Queen Mary's Dolls' House and Dolls Belonging to H.M. the Queen [antikvár]

QUEEN MARY'S DOLLS' HOUSE Clifford Musgrave, O.B.E. There can be hardly anyone of what-ever âge or sex, who is not amused and intrigued by dolls' houses. They are naturally the spécial realm of little girls, but boys and even grown-up men and women are far from being im-mune to their fascination. Almost every-one enjoys planning and arranging a full-size house, and the charm of a dolls' house lies in the fact that everything is crystallised into a small space, so that ail the interest and beauty of design and décoration and arrangement can be taken in at a glance. And more than this, while the beauties of a house are intensified by their concentration, the small defects and blemishes which are inséparable from seeing things life-size tend to dis-appear. What must surely be the most complété and magnificent dolls' house in the world is Queen Mary's Dolls' House at Windsor Castle, where it is preserved in a large glass case arranged so that one may walk with ease ail around it and see into ail its rooms. The suggestion for the création of the House was first made in 1920, when a group of people conceived the desire to present to Her late Majesty Queen Mary a gift that would serve as a token of national goodwill, and provide a means of raising fonds for the many charitable schemes which Her Majesty had at heart. For this purpose the House was exhibited on several occasions at the British Empire Exhibitions at Wembley in the 1920's. Now known as Queen Mary's Dolls' House, it is the spécial concern of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the fimds which resuit from its being exhibited at Windsor continue to enable important contributions to be made to many worthy charitable causes. One important purpose in the minds of those who put forward the idea of Queen Mary's Dolls' House was to present a model of a house of the 20th Century which should be fitted up with perfect fidelity, down to the smallest détails, so as to represent as closely and minutely as possible a genuine and complete example of a domestic interior with ail the household arrangements characteristic of the daily life of the time. Such a purpose found a ready response in the heart of Queen Mary, who was one of the most home-loving of ali our queens, and who had herself with great taste and knowledge planned and supervised the redecoration and rearrangement of the rooms, fumi ture and works of art at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Another and no less important aim was that the Dolls' House should give pleasure and be a source of gaiety, fantasy and wonder to people of ali ages. No one could have been found who summed up in one Personality all that these various aims required more completely and success-fully than Sir Edwin Lutyens. A scholar-ly yet originai and enterprising architect, who built the new city of Delhi and the Cenotaph in Whitehall and who was the designer of many splendid English country-houses, he was at the same time an intensely fun-loving person, and entered enthusiastically into the création of the Dolls' House. There is an extraordinary fascination and charm about smallness. Things cease to be as terrifying and unmanage-able when they are reduced in scale as they are in ordinary life, and there is a special satisfaction in creating a tiny replica of any object, whether it be a motor-car or a piece of furniture. In Queen Mary's Dolls' House the greatest care has been taken to make everything as closely as possible to the same scale of one twelfth normal size, or one inch to the foot. There are naturally a great many difficultés in making things to small proportions, but a great number of quite unexpected problems also arise. Materials behave in a différent way when used on a small scale. Fabrics such as clothing, bed-linen and tablecloths, although made of the finest and most delicate materials, seem to be unusually stiff, as anyone knows who has tried to dress a small doli, and who has found how difficult it is to get clothes to hang properly. There are also special diffi-culties in making books to a very small scale, because leather, cloth and paper cannot be made one twelfth of their normal thickness. And the steel ropes which are used in lifts seem to become stiffer than ever when made on a small scale, and will not lie smoothly over the pulleys on which they work. For this reason the lift-ropes in Queen Mary's Dolls' House were made of fine fishing-line. The door-locks throughout the house Continuai on page 7 facing page: The digrtifiedclassicalfaçade of the Garden Front.