Vintage Aynsley Queen Mother 80th Birthday Plate – Royal Arms, Genealogy Family Tree, Floral Border, Fine Bone China, England 1980

Most commemorative plates give you a portrait and a date. This Aynsley one, made for the Queen Mother's eightieth birthday in 1980, does something far more interesting: at its centre it lays out her family tree — and that tree runs straight back into Scottish history.

Read it from the bottom up. Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, born 4 August 1900, married to Prince Albert, Duke of York, in 1923 — the shy younger son who would become King George VI when his brother abdicated in 1936. Above her, the two lines that made her: her father's Strathmore family (the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne) and her mother's Cavendish-Bentinck line. The Bowes-Lyons are an old Scottish house whose seat is Glamis Castle, held by the Lyon family since 1372; the Queen Mother descends, nineteen generations back, from Robert II, the first Stewart King of Scots and grandson of Robert the Bruce. (A quiet link for the cabinet: Glamis Castle is the very same place named on our Royal Doulton Glamis Thistle teacup — "found near Glamis Castle, home of Queen Elizabeth.")

Around all this the design speaks in the standard grammar of British royal ware, worth learning to read. At the top, the full royal arms — the English lion and Scottish unicorn flanking the shield, the Garter motto Honi soit qui mal y pense circling it, Dieu et mon droit below — then a ribbon simply lettered The Queen Mother. The rim is a garland of the four national flowers: the rose for England, thistle for Scotland, shamrock for Ireland and daffodil for Wales, the four nations of the United Kingdom gathered around one dedication, To Commemorate … the Eightieth Birthday, with a gilt edge closing it.

The back carries the green Aynsley crown mark — Est 1775 / Made in England / Fine English Bone China. Aynsley is one of the oldest English bone-china houses, a Longton firm that began as enamellers in 1775 and went on to supply a good deal of the better royal commemorative ware; this is a substantial 10½-inch plate, not a small dish.

A plate for the royal-memorabilia and Queen Mother collector, for the genealogy or Scottish-heritage shelf, for the anglophile wall, or as a thoughtful gift to someone born in 1980.