Pair of naughty Emo cards sent by princess set to fetch £5k at auction
Naughty cards are always popular, but what price is a cheeky 95p design signed and sent by Princess Diana – around £5,000 if an auction estimate is anything to go by!
The two Emotional Rescue cards from the publisher’s early 90s GirlsTalk range will be going under the hammer tomorrow, Wednesday, 17 May, with an estimate of £3,000 to £5,000 because Diana had written and sent them to Constantine II, the last king of Greece and godfather to her son Prince William.
And Emo’s creative director Jennie Rutter was called in by Dominic Winters Auctioneers to help date the designs by artist Mike Edwards, although only found out why when the catalogue went online yesterday and the national media picked up the story.
Described as adult humour cards, lot 296 in the Photographs, Autographs & Documents, British Royal Memorabilia auction shows both cards have cartoons on the front with the punchline inside, one says: “Adam came first…Men always do!” and the other has: “What’s the definition of the perfect man?…A midget with a 10″ tongue who can breathe through his ears!”
The Princess Of Wales, who died in 1997, has written “Dearest Tino, fondest love as always, from Diana” and “Dearest Tino, lots of love from Diana”, adding “I couldn’t decide which card to send & then thought you’d enjoy both!” on the Perfect Man design.
Auctioneer Chris Albury, who specialises in books, manuscripts, ephemera and photography for the Gloucestershire business, explained: “They come from a private collection as do a few lots before and after with the same Constantine provenance noted.”
Other lots include the then-Prince Charles’ 1996 Christmas card, showing him with sons William and Harry, that was sent to Constantine and his wife Anne-Marie with a £500-£800 estimate, and a letter from Queen Elizabeth II to the Greek royals thanking them for their 1987 Christmas gift, also estimated at £500-£800, plus three signed festive cards from her husband Prince Philip which carry a £200-£300 estimate.
And there are a number of lots of individual Christmas cards from the early years of Charles and Diana’s marriage, each signed by both and with a £400-£600 estimate – in the catalogue many of the royal card, photo and letter images carry the auctioneers watermark, although they have allowed the SWNS news agency to use unwatermarked pictures of the Emo cards.
The catalogue also contains an explanation that the reason for sending the humour cards, other than “as a bit of fun”, is unclear as they’re don’t celebrate a specific occasion, and it adds: “Diana must have seen these cards and thought of Tino before buying and sending them, possibly inspired by a conversation they had had at some social gathering.”
It goes on to talk about the popularity of adult humour greeting cards, dating from the saucy seaside postcards of the early 20th century, which grew increasingly bawdy until Winston Churchill’s 1950s government cracked down, bringing in censorship boards which seized inappropriate postcards from traders to destroy them. The censorship boards weakened through the 1960s and were eventually disbanded.
Jen told PG Buzz: “We won’t be bidding for the cards although we hope that someone will get a lot of joy from owning them.
“We knew about another card of ours that was sent by Diana in the 1990s, it was covered by The Sun and we had the article on our office kitchen wall for years, but we didn’t know about these two – love the fact that Diana had a naughty sense of humour!
“The cards would have been bought in the 1990s from an independent retailer in Cirencester, Diana frequently shopped there. Back then the card would have sold for 95p, so £3,000-£5,000 is a bit of a leap!”
