London, 2019. A drizzly morning, the kind that makes the city feel older than it is. A woman of 90 is being wheeled from bank to bank across the city because she cannot remember which vault holds her jewels. Not one vault, several. Across several institutions, she has simply lost track. At the third bank, staff lead them down into an underground strong room her daughter India has privately nicknamed the bat cave.
They produce a battered leather case. The initials stamped into the leather read EM Edwina Mountbatton. The key no longer turns. A gardener named Eric is eventually summoned with a drill. The lid comes up. Inside a blaze of stones, staggering sparkling gems that have been sitting in the dark, forgotten, while the world moved on without them.
The old woman looks down at what her mother left behind and says almost to herself, “Your grandmother certainly knew how to outshine everyone.” That woman was Lady Pamela Hicks. She died on the 5th of June 2026 at 97 years old. Her daughter India announced it simply. There is no tragedy in the death of a 97year-old who has lived a full life.
Grief will be inevitable. Pamela was a bridesmaid to a future queen, the daughter of the last viceroy of India, a great great granddaughter of Queen Victoria, one of the last living connections to a world that has now entirely closed. Hugo Vickers called her in her final years a national treasure. And she died having forgotten which bank held her mother’s jewels.
Which raises the question this video is really about. How does a woman born to one of the great art deco jewel collections of the 20th century end up forgetting where it is? And what happened to the rest of it? The emeralds that lit two coronations, the tiaras, the diamonds, most of them are gone, scattered into anonymous private hands, their whereabouts unknown, their stories cut off mid-sentence.
This is the story of that collection told through the woman who let it slip away. To understand what she gave away, you have to start with what she was born into. Born into abundance. The story begins not in London, but at the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona. April 1929. Pamela Carman Louise Mountbatton arrives 5 weeks early in a foreign city in a grand hotel during a family holiday.
Her father, Lord Lewis Mountbatton, Dicki to everyone who knew him, telephones for help. By some extraordinary accident of timing, it is King Alonso I 13th of Spain who answers the line. A small comedy of misunderstandings unfolds before a doctor is finally located and the situation is resolved. It is in miniature the texture of the world she was born into.
Royalty on the telephone, crisis resolved by proximity to power, and a certain breezy assumption that things would work out. They usually did. Weeks later, her mother, Edwina, walked into Cartier. What she purchased was the Tutti Frutti Bandau, a platinum headband set with carved emeralds, rubies, and sapphires arranged as leaves and fruit, made by Cartier’s London workshop, English Artworks, in 1928.
Edwina had bought it the previous November, reportedly to mark the birth of her second daughter, while Lord Mountbatton was stationed in Malta. The price was £900. A Cartier jewel bought as a treat to celebrate a baby tells you everything about the world Pamela entered. Edwina Mountbatton was the granddaughter and principal ays of Sir Ernest Castle.
One of the wealthiest financiers of the Edwardian age, a man so close to Edward IIIth that his influence shaped the financial architecture of an empire. When Cassell died in 1921, Edwina inherited a fortune and a collection. jades, gold boxes, objects by Faber, and jewels of a scale that most people only encounter in museums.
She wore them the way other women wore cardigans. Contemporary accounts describe her as one of the six bestdressed women in the world. She alternated tiaras because she could not be seen twice in the same one. The show diamond tiara, a large alldiamond koshnik style piece reset by show in the 1930s from an earlier French creation was a signature.
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So was the nine emerald necklace originally set in a long art deco chain and later reset as drops from a diamond collar. So was the art deco diamond chain that could divide into a shorter necklace and two bracelets, a piece of engineering as much as jewelry. Pamela grew up inside all of this, not as a museum visitor, but as a child in the house where these things lived.
And here is the seed of the whole story, planted quietly in the 1930s. This was inherited splendor worn rather than curated. Glamour, not stewardship. Edwina enjoyed the pieces as accessories, not as a collection to be preserved. The pattern that would define Pamela’s life, the gradual, undramatic dispersal of extraordinary things, was already visible in her mother.
By the time Pamela was grown, that glittering world was about to reach its absolute peak in India and at a coronation. India and the crown. In 1947, Pamela was 18 years old when she followed her parents to Delhi. Her father had been appointed the last viceroy of India. The man tasked with overseeing the end of the British Raj and the transfer of power to an independent nation.
