Vintage King Edward VIII Accession Plate – Royal Navy Bicorne Portrait, Red Ensign Union Jack Flags, Blue Line Rim, Made in Belgium 1936

Most Edward VIII china remembers the coronation that never happened. This plate remembers the day the story began: Accession 21.I.1936. George V died late on the 20th of January at Sandringham — "the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close," said the evening bulletin — and the next day his eldest son was proclaimed Edward VIII at St James's Palace. Accession souvenirs were made only in the few weeks before coronation planning took over, and this reign allowed no second chance: 326 days later Edward abdicated for Wallis Simpson. A short production window inside a short reign — scarcer, in practice, than the famous "coronation that never was" pieces.

The portrait is the King as he wished to be seen: the sailor prince, Dartmouth-trained, in dark blue naval dress and bicorne hat with a star at his breast, framed in a gilt palm-frond oval beneath a garland of roses. The crossed flags flanking him are the Union Jack and the Red Ensign — the flag Canadians flew as their own until 1965, a familiar face on a plate now shipping from Ottawa.

A full 9 inches across with moulded scrollwork and a hand-drawn cobalt line rim, it displays like a proper wall plate rather than a small souvenir. The reverse tells its own story: a castle-and-shield trademark reading Ruwaha, Made in Belgium. Between the wars, Belgian potteries turned out British royal souvenirs by the boatload for the UK and dominion markets — cheaper than Stoke could manage, and irksome enough that England's potters answered with the "Buy British" campaign. A British king's accession, fired in a Belgian kiln, sold back across the Channel: the little mark is a trade war in miniature.

This shop now holds the complete 1936 arc: this plate for the accession, the Grafton mug for the cancelled coronation, and the Empire plate for the brother crowned in his place.