Earrings with Diamonds
The Royal Family have the Crown Jewels to rifle through to find something to wear for that special occasion. The Duchess of Windsor, who was notoriously unpopular with the Royals (especially Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), never had that luxury. But she did not let that deter her and before her death had amassed a spectacular collection of jewellery.
In 1948 the jeweller Harry Winston (who is famous for supplying Hollywood stars with eye catching bling at ceremonies like the Academy Awards and Oscars), sent the Duchess of Windsor some designs for diamond earrings. She arranged a meeting and greeted him with the words were “I cannot think of anything I would rather have than these two diamonds” referring to a pair of perfect pear shaped yellow gems.
The Windsors subsequently purchased the diamonds and some years later had them mounted by Cartier as ear clips with the pear shaped gems surrounded by smaller diamonds set within a border of gold corded wire scroll motifs. Loathe to admit how much they had cost, she told her hairdresser, Alexandre, that they had been given to the Duke of Windsor by an Indian Maharajah during a tour in the 1920s. There is a famous photograph taken by Cecil Beaton showing her wearing the diamond earrings at a ball given by the Rothschilds.
In October 1946 the Windsors were on a private visit to England and there was a theft involving these earrings which remains a mystery today - with more red herrings than an Agatha Christie mystery. While the Metropolitan Police were convinced they had found the thief, they never managed to get a confession and prove his guilt (even though he was supposedly seen running across the golf course at Sunningdale leaving a trail of priceless jewellery behind him). An international manhunt was launched to no avail.
One popular theory during the time was that it was an inside job to recover family jewels which the Duke had given to Wallis Simpson for King George VI’s daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret. Another piece of speculation was that it was staged to claim insurance money, with the Duke of Windsor trying to quash this rumour by telling the press the loss was valued at twenty thousand pounds and not five hundred thousand as reported. Whatever the real truth, the diamond earrings were never recovered and the perfect pear shaped diamonds have not been seen since.