Sometimes, relatively small local museums can surprise. The Barnstaple Museum holds such an eclectic array of objects that combined they tell the story of Devon over the last millennia.
So many stories I didn’t know – so many keys to the past…
This is where I chanced upon Queen Victoria’s slippers. Approximately a size 3 – 3.5 in today’s size, I could have just about squeezed my feet into them, Cinderella-like! Which is what the Queen would have done – the fashion in those days to wear a size smaller than you really were.
Legend has it that she would only ever wear a pair of shoes once – then she would hand them down to her maids. It is touching to think of her many shoes, dancing off in different directions on the feet of her attendants. To walk a mile (or more) in Royal shoes! They were no doubt cherished.
The young Queen would have been in her thirties when these shoes were made. Her dancing days! And these would have been her dancing shoes, dancing with Albert at one of her lavish costume balls at Buckingham Palace.
What an evocative piece of our history.
Although the song I have chosen ‘Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day’ is actually a Christmas carol, adapting an old oral ballad which uses the medieval metaphor of Jesus inviting ‘his true love’ (humanity) to his ‘dance’; here, it seems an appropriately romantic image to imagine Victoria dancing again with her true love Albert.
