Auction house of Windsor: Netflix to sell off Crown props
From the Westminster Abbey coronation chair, to Diana’s revenge dress, to the Gold State Coach, props created for the Netflix series will be auctioned off to fans.
Many of The Crown’s fans have long hoped that it would be brought up to the present day to cover everything from Megxit to the King’s accession. It doesn’t look likely.
About 450 costumes, props and sets made for the Netflix series are to be sold at auction next year, giving fans the chance to wear Diana’s “revenge” dress or stir a cocktail with the Queen Mother’s swizzle stick.
Highlights include a fibreglass replica of Westminster Abbey’s coronation chair, complete with Stone of Scone underneath (and an estimate of pounds 20,000) and what is claimed to be the world’s only copy of the Gold State Coach (pounds 50,000). You could buy the front door to No 10, complete with lantern, railings and boot scrapers, which is expected to fetch pounds 30,000, or replica wrought-iron Buckingham Palace gates for as much as pounds 8,000. A version of Diana’s 1987 Jaguar XJ-S may cost up to pounds 20,000.
A powder blue ballgown worn by Claire Foy, who played the Queen in the first series, is estimated at pounds 5,000-pounds 7,000. An engagement ring worn by Emma Corrin, as Princess Diana, should go for pounds 2,000-pounds 3,000.
Left Bank Pictures, the show’s production company, is selling the objects at Bonhams in February.
Andy Harries, 69, its co-founder and an executive producer on the show, said The Crown had used more than 2,500 sets across six series and had filled 18 shipping containers at the Elstree studios in Hertfordshire with props and costumes.
“We were overspilling. It was overrun with Crown props,” he said. “It was really more expensive to store it.”
The first half of the sixth series – which its creator and writer Peter Morgan, 60, has always insisted will be the final one – appeared on Netflix on Thursday.
To make the fake Gold State Coach, the prop-maker Jason Szukalski, 55, took hundreds of photographs of the real one, on display at the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace. Its decorations were made with a combination of 3D printing and clay sculptures cast in fibreglass, rather than the wood used on the real one, with a paint called Bristol Gold standing in for the gold leaf. “A lot of technology went into it, and a lot of traditional skills: sculpting and painting skills and engineering,” Szukalski said. It was used when Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton played Queen Elizabeth II during her Silver and Golden Jubilee, respectively. It is two thirds the size of the original, made in 1762.
Other lots are smaller. For about pounds 80 you could get the Queen Mother’s swizzle stick and handkerchiefs, while a pair of porcelain corgis may fetch pounds 300.
Much of The Crown’s success has been attributed to the authenticity of the props and its sumptuous backdrops. The show’s makers even commissioned sculptors to create a bust of Colman as Elizabeth to be used as the model for a set of stamps bearing her likeness. “These things were made as if they were really being made for the purpose that they were imitating,” said Charlie Thomas, Bonhams’ head of house sales and private and iconic collections.
Most of the outfits, except the “revenge” dress that Diana wore to a 1994 dinner after her husband’s bombshell interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, are not exact copies but “reimaginings”. Amy Roberts, the show’s Emmy-winning costume designer, said that when she designed Diana’s wedding dress she met David Emanuel, who made the real thing in 1981 with his then wife, Elizabeth. “He was funny, not at all precious, and said to just have fun with it,” she said.
The final series takes the story from Diana’s death in 1997 to the wedding of Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Morgan has insisted he did not want to cover events less than ten years old because their significance is still unknown.
A free exhibition of the lots will be created at Bonhams in central London before the sale.
Proceeds will go to the National Film and Television School to set up the Left Bank Pictures – The Crown Scholarship. Harries hopes the sale will raise up to pounds 1 million and help put as many as 100 students through their courses.
