It is almost certainly the first time that cassette tapes of Elton John’s Greatest Hits (Volume Two) and Diana Ross’s Ultimate Collection have featured in a royal collection.
Visitors to Buckingham Palace this summer will see all kinds of gifts presented to the Queen during her 65-year reign, from a dinosaur’s upper arm bone and a beaded Nigerian throne to the first Union Jack badge to be worn in space.
However, they will also find some old tapes they may have owned themselves, thanks to a poignant display of items belonging to Diana, Princess of Wales.
A suitcase of cassettes by artists including George Michael, Rod Stewart and The Three Tenors (a Celine Dion album, The Colour of My Love, is tucked away at the back) is among the items chosen by her sons in a special tribute to mark the 20th anniversary of their mother’s death. Other exhibits include her ballet shoes and the wooden tuck box she took to boarding school.
It is the first time that Buckingham Palace has dedicated a display to the princess. “I think people will feel it’s very personal and emotive,” a palace spokeswoman said.
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The rest of this year’s exhibition in the State Rooms is dedicated to the presents collected by the Queen, after 65 years of travelling the world.
There are no Celine Dion albums in the royal gifts exhibition, but there are bags of salt from the British Virgin Islands; a painted ostrich egg from Namibia; a Tibetan prayer shawl blessed by the Dalai Lama; a 13th-century gold breastplate from Panama; a sperm whale’s tooth from Fiji and a handbag made from coconut leaves (never used).
Few monarchs have travelled more than the Queen, who has clocked up at least 89 state visits to other countries, and has made more than 180 official visits to Commonwealth countries. At home, she has received 109 state visits from 61 countries. Which means a lot of gift-giving.
On the occasion of her coronation in 1953, Emperor Hirohito of Japan sent an exquisite lacquer box. Uganda gave her a humble wooden chair. Nelson Mandela gave the Queen a silk scarf depicting San bushmen hunting antelope and JFK offered a signed photograph of himself. The samovar — a heated metal container for making tea — from Boris Yeltsin is one of the few gifts still in use at Buckingham Palace.
Jumbo, the 589kg elephant given by President Ahidjo of Cameroon in the 1970s, is no longer around, nor is the giant armadillo from Brazil. Live animals are still presented to the Queen but these days, Sally Goodsir, curator of the exhibition, said, “they remain firmly in their homeland”.
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The most humorous gift came from the Glaswegians, during the 2014 Commonwealth Games — a pair of His and Hers security passes just in case the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had trouble accessing any VIP areas.