‘Let’s Bee Having You’

Victorian brooches often hide small stories, but this one seems determined to hide several at once. At first glance it looks like a classic silver commemorative piece for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. The heart shape is decorated with hand-engraved roses, shamrocks and thistles, along with VR and the dates 1837 and 1887 – all very proper, all very patriotic. Then you notice the centrepiece: a large, slightly smug-looking bee clutching a small truncheon.

That’s when the questions begin.

Some collectors suggest a neat symbolic pairing. Victoria as the Queen Bee, and the truncheon as a tidy nod to royal authority. Others take a more literary route and see a playful reference to Sherlock Holmes, who had become a cultural favourite by the late 1880s. Holmes, of course, retired to Sussex to keep bees, having spent his earlier years in the company of truncheons and constables. It’s a tempting link.

Then there’s the wonderfully eccentric explanation heard in markets from Edinburgh to Exeter. Victorian landlords, it’s said, sometimes encouraged tenants to leave by releasing a swarm of bees inside the property. If the tenants stayed perfectly still, the bees would drift up the chimney and disappear. If not, the message was received rather more briskly. In that telling, the brooch becomes a curious badge of the beekeeper and the bailiff, a tiny silver nod to authority and ingenuity in equal measure.

Whether any of these theories is the right one is part of the charm. Victorian jewellery rarely settles for a single meaning when three will do.