Tag: Williams

Ivory displayed at Prince William’s palace despite his criticism of trade

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For more than a decade, Prince William has spoken out vehemently against the use of ivory, calling it “a symbol of destruction, not of luxury”. The royal patron of the anti-ivory charity Tusk has lobbied leaders in China, the US and countries across Africa.
He has even said that he wants to destroy all the ivory owned by the royals. In 2019, a spokesperson for William clarified that while destroying all the ivory in the royal collection was beyond the prince’s control, he had “ensured there is no ivory from the collection at Kensington Palace”, his place of residence.
Prince William feeding a baby elephant at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation at Panbari Reserve Forest in Assam, India, in April 2016. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/AFP/Getty Images
However, the Guardian has discovered that nine items containing ivory have been displayed at Kensington Palace since the beginning of the year. Each of them were displayed not far from Apartment 1a, the official London residence of Prince William and his family.
The ivory on show at the palace includes a ring with a miniature portrait of George III painted onto ivory, a desk made partly of ivory and Queen Victoria’s ivory quill. A Kensington Palace exhibition earlier this year included six miniature portraits, delicately painted on to thin sheets of ivory, which was used regularly in the 18th century due to it luminosity.
All of the items except for the ivory quill, which is privately owned by King Charles, are among a total of 1,849 ivory pieces discovered by the Guardian in a catalogue of the royal collection, an enormous trove of national heritage held in the “right of the crown”. Among the many ivory pieces are carved thrones, Fabergé ornaments, armchairs and elephants.

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In 2016, at an event organised by the conservation charity Tusk, William stood at the podium before a crowd of campaigners and policymakers and explained that if the rate of ivory poaching continued, by the time his daughter, Princess Charlotte, was 25, “the African elephant will be gone from the wild”.
Two of the seven portraits on ivory displayed at Kensington Palace earlier this year were of another Princess Charlotte of Wales: the daughter of King George IV.
One of the two portraits on ivory of Princess Charlotte displayed at Kensington Palace. Photograph: Todd-White Art Photography/Royal collection
Prince William’s father, King Charles, who is the patron of the royal collection, has also spoken out against the use of ivory. In a speech in 2014, with William by his side, Charles described how the illegal wildlife trade had “reached such unprecedented levels of killing and violence that it now poses a grave threat, not only to the survival of some of the world’s most treasured species but also to economic and political stability in many areas around the world”.

