Model behaviour
In 1964, Hugo Vickers started making 500 models of the Royal Family and Knights of the Garter – and then he met them in the flesh
Iwas twelve years old when I decided to make a model of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1964. A few months earlier, we had Easter at my prep school, Scaitcliffe, Englefield Green. My headmaster took a few of us over to St George’s Chapel to hear the St Matthew Passion. He was one of those rounded men with extensive knowledge in many areas of life. Because we were in the queue outside, he spoke of the chapel’s history, of the Knights of the Garter, their banners and the Royal Vault, with its lift that descends dramatically during royal funerals.
I remember thinking that if I was lucky enough to get to Eton, just down the road, I would love to explore St George’s Chapel. It was the place for me – and so it has remained for the last 56 years. On my first Saturday and on virtually every Saturday and Sunday thereafter (between 1964 and 1969), I escaped from school and immersed myself in this fascinating world.
I had always liked making models. I was not drawn to cars or aeroplanes or guns; I liked buildings. As a child, I made models of Wellington Arch, Admiralty Arch and Marble Arch – all out of cardboard. I liked doors and gates that opened and shut. And I liked special doors that were opened on special occasions – the great gates of Wellington Arch were normally firmly closed unless the Queen or a procession was expected.
It was a logical step for me to make a model of St George’s Chapel. In so doing, I not only examined the architecture but also copied all the banners of the Knights of the Garter (drawn on paper), and then the stall plates – tiny cardboard items smaller than a thumbnail.
For the building, I used cardboard, wallpaper, Fablon (ideal for oak or marble floors) and many, many tins of Sellotape. I solved problems more by luck than by anything else. Those little plastic studs the laundry put in shirt collars made admirable organ stops. The model eventually occupied an entire attic room in my parents’ Hampshire home.
Next, I needed to people it. And as I could not buy the people, I had to make them myself. I needed a Dean and Canons, Verger and sacristans and a choir; then Military Knights, the Royal Family and the Knights of the Garter; then their wives and, significantly, the widows of previous Garter Knights; then those people who came to the chapel for various actual services, which required hasty additions to the collection.
I ended up with about 500 of them, some notably better than others. To get them right, I studied as many of the real-life characters as possible when they appeared at the real St George’s Chapel and I pored over papers and magazines.
I witnessed many services in the real chapel. I modelled 93-year-old Lord Iveagh in his wheelchair as he turned up for the opening of St George’s House in 1966. Princess Marina’s funeral in 1968 required me to make a King Umberto and a Queen Frederika, and a host of auburn-haired princesses who all looked a bit like Princess Marina herself.
In December 1968, some RAF candlesticks were dedicated in the Chapel in the Queen’s presence – I got some rather good fabric for the uniform of Bomber Harris, who was at the service.
Though I don’t think Lord Dowding attended, he was much in the news (there was a film about the Battle of Britain in 1969) and he was irresistible to do. When I saw Sir Robert Menzies unveil a statue of Churchill, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, I had to have him.
I spent the entire summer of 1968 stitching about 30 Garter robes in blue
velvet, lined in white satin. That took for ever, and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s cope took me a week – Michael Ramsey, a marvellously craggy face to capture.
The models were made from cardboard, with a lot of crinkly paper, their faces covered with pink silk (white, if they were very old) – and the features drawn with biros in various colours.
Considerable attention was paid to uniforms, orders and decorations, with pins for buttons. This has since turned me into the scourge of Downton Abbey and The Crown, as I keep spotting howlers. It had me frowning at the television when Admiral Sir George Zambellas appeared at the 2019 State Opening in GCB riband – and Bath collar! The riband and the collar are never worn together.
From time to time, an interesting figure appeared in the press. I could not resist Olave Baden-powell in her Girl Guides uniform, Bertrand Russell and Lady Violet Bonham Carter (whose voice on Any Questions accompanied me as I grew up).
Lord Snowdon’s bottle-green uniform for the 1969 Investiture was fun, and I put Princess Margaret into her Investiture outfit, too.
In 1972, the King of Denmark died, and I copied Queen Margrethe, Prince Henrik and Queen Ingrid – seen together in photographs from Copenhagen.
During my teenage years, I spent every waking hour of the holidays in that attic. I was a reclusive child, working away, and listening all day long to Radio 4 – so not entirely isolated. No doubt I was a worry to my parents, though they were lucky that I eschewed drugs, nor did they have to rescue me drunk from pubs.
What was I doing? I was escaping. I was not in tune with their essentially rural pursuits. Riding, shooting and fishing were not for me. But without analysing this at the time, I was creating in miniature the world I perhaps did not even realise that I wanted to belong to. Years later, when editing Cecil Beaton: Portraits & Profiles, I discovered that people like John Gielgud first played with toy theatres and then went on to make that their careers. I was not a budding architect, but a biographer in the making.
As time went on, my obsessive hobby was laid aside, and I emerged into the real world. The chapel survived until the late 1980s, when some Rentokil men came – in my absence – and ripped much of it apart. They wrote me a ‘There, there’ letter and offered me £30 compensation – which I declined. But the models survived.
When I met the real-life figures, it may sound odd that I did not focus particularly on the fact that I had modelled them years before. I ended up writing biographies of several – the Queen Mother, the Windsors and Princess Andrew of Greece (Prince Philip’s mother) – and I must have written numerous obituaries of others.
The Countess of Avon, still with us happily at 99, and Lady Diana Cooper became real friends.
Widows of Knights of the Garter were a particular category. I thought I had rounded them all up, but some slipped through the net. One was Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough, whose husband had died in 1934. She became a real-life obsession. I found her in St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, in 1975.
On one visit, I took some models to show her, though not the one I had made of her. Among these was her stepson, the 10th Duke of Marlborough. She held him for a moment and said, ‘I don’t recommend him to you.’ She wanted to throw him out of the window. Instead she lowered him gently to the floor.
Hugo Vickers’s biography of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough – The Sphinx – is out now