My dream 150-year-old wedding dress was lost by Queen’s dry cleaners
LOVINGLY stitched together by her great-great-grandmother almost 150 years ago, it was the perfect ‘something borrowed’ for Tess Newall’s wedding day.
The 29-year-old, from Haddington, East Lothian, had worn the antique lace gown at her wedding to husband Alfred, 30, last June.
But the newlywed was yesterday left devastated to discover that the family heirloom had gone missing from a dry cleaner in Edinburgh.
Racked with ‘guilt’, the set designer is now on a mission to trace the gown, first worn by her family in 1870.
She said: ‘It was so old and beautiful, I was overjoyed to have been able to
‘Dream turned into a nightmare’
wear such a beautiful family heirloom.
‘It was the nicest thing to wear, it was a complete dream, but now it has turned into a nightmare. I am desperate to find it.’
Mrs Newall married in a church in Morham, East Lothian, Scotland’s smallest parish.
Upon her engagement to furnituremaker Alfred, her 88-year-old grandmother told her about the dress, which had not been worn since her great-great-grandmother.
The antique gown was made by her distant relative, Dora Torin, who married her hat-maker husband Ernest in Edinburgh.
Mrs Newall said: ‘I didn’t know that it existed but when I got engaged my grandmother told me there was this old, lace dress that she had kept in a hat box and thought that I would like. I went up to the attic and found it in the box all wrapped up in tissue paper, it was just magical opening it.
‘When I held it up I couldn’t believe it – it was so beautiful and fit almost perfectly, I just had to make a few minor alterations.’
Her father Patrick Gammell, the Vice Lord-Lieutenant of East Lothian, took the dress to Kleen Cleaners in Edinburgh, holders of a Royal warrant, because of its excellent reputation.
But when he went to collect it this week, he discovered it had gone into administration and that there was nothing in the shop that matched the number. The family now fear it has been sold off. Efforts to find the dress have failed so Mrs Newall turned to social media. Last night her appeal on Facebook had been shared more than 15,000 times in just a few hours.
She said: ‘I have been absolutely overwhelmed with the response.
‘I just can’t believe that this has happened. I don’t want a witch-hunt against the company, I just want to find the dress.
‘If someone has bought or found the dress, we’d be very happy for them to wear it to their wedding, it would just be incredible if it could come back to our family afterwards so that more family memories can be woven into its threads.’