The tricky business of Royal warrants

Also, the sun was nice, wasn't it? Plus a little-known but *excellent* TV show, and are there aliens living underneath my road??

Some years ago, while working at the Mail, a colleague and I spotted that the (late) Queen always matched her umbrellas to her outfits, which we thought was splendid. The umbrellas were made by a company called Fulton, we discovered, which had a Royal warrant. Until then, I didn’t know that the (late) Queen had an official umbrella maker, but I liked the idea very much.

A couple of years later, I visited the Queen’s official glovemakers in East Sussex, where ladies in pristine white coats sat behind sewing machines. There, I blinked at rows and rows of disembodied hand maquettes while interviewing Genevieve James, the business’s owner, whose mother Cornelia had fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1939 and arrived in the UK with a suitcase of leather scraps. Norman Hartnell subsequently commissioned Cornelia to make a pair of going-away gloves for the Queen in 1947, and the glovemaker was given her Royal warrant in 1979.

I mention it because the King has just revealed which companies he’s giving Royal warrants, and while you may not have been waiting for this news as excitedly as some people since the sad death of the (late) Queen nearly two years ago, for others it’s a BIG deal.

Here’s the lowdown - when a monarch dies, Royal warrants are automatically reviewed. There’s a two year-grace period, which means businesses can continue to display the Royal coat of arms on their packaging and website, but if they lose it after that then kaput - the warrant has to come off everything.

Since the Queen died, around 800 businesses have been nervously waiting to hear if they could keep theirs. Last summer, a friend who works for one of these businesses told me that there’d been a good deal of back and forth between them and the King’s office about it while he decided, with clothing labels having to change multiple times, which didn’t sound terribly sustainable to me given that the King is a man keen on such matters.

Anyhow, the King’s new list has just been announced and seriously whittled down. For instance, there used to be EIGHT official champagne providers - Bollinger, Mumm, Lanson, Louis Roederer, Moet & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Pol Roger and Laurent Perrier. Awfully embarrassing, it seemed, to be a Champagne business and not have a Royal warrant back then. And now? There’s just one on the King’s new list: Laurent Perrier, so I imagine the others are a bit fromaged off. Although a Cornish company which makes sparkling English wine (Camel Valley) has been given one, and Berry Bros and Corney & Barrow have warrants on the new list too, so the Royal households won’t be short of wine. PHEW.

I’ve always found the niche warrant holders quite amusing. Under the old regime, along with the umbrella and glovemakers, we had a Royal kilt-maker, a Royal equine dentist and a Royal sausage maker (Musk’s, a Newmarket sausage company which was granted a warrant in 1907). But Musk’s and the equine dentist aren’t on the new list. Tragically, neither is the Royal portaloo company. ‘By Appointment To Her Majesty The Queen, Supplier of Executive Toilet Hire,’ says a proud line still on the Event-A-Loo website, but the Lanarkshire-based business which has been supplying posh portaloos at Royal events for the past 18 years may now have to take that off. The umbrella and glovemakers haven’t made the cut either.

Happily, you can still find a few, funny specialist suppliers on the new list. A Welsh juice company has been made the official ‘supplier of apple and pear juice’. Milborrow Chimney Sweeps of West Sussex are the official Royal chimney sweeps, and Bricknell Swimming Pools of Berkshire are the official Royal swimming pool providers. There’s also a company called Corgi Hoisery on the new list which made me briefly confused (knickers for corgis?), but it turns out they make socks for humans.

Since the King is partial to a spot of skiing, two skiing brands have gone on the list - Braemar Mountain Sports and Gotschna Sport, which appears to be a Swiss company. Slightly bafflingly, the Italian restaurant chain Carluccio’s is also on the new list, when I’m not sure I’ve ever had a particularly memorable time eating in one. Hugo Burnand, the photographer who’s taken pics at various Royal events, has been granted one too, which is very lovely because Hugo is a terrific egg even though he once told me that my left side was my better side, and so now I tiresomely insist on being on the left in all group shots.

My mole who told me about Royal warrant dramas last year said then that Kate and William were issuing Royal warrants too, and as the Prince and Princess of Wales they would certainly be able to, as Charles did when he was the Prince of Wales. But they have quite a lot going on atm and will presumably worry about it down the line.

