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Auction: 26052 - Jewellery & Objets de Vertu
Lot: 64

AN EARLY 20TH CENTURY STICK PIN, WITH MONOGRAM OF KING GEORGE V
The head designed as the crowned monogram 'GR' of King George V (1865-1936), in red, white, blue and green enamel.
Unmarked
Accompanied by a blue box with cream silk and velvet interior, inscribed 'Benzie THE YACHTSMEN'S JEWELLER COWES' beneath the royal warrants of the Crown and the Prince of Wales.
Size/dimensions: 6.90cm long
Gross weight: 2.45g

All enamel is present and in excellent condition. The gold shows small signs of wear consistent with use, and the shaft is intact and straight. The pin is offered in excellent condition.


A naval officer in his youth, George V was a devoted yachtsman whose racing yacht Britannia was a fixture of Cowes Week, which makes the Benzie of Cowes case particularly fitting.



Between the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War, the stick pin was an essential accessory for any well-dressed man, worn to secure and ornament the folds of a cravat or tie. It was also one of the most personal gifts a sovereign or royal household could bestow. Pins set with a crowned cypher or monogram were given as tokens of favour and remembrance to courtiers, officials, household staff, visiting dignitaries, and the guests and companions of royal shooting parties, regattas and state visits. Small enough to be given freely, yet unmistakably royal, they carried their recipient's connection to the court wherever they were worn.



Reading these jewels is part of their appeal. The initials are often intertwined or mirrored so that they read in either direction, sometimes with a regnal numeral, and the form of the crown above signals rank: imperial and royal crowns, the archducal crown of the Habsburgs, and the strawberry-leaved coronet of a duke. Many pins survive in the cases of the court jewellers who supplied them, and the cases in this section form a small directory of royal patronage, from Sy & Wagner, Court Goldsmiths in Berlin, and V. Mayer's Söhne, Imperial and Royal Court Jewellers in Vienna, to E. & R. Altenloh, purveyors to the King and Queen of the Belgians, and Benzie of Cowes, the yachtsmen's jeweller.



The families represented here, among them Hanover, Denmark, Belgium, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia and Habsburg Austria, were closely bound together by marriage, and pins such as these passed freely between their courts. Within a few years, many of these monarchies had gone. The war that began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 ended in 1918 with the fall of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the crowned cyphers on these small gold jewels belong to a world that vanished almost overnight.



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Estimate
£500 to £700

Starting price
£400