The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 11 August 2019 *** 11
Dress to thrill A dress
believed to have belonged to
Elizabeth I is seen in its full
magnificence for the first
time after Libby Thompson,
a textile conservationist,
worked on its restoration at
Hampton Court, above and
left. The garment had been
used as an altar cloth in St
Faith’s church, Herts, for
centuries until 2015 when it
was identified as possibly the
only surviving fabric from
one of the Tudor monarch’s
famously elaborate dresses.Now, after 1,000 hours of
conservation and research by
the Historic Royal Palaces
(HRP), the dress, which is
decorated with detailed
depictions of animals, is to go
on public display. Along with
the circa-1600 “Rainbow
Portrait”, above right – in
which the queen wears a
bodice strikingly similar to
the dress – it will feature in
the exhibition The Lost Dress
of Elizabeth 1 at Hampton
Court Palace from Oct 12 toPAUL GROVER FOR THE TELEGRAPH/GETTY IMAGES Feb 23.
The Duke’s
cousin, birth
at Ritz and a
furry shock
for the King
By Hannah Furness
ROYAL CORRESPONDENT
AS a cousin of the Duke of
Edinburgh, daughter of the
last Viceroy of India, and
child of London’s extraordi-
nary high society, Lady
Pamela Hicks has had one of
the most colourful lives of
any living Briton.
Lady Pamela, the daugh-
ter of the 1st Earl Mountbat-
ten of Burma, is to regale a
new generation with the
vanishing history of her
golden age, from the hotel
birth that nearly led to her
being called “Ritzy”, to be-
ing abandoned in Budapest
for six months.
Persuaded by her daugh-
ter, the 90-year-old is set to
become a star for the digital
age, coincidentally follow-
ing a trend for royal podcasts
which saw Princess Eugenie
of York announce her own
project this week.
Her appearances on The
India Hicks Podcast, hosted
by her daughter, will span a
seven-part series offering
family history, with snap-
shots of life with the Queen
and Duke of Edinburgh.
The project, which she
was convinced to do over tea
and cakes at home, is in-
tended to bring history to
life in her inimitable style,
with Hicks saying it was
“very grounding” for a
young audience to hear her
mother’s no-nonsense ap-
proach to life’s mishaps.
Two episodes published
so far see Lady Pamela dis-
cuss how the King of Spain
ordered a royal guard of the
Ritz Hotel in Barcelona for
her birth; how she shocked
King George VI with her pet
mongoose during a stay at
the palace; and how Euro-
Hong Kong tycoon ‘paid
Zara Tindall £100,000’
By Patrick Sawer
SARAH, Duchess of York,
and Zara Tindall were re-
portedly paid tens of thou-
sands of pounds to advise a
Hong Kong tycoon.
Mrs Tindall was paid
£100,000 a year for a non-
executive directorship at the
Global Group of companies
owned by Dr Johnny Hon, it
was reported yesterday. She
was reportedly appointed to
advise on horse racing for a
sports investment arm in re-
turn for attending two board
meetings by phone a year
and four company functions.
The Duchess was paid al-
most £300,000 from a firm
chaired by Dr Hon, as well as
a £72,000-a-year retainer
for her non-executive direc-
torship of his Hong Kong
film investment firm, ac-
cording to The Daily Mail. Dr
Hon, 47, said her main role
was “to introduce a few peo-
ple to me in Hong Kong”.
Dr Hon’s spokesman said:
“The building of relation-
ships (charitable/business/
otherwise) is a mutual bene-
ficial matter – it is never in-
tended to benefit one party
alone.” Mrs Tindall refused
to comment last night.News
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Tominey and Hannah
Furness
telegraph.co.uk/
royalnewsletter1pean royals maintained fam-
ily relations while being
“loyal to their own coun-
tries” during the Second
World War.
One anecdote relays how
she and her sister Patricia
Knatchbull, 2nd Countess
Mountbatten of Burma,
were left in a hotel near Bu-
dapest with a feuding nanny
and governess for six months
after her mother, Edwina
Mountbatten, Countess
Mountbatten of Burma,
dropped them off during
home renovations, wrote its
name on a piece of paper and
lost it.
Asked whether it was sup-
posed to be for her benefit,
an amused Lady Pamela re-
plies: “My benefit? No, she
never thought of us! But
when she was home we of-
ten had lunch in the sum-
mer, and she was great fun.”
Of her birth in Barcelona,
in which she was placed in a
“very sweet dog basket” as a
newborn after King Alfonso
XIII of Spain placed a per-
sonal royal guard around the
Ritz, Hicks tells listeners
Lord Mountbatten and his
wife “lost their minds for a
moment and thought she
should be called Ritzy”.
Hicks told The Sunday Tel-
egraph the series had come
about after she posted “snip-
pets” of Lady Pamela on Ins-
tagram and realised that a
new generation had been
captivated by her tales.
“I’ve grown up listening
to my mother’s extraordi-
nary stories,” she said.Podcast by Lady
Pamela, 90, regales
listeners with tales
of lost golden age
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