Vintage Caverswall Queen Mother 90th Birthday Loving Cup – Heritage Collection, Royal Arms, Tudor Roses, Gilt Bone China, England 1990

Look closely at the sash on the portrait: two badges, not one. The Queen Mother wore the Royal Family Orders of both George V and George VI — father-in-law and husband — and this stippled portrait for her ninetieth birthday, 4 August 1990, shows them plainly. She is an old friend of this shop's shelves: the young Queen smiling from the 1939 Canada tour plate walked into an Ottawa crowd of veterans fifty-one years before this cup was fired; she stood beside the stammering King of the 1937 coronation pieces; in the Blitz she refused to leave London — "the children won't go without me; I won't leave without the King; and the King will never leave." She lived to 101.

The cup honouring her ninetieth comes from Caverswall, the young aristocrat of Stoke-on-Trent — founded only in 1973, yet hand-making fine bone china for Asprey and Fortnum & Mason counters and, from 2008, holding the Prince of Wales's Royal Warrant. Tudor roses and thistles flank the crowned portrait — England for the Queen she became, Scotland for the Bowes-Lyon girl from Glamis she began as. The reverse carries her full royal arms in colour within the Garter band, supported by lion and red lion, over cobalt stipple bands and gold lines, between sculptural scroll handles in the old loving-cup manner.

For the Queen Mother devotee, the Caverswall collector, or a ninetieth-birthday gift with real precedent behind it.