‘How DID you find out? I’ve only just found out myself,’ said Hugo Burnand when I emailed him yesterday to say he’ll now need a posh coat of arms on his office door. Well, the whole list has just been published, if you’re the sort of sad individual who, like me, finds this stuff interesting, and you can see it HERE.

Pictures of the week

Couldn’t decide on one picture so you’ve got six, you lucky devils. My pal Hols and I went to stay with friends on the weekend, in their cottage on a little spit near the New Forest that overlooks the Isle of Wight. It is genuinely one of the most idyllic spots I’ve ever visited - we had breakfast while the tide came in, watched sails billowing up and down the Solent, went for a stroll among the loose horses that graze everywhere down there, ate crayfish, drank rosé, and hung out with a pug called Mabel. We seem to have waited SO LONG for a burst of sunshine this year that it felt all the more special, and I’m not sure the countryside has ever looked more beautiful than it does right now - rhododendrons, honeysuckle, wisteria and so on. Is May the loveliest month? It felt like it this weekend. Although, as a slightly Eeyore-ish friend said to me a few days ago, it’s the longest day next month and then it starts getting darker again. Still, let’s enjoy it while we can, eh?!

Recommendation of the week

Can I be the first to recommend a little-known Amazon series called Clarkson’s Farm? Alright, alright, I know, I’m the last person in Britain to have watched it. Or maybe the second-last because Paul hasn’t seen it either. I’ve sort of avoided it for ages because…Clarkson…but I had to watch an episode last week in preparation for something and it’s brilliant! Why did nobody tell me this?? Why did nobody say that it’s funny and interesting and moving and immensely enjoyable TV?*

I was also partly encouraged to watch it having listened to last week’s episode of The Rest Is Entertainment (the podcast with Marina Hyde and Richard Osman) which touched on the show, talking about why and how it’s become Amazon’s biggest and most successful original series ever. I like it v much because it shows Jeremy being quite humble, on the basis he doesn’t know much about farming, as opposed to him being fairly arrogant in Top Gear because he knew everything about cars. Anyway, you presumably know all this because you’ve probably watched it. All I’m saying is, if you’ve been putting it off, like me, because you thought it might be incredibly irritating ~ Top Gear with tractors ~ then have a look. Series three has just dropped which is why there are ads for it all over the place.

I’m also going to stick a plug in here for The Rest Is Entertainment. I wasn’t sure what the point of it would be at first - do we need yet more dissection of everything on TV/in the media? - but every week the pair of them have a GREAT chat about something entertainment-y and topical. And because they’re wildly clever, articulate and connected, it’s not just mindless waffle. You get proper insider stuff. The Baby Reindeer discussion recently was gripping. And Marina on The Met Ball was also v lol (I didn’t know, for instance, that Anna Wintour stands at the top of the steps and shakes everyone’s hands as they come in, and you can apparently see all the celebs gibbering with nerves as they approach her).

*Literally every TV critic in the country said this. I just chose to ignore them.

Nonsense of the week

This is the message I received on Friday from my friend Helen. It is a sinkhole on my road. I replied that I was genuinely exited about the pic she’d sent me until it downloaded properly and I could see what it was. Then she sent me this:

At the time, I was interviewing a polo player so unfortunately couldn’t attend to the sink hole on my road. I was also unsure about how to launch my Tiktok career with it, but I did some sleuthing and it turns out sinkholes are are one of the 2725 things that people have conspiracy theories about these days:

@psychopolyAre sinkholes even real? This theory is pretty far out there ngl😂 #sinkhole#conspiracytiktok#icebergchart#hollowearth

Tiktok failed to load.

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Worried that an advanced underground society might be living underneath my road, yesterday I went out to have a word with one of the builders working on it. It’s not an advanced underground society, he told me, it’s a burst sewage pipe. A sewage pipe has apparently been leaking on our road for some time and washed away all the earth beneath the tarmac, thus a great big hole has suddenly opened up. Given the proximity of the hole and the burst sewage pipe to my flat, I think I would have preferred the advanced underground society. It won’t be fixed for another 10 days or so either, the builder added, before heading off for lunch.