It was one of the most consequential political assignments of the 20th century and Pamela was there for it. She lived in Viceroyy’s house in New Delhi and the vice regal lodge in Simla watching history dismantle itself around her. She later recorded what she witnessed in India remembered co-authored with her daughter India and historian Mark Tully a first person account of partition and the end of empire that remains one of the more remarkable eyewitness documents of that period of her mother’s relationship with Jawahar al- Nou Pamela was always clear
she described it as deep and genuinely affectionate and in her own account platonic she said So and moved on. So shall we? What the photographs from this period show is the collection at full blaze. Edwina in the nine emerald necklace at vice regal events. The show tiara in official portraits marking Mount Batton’s appointment.
The art deco diamond chain at formal dinners. Tiaras at 10:00 in the morning on Commonwealth tours. Diamonds against the Delhi heat, worn with the same ease that other women wore pearls. Pamela, still the viceroyy’s daughter, rather than a royal in her own right, appears in simpler pearls and dresses, watching, absorbing, inheriting in slow motion.
Then came Kenya, February 1952. Pamela was serving as lady and waiting to Princess Elizabeth on the Commonwealth Tour when word arrived that King George V 6th had died in the night. Elizabeth was now queen. Pamela’s own recollection of that moment has been repeated in biographies and obituaries ever since because it captures something that no official account quite manages.
She embraced her cousin, the young woman she had known as Libeet, and then mid embrace the realization arrived. The girl in her arms was no longer her cousin in the ordinary sense. She was the sovereign and Pamela instinctively dropped into a curtsy. The hinge of the whole century witnessed at arms length. A year later, Coronation Eve, 1953.
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the night before the crowning. The building thick with perfume and uniforms and the particular electricity of a city on the edge of something enormous. Edwina in the nine emerald necklace and the pearl and diamond tiara. Pamela beside her in her own diamond necklace and tiara.
A cascade of Mountbatton jewels orbiting a queen about to be crowned. The next morning, the abbey itself. Pamela in the same diamond necklace, the same tiara, watching her cousin become Elizabeth II. This is the high water mark. Everything after is the tide going out. She was 31 when the world she had been raised for began quietly to be sold off and it started with a wedding.
The Long Dispersal. January 1960. Romy Abbey, Hampshire. A snowstorm. Pamela marries the designer David Hicks in Whiteworth satin trimmed with mink, a 5-ft train, and a pearl and diamond tiara on loan from her mother. The wedding is attended by the Queen Mother and Prince Phillip. Queen Elizabeth cannot come.
She is pregnant with Prince Andrew. It is by any measure a magnificent occasion. The press call Pamela the bride of the year. Weeks later on her honeymoon crossing the Atlantic on the RMS Queen Elizabeth then onto the West Indies news reaches her that Edwina has died suddenly in Jesselton North Borneo. She was 58 years old.
In the same season, Pamela becomes a bride and an ays. The nine emerald necklace and the show tiara pass to her. Other pieces go to her sister Patricia. The collection divides and Pamela becomes the custodian of the most spectacular portion of it. A role she had not perhaps entirely anticipated. She was 30 years old.
She had a new husband, a new life, and a leather case full of her mother’s stones. 6 years later in June 1966, the nine emerald necklace goes to Suries in London. A press photograph from that day shows the buyer’s teenage daughter, a young woman named Caroline Seymour, lifting the necklace for the cameras. Coronation Emeralds, reduced to a caption and a price.
And even that price remains a genuine historical puzzle. Different agency captions from the same sale give figures that are wildly inconsistent with each other, ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands. No digitized SBY’s ledger has resolved it. The necklace that had been worn at the 1937 coronation of George V 6th, reset and worn again at the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II, walked out of that auction room and has not been seen publicly under the Mountbatton name since. Where is it now? Nobody knows.
It may be in a private collection under a changed description. It may have been broken up. The trail simply ends on the 6th of June, 1966. 12 years after that in 1978, the art deco diamond necklace follows the convertible chain that Edwina had worn in her most photographed portraits. The piece that appears in Cecile Beaton’s wartime portraits in the official images from the Vice royalty in decades of formal occasions goes to auction.
