Upstairs and Downstairs - Tales from Osborne House
Friday 9th October 2026
Mark gave a very interesting talk, detailing new information about Victoria and Albert’s life at Osborne. Initially Mark was going to give a talk about Prince Albert, but he asked if he could change the talk to a brand new presentation called, ‘Upstairs and Downstairs - Tales from Osborne House’.
Mark wanted Friends of Osborne to be the first group to hear this new talk.
As always, it was informative and entertaining. We heard from the memoirs of former staff at Osborne during the later part of the Queen’s life.
One of the many things we learnt was that during Queen Victoria's reign two Americn ships came into the Solent. One on the confederate side, the CSS Nashville, and the other, the USS Tuscarora, on the union side whose mission was to capture or destroy the Nashville.
The Nashville's escape was not simply a case of one ship slipping past another. It was a carefully managed exercise in British neutrality, with a Royal Navy frigate prepared to use force to prevent a foreign warship from violating British maritime regulations.
For a brief period on 3 February 1862, the waters off Cowes became the setting for a confrontation involving three warships, two opposing American governments and the diplomatic authority of Queen Victoria's Britain.
