Footnotes

• This cup was commissioned by Pamela Woolworth to be presented to her friend Mary Jane McGrath upon her winning the Four-in-Hand 1949 Devon Horse Show coaching competition.
  
  Mary Jane competed in equestrian events as a young woman. Her friend, Pamela Woolworth, had known of her friend's involvement in horses and competitions over the years, and decided to finally go to see one. The Devon competition event involved driving a four‐in‐hand carriage around a course. That year, the course was particularly difficult, and many of the competitors could not execute a tricky final turn to exit the ring properly. Mary Jane's horses had only been hitched together once before, but she drove her horses briskly through the course, deftly cut a sharp turn and exited gracefully in a dramatic display of skill that nevertheless caused the audience to clear out of the box seats, in case she sheared off the corner.
  
  Mary Jane, 19 years old and 98 pounds, won the event and received a small token of a winner's trophy. Pamela was so aghast that Mary Jane risked her life, only to get a "thimble," as she called it, that she commissioned this goblet from London glass engraver Laurence Whistler.
  
  Literature:
  Rupert Hart-Davis, Engraved Glass 1952‐1958 Laurence Whistler, 1959, p. 49

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Category: Furniture / English Furniture and Works of Art

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