Members of the Household Division in London rehearse for the King’s Birthday Parade, known as Trooping the Colour. The Colonel’s Review is held one week before and saw some 250 musicians, 20 pipers, 240 military working horses, and almost 1,000 dual role soldiers of the British Army’s Household Division run through their paces on Saturday. Trooping the Colour will take place on 15th June.
• The City of London has unveiled a new blue plaque commemorating the Royal National Lifeboat Institution which is this year marking its 200th anniversary. The plaque is on the Furniture Makers’ Hall in Austin Friars which is where the organisation has its first headquarters from 1824 to 1826. The plaque was unveiled by the Lord Mayor of London, Professor Michael Mainelli. The RNLI, which today operates 238 lifeboat stations in the UK and Ireland including four on the River Thames, was founded by Sir William Hillary in the City of London Tavern in Bishopsgate on 4th March, 1824, and early meetings were held at various addresses until it moved into 12 Austin Friars. Meanwhile, ‘Ian Visits’ reports that a new plaque has also been installed at Limehouse Basin to commemorate Lifbåt 416 which was built there by Forrestt & Son’s boatyard in 1868 and sent as a gift to the King of Sweden, Karl XV. The Lifbåt 416, which has been restored, returned to Limehouse Basin this week after attending RNLI commemorations in Poole, Dorset (where it was the oldest lifeboat to take part in a mile-long flotilla).
• The “weird and wonderful” ways birds have adapted to survive are celebrated in a new exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre, which opens at the South Kensington institution on Friday, has been created in partnership with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and features installations and hands-on exhibits which allow visitors to feel how fast a hummingbird’s heart beats when in flight, smell the strange oil one bird uses to protect its eggs and listen to the sound of a dawn chorus of birds in the year 2050. Objects on show include the ‘Wonderchicken’ – the oldest known fossil of a modern bird, a replica of a stork that flew across the world from the African continent with a spear lodged in its neck, and a headdress of the ‘Hargila army’ (pictured), a group of women in the Indian state of Assam who work to protect one of the world’s rarest storks. Admission charge applies. Runs until 5th January. For more, see www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/birds-brilliant-bizarre.html.
• A walk-through photographic exhibition featuring some of the most iconic photos of Princess Diana opens on Saturday. Princess Diana: Accredited Access features 75 life-sized photographs by her official royal photographer, Anwar Hussein, and his two sons – Samir and Zak – which include behind the scenes access. The exhibition at the Dockside Vaults, St Katharine Docks, runs until 2nd September. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.princessdianaexhibit.com.
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• A landmark exhibition exploring the final three decades of the life of Renaissance master Michelangelo has opened at the British Museum. Michelangelo: the last decades focuses on how his art and faith evolved and centres on the two metre high Epifania (about 1550–53), which is being displayed for the first time since conservation work on it began in 2018. Showing alongside it is a painting made from it by Michelangelo’s biographer, Ascanio Condivi, as well as preparatory drawings from the Last Judgment, which chart how Michelangelo invented a fresh vision of how the human form would be refashioned at the end of the world, and works created as part of his correspondence with his friends Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and the poet Vittoria Colonna. The latter include The Punishment of Tityus (about 1532) showing an eagle tearing out the liver of a bound naked man which was gifted to Tommaso as moral guidance for the young man. Other highlights include a group of drawings of Christ’s crucifixion which he made during the last 10 years of his life and through which he explored his feelings about mortality, sacrifice, faith, and the prospect of redemption. Runs until 28th July in the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.britishmuseum.org/michelangelo.
• A new exhibition has opened celebrating the expressionists’ radical experimentations with form, colour, sound and performance at the Tate Modern. Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider features masterpieces from the Lenbachhaus in Munich and includes some works never previously seen in the UK. Among the artists whose work is on display are everyone from renowned artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc and Paul Klee, through to lesser known figures like Wladimir Burliuk and Maria Franck-Marc. Highlights include Marianne Werefkin’s Self-Portrait (c1910), Münter’s Listening (Portrait of Jawlensky) (1909), Erma Bossi’s Circus (1909), Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert) (1911), Franz-Marc’s Deer in the Snow II (1911), Klee’s Legend of the Swamp (1919), and a selection of photographs from the Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art exhibition staged in Munich in 1910. Runs until 20th October. Admission charge applies. For more, see tate.org.uk.
