Island Life - June/July 2010
feature
were ilexes, cork trees, cedars and Mediterranean pines and
the principal drives and walks were lined with myrtle and
laurel evergreens.
In 1851 the house was completed, with the exception of the
Durbar Room that was added in 1890, and to celebrate the
event the royal couple gave the workmen and their families
an open-air dinner with games and dancing. By now, Victoria
and Albert had five children and after being crammed into
the attics of Buckingham Palace’s North Wing, the children’s
new home felt spacious.
Victoria loved ‘dear beautiful Osborne’ because Albert had
planned and built it. In the Queen’s sitting-room they sat side
by side at twin desks with the blotters not eighteen inches
apart as they worked on state papers - he was her “private
and personal secretary”.
And sometimes at night, they would step outside to listen
to the nightingale’s song or sit at the piano in the drawing
room and play the four-handed duet that Mendelssohn had
composed especially for them. But another side of Victoria’s
character is revealed by the frankly erotic fresco of a naked
Hercules with Omphale, Queen of Lydia, in Prince Albert’s
bathroom, a birthday present to him from the Queen.
Victoria’s family continued to grow and Sir Charles
Locock, a gynaecologist who lived at Binstead House on the
Island, delivered some of the early babies. Later Victoria
commissioned white marble replicas of the royal children’s
feet and hands as mementoes of their childhood.
In 1853 a tiny Swiss chalet was brought from Switzerland
as a playhouse for the royal children. Here they could play
as ‘ordinary people’ in a scaled-down kitchen where they
prepared meals for their parents and learned the skills of
gardening in the cottage garden, selling the vegetables
they grew to Prince Albert at commercial rates. Their
wheelbarrows and garden tools, each painted with the
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