The reported price is $71,000. The auction house is not specified in the sources available. Another thread cut. Then 1979 and something that has nothing to do with jewels and everything to do with what this story is actually about. An IRA bomb kills Lord Mountbatton on his boat off the coast of Mullore County Siggo.
Pamela’s father, the man who had telephoned a king from a Barcelona hotel 50 years earlier, who had overseen the end of an empire, who had been photographed in every official portrait surrounded by the collection we have been tracing, is gone. Relatives lie gravely injured in hospital. Pamela leads the family mourning at a military funeral.
The woman who had curtsied in tiaras at a Kenyan dawn becomes the chief mourner at an assassination. Hold that. Let it sit against the glitter. Then 2002, the Shome Diamond Tiara, the great Kakosnik piece, Edwina’s signature, goes to Sbees. Pamela is in her 70s. She explains it herself in a line that has been quoted ever since because it is so entirely without self-pity.
We’re not pop stars, so we need the money. I am sad to have to sell it as it belonged to my mother and it’s very precious to me. It has however come to the point where I have to sell something. The tiara sells for approximately £149,650 against an estimate of £100,000 to £150,000. It passes to a private buyer.
By the mid200s, it has been reported in an Austrian collection. It has been occasionally exhibited since, but it has no permanent public home. This is the shape of the dispersal. Not scandal, not recklessness, not a single dramatic moment of loss. Just a woman across a very long life quietly funding a real existence out of inherited splendor.
The opposite of a museum. Piece by piece across four decades, the collection dissolves, not into chaos, but into the ordinary arithmetic of a life that outlasted the world the jewels were made for. By the end, almost everything had gone, except the one piece she never owned, and the one thing no auction could take, the last of her kind.
Come back now to that drizzly London morning in 2019. The batcave, the battered case stamped emic and his drill, the blaze of stones in the dark. It reads differently now, doesn’t it? Not eccentricity, not decline. The natural end of a life in which jewels had been so abundant, so casually present from birth, that losing track of which city vault held them was simply what happened when you lived long enough.
Pamela was 90. She had been born into a world where a Cartier Bando was a birth announcement. Of course, she had forgotten which bank. The open questions remain open. The nine emerald necklace gone since 1966. whereabouts unknown. The art deco diamond necklace sold in 1978. Current owner unidentified. The show tiara in private hands abroad.
Occasionally surfacing at exhibitions. The pearl and diamond tiara. Its fate genuinely uncertain. No confirmed sale record. No recent public sighting. Possibly still with the family. Possibly not. A coronation’s worth of stones scattered and anonymous. Their stories severed from their surfaces. And then there is the one that survived.
The Cartier Tutti Frutti Bandau. The piece Edwina bought to celebrate Pamela’s birth. The jewel that opened this story is the single piece of this entire collection that the public can still walk in and see. In 2004, when a new owner applied for an export license, the UK government placed a temporary ban on the piece on the grounds that it was of preeminent importance for the history of British art deco jewelry.
Since 2008, it has been on permanent display in the William and Judith Ballinger Jewelry Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The jewel that marked her arrival is the jewel that outlasted everything she let go. There is something almost too neat about that except that it is simply true. What could not be sold was The Witness.
Pamela wrote India Remembered in 2007 and Daughter of Empire in 2012, a memoir that reviewers called Joyously Entertaining and with some affection extraordinarily posh. Her daughter India’s 2024 book Lady Pamela added another layer. The objects dispersed, the account of them remained. She kept the story even as the stones scattered.
Pamela Hicks died on the 5th of June 2026. She was 97. India’s announcement was quiet and exact. Whilst there is no tragedy in the death of a 97year-old who has lived a full life, grief will be inevitable. She called her mother truly the last of her kind. That phrase deserves a moment. The last of her kind.
A woman who had been present at the end of the British Raj who had curtsied to a new queen in a Kenyan forest at dawn who had worn her mother’s emeralds to a coronation and then across the following decades sold them one by one to pay for an ordinary life. A woman who outlived the entire world. Her jewels were made for the vice royalties, the coronation balls, the era when a show tiara was simply what you wore to sues before selling it.
The jewels were never really the point. They were the thread, the material record of a life lived at the intersection of empire, royalty, and the long, quiet work of letting go. What endures is not the emeralds. It is the woman who remembered where they had been. Where do you think the emeralds are now? Is there another royal jewel story you think deserves this kind of attention? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone.