• On Now – Dinosaur rEvolution. This exhibition at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill highlights discoveries from recent decades which have changed the way we envisage dinosaurs – not all as scaly green reptiles but many with an array of colours, feathers, quills and spikes. At the centre of the display are five large animatronic dinosaur models – including a seven metre-long Tyrannosaurus rex – as well as well as artworks by artist and exhibition curator Luis V Rey. The exhibition also features fossil casts including the horned skull of a Diabloceratops, the claw of a Therizinosaurus, and skeletons of Velociraptor and Compsognathus – a chicken-sized, feathered dinosaur. Runs until 3rd November. Admission charge applies. For more, see www.horniman.ac.uk.
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A suffragette and women’s right’s campaigner, Princess Sophia Jindan Alexandrovna Duleep Singh was the daughter of the deposed Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh, last Sikh emperor of Punjab, and god-daughter of Queen Victoria and is known for having leveraged her position to advocate for the rights of others.
Singh was born on 8th August, 1876, at a house in Belgravia, the third daughter of the Maharajah and his German-born first wife, Bamba Müller. The fifth of six children, she was named Sophia for her maternal grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman from Ethiopia who married a wealthy German banker, and Alexandrovna in tribute to her godmother, Queen Victoria.
Following his forced abdication, the Maharaja had travelled to England as a boy in 1854 where he lived on an annual government pension of £25,000. Having later married Bamba in Cairo, he returned to England where in 1863 he purchased Elvedon Hall in Suffolk (which he later rebuilt). Sophia subsequently spent her childhood there.
But after the breakdown of her parents’ marriage (after which her father remarried before being exiled to Paris where he campaigned for a return to India until his death in 1889) and the death of her mother in 1887 from typhoid (she had contracted the disease but survived), Sophia and her siblings were placed in the care of Arthur Craigie Oliphant – chosen by Queen Victoria to be guardian – first at their home in Folkestone and then in Brighton.
After finishing her education at a girls school in Brighton, Sophia and her sisters sisters Bamba and Catherine embarked upon a six-month tour of Holland, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Egypt.
Sophia, who had inherited some of her father’s fortune, was given Faraday House – part of the Hampton Court estate – as a grace-and-favour apartment by Queen Victoria in 1896 (along with an annual grant to maintain the property and a key to Hampton Court Palace where she could walk her dogs).
The princess took a keen interest in dogs – she was a member of the Ladies’ Kennel Association and showed her dogs on several occasions – as well in music, photography and fashion. She also supported Indians in London, particularly those in the Sikh community, and travelled to India a number of occasions.
Princess Sophia is known for her work in the women’s suffrage movement and was an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. She was present in Parliament Square ion 18th November, 1910, when more than 300 suffragettes including Emmeline Pankhurst gathered and demanded to see the Prime Minister HH Asquith and, having refused to disperse when he refused to see them, were met with a violent response by police. The day, which resulted in injuries to more than 200 women including two who died of them, became known as Black Friday.
Sophia was also, perhaps more importantly in terms of public impact, a member of the Women’s Tax Reform League and refused to pay fines on a couple of occasions, protesting that taxation without representation was “tyranny” (with the result that some of her jewels were confiscated and auctioned off).
During World War I, Princess Sophia – as well as being part of a 10,000-strong march calling for the establishment of a female volunteer force – was involved in fundraising for organisations such as the Red Cross and in support of Indian soldiers and also worked as a nurse at the Brighton Pavilion and other hospitals where Indian soldiers were recovering.
During World War II, Sophia moved to Penn, Buckinghamshire, with her sister Catherine, and took in evacuee children from London.
Having never married, Princess Sophia died in her sleep in Penn on 22nd August, 1948. A full band played Wagner’s Funeral March at her cremation and her ashes were taken to India for burial.
Sophia’s name and image are among those on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square. In 2023, an English Heritage Blue Plaque was unveiled on Faraday House in Richmond.
Sources: Historic Royal Palaces; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; BBC.
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