This lace fan was made in Honiton for Queen Mary’s coronation, as the gift of the Fan Makers Company. The formal circumstances of the gift are reflected in the royal and heraldic content of the lace design, with four shields of arms and decorative border containing the rose, thistle and shamrock. The fan was noted by Queen Mary as being ‘in use’. It was apparently taken by her to India for use during the Durbar celebrations.

According to information passed to The Illustrated London News, the fan was designed by the industrial designer, fan-maker and fan historian George Woolliscroft Rhead, and the leaf was made in the workshop of Miss Fowler of Honiton. The guards and sticks were carved by Robert Gleeson under the direction of Mr Joseph Ettlinger, Past Master of the Fan Makers Company. Gleeson had also produced the sticks for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee fan. Although the original box has survived, it does not record the name of the firm responsible for making the fan.

The leaf is of very high quality and includes the full range of Honiton techniques, including raised outlines, whole and half-stitch, a variety of elaborate fillings and a delicate net ground worked with bobbins in imitation of a needle-made ground. By 1911 very little lace was being produced in Honiton. The problems involved in a design of such detail and intricacy - complicated by the fact that the lace is worked from the back - are suggested by the existence, at Honiton, of a piece of lace bearing the arms of England and Scotland (on the right in the finished leaf), erroneously worked in reverse.

The Honiton lace-makers also produced a fan at the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1937. That leaf - incorporating roses, thistles and ferns - was made and probably designed by Miss Ward, niece of Miss Fowler.

Text adapted from Unfolding Pictures: Fans in the Royal Collection 2005