plot in the Bagneux Cemetery. In 1970 the man who rescued the Vladimir tiara ended up in a communal grave. His world and his so-called friends had faded away. But his true wealth, of course, were his memories, as recorded in his Russian Diary of an Englishman, Petrograd 1915-17.