Her Australian tour may well be Queen Elizabeth II’s antipodean swan song, but she will have to wait for the grateful nation’s opulent parting gift — a sparkling, jewel-encrusted coach.
Designed and built in Australia by former royal horse handler Jim Frecklington, the A$1.5 million (US$1.54 million) state coach Britannia is made from rare fragments of British history, including pieces from Australian founder Captain James Cook’s ship the Endeavour.
Part-financed by an A$245,000 government grant and intended as a gift to Buckingham Palace, it has been a seven-year labor for Frecklington, an avowed monarchist.
The queen, 85, would not view the masterpiece, originally scheduled as an 80th birthday present, when she arrived for a 10-day visit to Australia yesterday, with Frecklington having “no plans” to see her.
He is instead determined to deliver the coach in style for the queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year.
“Special occasions don’t come up all that often and next year is going to be a very special event,” Frecklington said in his Sydney workshop. “In the last 1,000 years there’s only ever been one Diamond Jubilee and that was in 1897.”
Weighing three tonnes and nearly 5.5m in length, the Britannia is Frecklington’s second royal coach and will be only the second presented to the royal household since 1901.
His first, the Australian State Coach, was given to the queen in 1988 to mark 200 years since European settlement of Australia and was used in this year’s royal wedding procession to carry Prince William and Kate Middleton’s parents.
Frecklington set out to make the Britannia a coach like no other, using pieces of wood from King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose and the doorframe of No. 10 Downing Street and a fragment of the Coronation Stone.
The crown atop the roof is timber from Lord Horatio Nelson’s ship Victory, which went to the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, and Frecklington also used metal from planes that flew on D-Day, the Battle of Britain and Dambuster raids.
Pieces of the Mayflower which took pilgrims to the US in 1620 also feature, while the New Zealand-made doorknobs are encrusted with 24 diamonds and 130 sapphires.
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