Edward VIII, Wallis Simpson and the value of the royal bottom
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Version 0 of 1. This Thursday a two-seater sofa of no obvious distinction is expected to fetch up to £3,000 at a Northamptonshire auction. The reason for the astronomical estimated price tag is that it was on this bit of nondescript furniture that the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, first flirted with Wallis Simpson. The sofa stood in the country house of Edward's previous girlfriend, Lady Thelma Furness, who was responsible for introducing the lovestruck pair. The auctioneer in charge of the sale trumpets that this was "a settee that was set to change the course of history", a reference to the looming abdication crisis. Without this elaborate narrative buttressing its claims to historical significance, the sofa is – well, just a sofa. It's even debatable whether it's actually the same sofa on which the royal bottom canoodled with a bony behind from Baltimore. When Lady Thelma found out that her playboy lover had transferred his affections to her rival, she took an axe to the sofa and chopped a third off it. What was originally a three-seater is now only two – "a love seat", trills the promotional blurb – and is covered in a shade of velvet that is known in certain interior design circles as "blush". None of these spoilsport caveats matter if you're the kind of person who reckons they can channel the dead, or at least the absent, through surviving objects. That's why people keep hold of tokens that used to belong departed loved ones – a mother's ring, a father's tools. It all becomes more complicated when you start buying up, or into, other peoples' memories. Jimi Hendrix's guitar doubtless meant a lot to Jimi Hendrix, but quite what it means to the person who buys it at auction is unclear. Of course it may be acquired simply as a capital asset, a hedge against inflation or financial meltdown. But that only works because there's a healthy market for such memorabilia, a market buoyed up by other peoples' wistful dreams of what it might feel like to own the Fender Stratocaster of a man they never met. Strictly speaking, this personal connection shouldn't matter for an object to have meaning. In recent years Neil MacGregor of the British Museum has done a brilliant job of telling us, via BBC Radio 4, the History of the World in 100 Objects, none of which we are likely to have ever fingered for ourselves. But the point here is that MacGregor used the objects as a way of unlocking narratives. He did not suggest that he simply had to stare at an Australian bark shield or an American otter pipe, or even touch them, for their significance to become immediately legible. Instead, he called in the experts to set out the story of how an object was made, used, sold, and traded halfway around the world. It was a means of carving a path through complex subject specialities, from history to geography, economics to literature. MacGregor had 15 minutes for each of his programmes, in which a series of stories generated from a single object spilled out over the airways. But how will it work if, on Thursday, you happen to become the lucky owner of the ordinary-looking blush-coloured sofa on which the Prince of Wales once canoodled with the woman who wrenched him away from his historical destiny? Without the narrative the sofa is merely the kind of thing your friends might assume you'd inherited from your gran and were planning to take to the skip as soon as seemed decent. And with the narrative? Well, that requires you to greet your guests at the door of your sitting room like a tour guide and make them stand there while you recount the sofa's story, complete with a good chunk of mid-20th century constitutional history. And that, it's pretty safe to bet, will put the kibosh on any plans you might have for any sofa action yourself later in the evening. |