Footnotes

Provenance
Viscountess Churchill (1895-1972)
Descent to the current owner

Born Christine McRae Sinclair, Viscountess Churchill married Victor Albert Spencer, 1st Viscount Churchill in 1927, as his second wife. The Viscount was a distinguished courtier whose career spanned the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and was a second cousin of Sir Winston Churchill.

During the first part of the 20th century, aristocratic society enjoyed a glamorous social life on a luxurious and lavish scale. It was not only fashionable for women to festoon themselves like queens, but protocol to wear certain jewels and decorations when attending formal festivities. The tiara, the most majestic of accessories and the ultimate symbol of rank, was worn by royalty and nobility at all glittering court and state occasions in Britain and the vice-regal courts of India and Ireland. It also became fashionable for society ladies to wear tiaras to private dinners, balls and to the opera.

At the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, tiaras, along with coronets, were permitted to be worn for the first time, in a move that traditional courtier, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, condemned as "the revolt of the Peeresses against wearing no diamonds.. the dignified uniformity of immemorial practice has been sacrificed to a heedless passion for indiscriminate ornament." The Peeresses similarly revolted at wearing no diamonds at the State Opening of Parliament the same year, further establishing the tiara as an obligatory accessory for aristocratic public life.

The coronation of George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon as King and Queen of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth and as Emperor and Empress of India at Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937, was a designed as a triumphant display of British pageantry and Imperialism and was one of the most costly public spectacles ever staged. Guests from across the Empire and around the world were invited, including Indian princes, African royalty and representatives and contingents from Britain's Dominions and colonies. The procession from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace was six miles long. Vogue pronounced "from the moment we watched those Duchesses, proud as galleons in full sail moving majestically with their tiaras and trains up one of those double staircases, we knew the social clock had been put back thirty years." The diarist Sir Henry "Chips" Cannon described the "blazing light" of the Peeresses' diamonds and how the north transept of Westminster Abbey was a "vitrine of jewels and bobbing tiaras."

This tiara, made by Hennell, British jeweller par excellence, in the geometric Art Deco style, is also a "tranformable jewel" and may be worn in a variety of ways: tiara, necklace, pair of bracelets and various clips and brooches. The accompanying green paste and diamond brooches also double up as an interchangeable centrepiece for either the tiara or the necklace; presumably the green pastes replace valuable gems that were previously sold. The tiara was worn by Viscountess Churchill at the 1937 coronation and the photograph shows her wearing it in her peeress's robes designed by Norman Hartnell and holding her coronet. It is not only a fine example of the jeweller's art but a great survivor from an age of aristocratic glamour.

Further reading
Munn, Geoffrey, "Tiaras: A History of Splendour", Antique Collectors Club Ltd, Woodbridge, 2001
Scarisbrick, Diana, "Ancestral Jewels", André Deutsch Ltd, London, 1989