Janet Hewlett-Davies gave Geoffrey Munn her gorgeous tiara after having it valued in 1990.
Antiques Roadshow at Christmas offered a wholesome update on an item originally presented to jewellery expert Geoffrey Munn on screen all the way back in 1990.
During Sunday, 22 December's programme, Fiona Bruce caught up with Munn on the grounds of Pitzhanger Manor in London, where he revealed that the late Janet Hewlett-Davies left him a stunning tiara in her will after connecting at the Brighton roadshow 34 years ago.
Hugh Scully, who passed away in 2015, presented Antiques Roadshow at this point in the show's history.
In archive footage, Munn told Hewlett-Davis upon seeing her neo-classical tiara: "Oh my goodness, I never expected to see anything quite as glamorous as that!"
He then informed her that it was worth no more than £500.
Skip to his catch-up interview with Bruce; the expert said that the roadshow visitor surprised him by getting in touch via a letter around the year 2005. She wanted to leave the tiara to him, should anything happen to her.
"Well that was an extraordinarily generous thing to do - hugely touching," Munn commented. "She was actually Deputy Press Secretary at 10 Downing Street for the Prime Minister Harold Wilson. This tiara was bought by her husband for her; now in those days if you went to a formal white-tie reception, women were asked to wear tiaras. It was almost mandatory to do that, so it's had another life of its own."
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Bruce went on to highlight the fact she's never heard of somebody leaving their possessions to one of the Antiques Roadshow specialists.
Explaining his intentions with the tiara, Munn noted: "There was a very strong implication that she would like it to enter a museum collection. I think one of the national museums is highly likely to accept it and I think that they ought [to] because it's not conventional. it's extraordinarily beautiful and it comes from an age increasingly remote from us."
Later on, art lover Frances Christie deconstructed Dame Laura Knight's painting of the snowy Morven mountain hills in Scotland.
"I think snow is such a fleeting weather condition; one minute the fields are completely white and the next minute the sun has melted them," she began, "and if there's something that artists love it's capturing light and shadow over the landscape, and I think she's really been inspired here by perhaps some of the impressionist landscapes."
Christie pointed out to Bruce: "What I started to notice if you come down to the snow in the foreground, you can actually see that the shadows are actually painted using an incredibly bold blue, and then she's added a sort of orangey tint to the white and that combination, which are complimentary colours, has sort of brought out the contrast between shadow and snow."