Tea caddy a handy link to the past for Anita
A unique memento from the last royal Coronation is still being used today by an Olympic couple.
The tea caddy, which belongs to 1960 Olympic swimming gold medallist Anita Lonsbrough, was created for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and has been a part of the home and used regularly by herself and husband Hugh Porter since she inherited it in 2005.
Anita received the caddy following the death of her mother Maud in 2005 and said her mother had been a keen souvenir collector, so would have wanted to buy something from the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
She said: "I think my mother must have bought it as she was a great souvenir collector of different things, with some of my memorabilia picked up by her being unbelievable to see.
"She liked things like that and it would have been either a tea caddy or a biscuit tin and she obviously would have collected it and used it."
Anita said that her parents Maud and Stanley were big admirers of the Royal Family, with Stanley serving as a regimental Sargent Major in the Coldstream Guards and the family travelling around bases in Yorkshire.
One thing Anita said she couldn't believe was how good the tea caddy looked after 70 years, with the photos of Prince Phillip and the Queen still very clear on the side of the caddy and the Gray and Dunn logo visible on the base.
She said: "It's amazing when you see this and some of the other things we've got at home and I can't believe that she managed to keep this in such good condition.
"We keep it in the kitchen as we have a number of things that we've collected over the years and keep them on display on cupboards.
"It's nice to keep these items as they're not available these days and I don't know where you'd have to go to collect them, so to have something like this at home is really nice."
