Although it was the private home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Osborne also had a glittering guest list as it played host to many leading national and international figures of society and politics.
Over the past two days, as well as earlier in the month, Osborne’s guides lead fantastic ‘Footsteps of the Famous’ tours designed to shed light on these private visits at Osborne House near East Cowes.
Visitors were introduced to Csar Nicholas II, Emperor Napoleon III, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the King of Siam. The more intimate stories of Victoria’s relationships with servants John Brown and Abdul Karim were brought to life too, in the very rooms where they would have stood.
Those participating in the tour got to also see where Alexander Graham Bell was invited to demonstrate his acoustic telegraph or “telephone” to Queen Victoria at Osborne on Monday 14 January 1878. Bell’s invention had only recently been patented and the publicity gained from the experiments at Osborne certainly added to the fame of his telephone.