This raises the question of why the king, too, has ivory at his home; in this case, a snuff bottle with an ivory handle. It is kept in the library of his palatial London residence, Clarence House.
There are 23 ivory items on display in the ballroom in Sandringham House, the king’s privately owned residence in Norfolk. A tour guide told visitors that these items were Charles’s private property.
Buckingham Palace declined to respond questions about the ivory on display in royal properties, saying that for “operational reasons” it would not have the capacity to answer such queries until after the king’s coronation next month.
A throne and footstool made from ivory. Photograph: Royal collection
Unlike William, the king has not gone so far as to suggest the ivory in the royal collection should be destroyed, with one palace insider reportedly saying Charles viewed his son’s comments on the matter as “naive”.
A Guardian analysis of the royal collection identified 126 items on show in 24 palaces and museums around the UK and abroad.
They include a pair of carved leopards looted by British forces from the kingdom of Benin in 1897 and presented to Queen Victoria. The statues are on long-term loan from the royal collection to the British Museum and are exhibited alongside the controversial Benin bronzes, which were captured by the British forces at the same time.
Elsewhere, a model Indian temple made, in part, of ivory is on loan to a museum in Ontario, Canada.
Opinion is divided over how art custodians should handle legacy collections of ivory. Tusk said as long as galleries and museums were “in no way glamourising the ivory trade” it was highly unlikely their displays would fuel extra demand. But Dr Mark Jones, the head of policy at the conservation charity Born Free, said ivory items should be exhibited only in exceptional circumstances and that care should be taken when they were.
“We would urge museums and galleries to provide information to their visitors on the detrimental impacts the demand for elephant ivory has had on the conservation of elephants and the welfare of individual animals, alongside any historical information, in order to discourage further demand for ivory products,” Jones said.
The pair of leopards, made from ivory with metal inlay, looted from the kingdom of Benin. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images
While the royal collection’s online catalogue logs items made of ivory, there is no mention on the website of any concerns or controversies surrounding the material. And there is no such information accompanying the public displays of ivory at royal palaces or residences, including Windsor Castle.
Close to half a million people visited the castle in 2021-22, taking in the treasures inside. Those included 12 items made of ivory, the most striking of which is the elaborately carved ivory throne, which takes pride of place in the Garter Throne Room. There is no information about the animal cruelty that created it on show anywhere in the palace.
William’s 2019 commitment to ensuring no ivory would be on display at Kensington Palace was made to the former Lib Dem MP Norman Baker, the author of a book on the royals. “I was given the clear indication that William found these ivory items distasteful and as soon as he was in a position to do so they would be disposed of,” he said. “I’m perplexed that they haven’t been.”
With respect to the king’s personal ownership of ivory, Baker said: “If you make statements saying that you don’t want ivory and then he has ivory in his own collection, that’s the definition of hypocrisy.”
A spokesperson for the Royal Collection Trust said “it is to be expected” that a collection of its size would include ivory but that, in keeping with international regulations, no modern ivory was used in the conservation of those works.
They added: “Works of art in the official royal residences (including Windsor Castle) and historic royal palaces (including Kensington Palace) are not generally labelled as they are displayed as part of historic interiors, rather than a museum display.”
Visitors wanting more information, the spokesperson said, could visit the collection’s website, consult an onsite guidebook or speak to a warden.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 27, 2023
As Prince Harry battles the press, why have the other royals given up the fight? | Zoe Williams
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Prince Harry has long alleged that the royal family – “the Institution”, as he calls it – is locked in a trap of appeasement with the tabloid media. In their Netflix documentary, both he and Meghan talked about how they were savaged by the redtops, while the palace made no attempt to curtail their racist insinuations. In his memoir Spare, and interviews around it, Harry accused Camilla of leaking stories about him in order to massage her own reputation.
Last month, in papers filed to the high court as part of his case against News Group Newspapers, who publish the Sun, Prince Harry claimed members of the royal family struck a secret deal over the circumstances in which it would sue over phone hacking. News Group denies that and says there is no evidence to support that claim. But claims made by Harry in court documents this week go even further: that in 2020, Prince William was paid a “very large sum of money” by Rupert Murdoch to settle a phone-hacking case out of court.
There are elements of this saga that make no sense – chiefly, if William was paid, what would he need a “very large sum of money” for? In all the privations of his role – of privacy, of self-determination – surely the one thing he’s not short of is a bob or two? But mostly, this appears to be an entirely familiar tale: blackmail of the royals by sections of the print media, diverging from regular extortion only in the respect that it’s happening in plain view, its currency not cash but compliance. This dynamic has always, until Harry took it on, appeared to be impossible to fight.
Tampongate, in 1993, was the moment the gloves really came off in the battle with the media. Sure, maybe there was a public interest case that people ought to know about Charles and Camilla’s affair, but it wasn’t necessary to transcribe this incredibly intimate, embarrassing conversation between them – especially as the affair was already common knowledge. This was a calculated humiliation, and it’s hard to see what the legal recourse would have been for the then Prince Charles, given that the contents of the tape had already surfaced in an Australian weekly.
Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
The attitude of the tabloids was brazen: they would perform their elaborate patriotism, revel in the flag-waving, genuflect before the royals, while at the same time never missing an opportunity to heap shame on them. They never saw any moral contradiction between these completely dichotomous stances of respect and contempt, because they weren’t a moral agent, they were a newspaper, whose only logic is to sell itself. Periodically, some huffing royal watcher would be wheeled out to square the circle, with the line that it was the Queen they felt sorry for, her dignity undermined by the capers of her children.
If the 1993 debacle had established the tabloids as amoral, and left the royals petrified of taking them on, the years of phone hacking that followed destroyed trust within the family. This is a story familiar to many who were hacked by the News of the World: unable to figure out where the papers were getting their intelligence, victims accused those around them. Jude Law knows, now, that Sadie Frost wasn’t leaking details of their divorce.
Should Harry maybe give Camilla the benefit of the doubt, given that per his own testimony, multiple members of the family were being hacked? Perhaps. But it’s always been quite fundamental to the tabloids’ power that, in the absence of a fresh scandal, they can generate a propulsive narrative by pitting one member of the family against another – Diana against Camilla, Kate against Meghan, William against Harry, bold splashes of black and white in which the reader is invited to pick their team. You would have to be quite a solid royal crew to resist, particularly if you had no way of knowing where the information was coming from, and no way of correcting untruth.
Harry is now pursuing three separate legal cases against British newspaper groups in a move of either bravery or slash-and-burn recklessness. He may think the press has done its worst: revealed under infra-redtop every stain on his character, from the Nazi fancy dress to the stint in rehab; essentially exiled his wife by repeatedly alluding to her fictional gangster roots, not to mention hounded his mother to her untimely death.

But there is no hard limit to the reputational damage a person can sustain when he is by definition remote, a figurehead, and when he moves through the world an uneasy amalgam of his own personal qualities and the mutable associations of his position. Newspapers haven’t even needed a smoking gun, just an absence of positive stories, the odd insinuation of greed or attention-seeking: Harry and Meghan’s popularity has been tanking in the UK and went off a cliff in the US.
I think, in the long run, it will be worth it: in two years’ time we won’t be able to remember what we were supposed to dislike about the couple. But even if that turns out not to be true, you have to wonder what a reputation is worth, with Murdoch’s and other empires holding it hostage.
- Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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#Prince #Harry #battles #press #royals #fight #Zoe #Williams
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
April 25, 2023