So, what is hidden under the Queen’s floorboards?
CIGARETTE packets and a newspaper cutting from 1889 have been found beneath the floorboards of Buckingham Palace as workers replace 70-year-old wiring as part of a £369million reburbishment.
The relics of royal history were unearthed in rooms below the Queen’s private apartments.
They included packets of cigarettes from bygone days – Player’s Navy Cut, Wild Woodbine and Piccadilly Number One.
It is not clear whether the packets, thought to date back to the 1940s, belonged to heavy smokers in the Royal family, such as King George VI or his younger daughter Princess Margaret, or to servants.
A copy of London’s Evening Standard newspaper dates back further to Wednesday, November 27, 1889, two years after Queen Victoria, Empress of India, had celebrated her Golden Jubilee.
The revamp has not been straightforward for a team of engineers who has been removing vulcanised Indian rubber cabling installed in the 1940s. Without a blueprint to show where the wires wind through the floorboards, the engineers have had to pull the old cables up through ceilings and across floorboards after finding they snaked around the rooms and corridors.
Electrical engineer Mick Carden said: “You think it would just go straight down the corridor but in actual fact it takes a convoluted route to get it to that point.” Barbara Welch, programme director, explained that the work was vital to make the Palace safer. “The vulcanized Indian rubber becomes really brittle with age and it cracks and it falls off exposing live electrical cables, which is a real fire risk,” she said. “It presents the highest risk to the Palace and therefore the sooner we get that risk out of the building, the better.” The full Palace refurbishment will take 10 years.
BUCKINGHAM Palace’s floorboards have been concealing a time capsule. Newspapers and cigarette packets dating back to the 19th century have been unearthed, reminding us of a bygone age. What will future generations find from our own times? The mind boggles.