Science Museum exhibition about last Tsar to show photos found in a champagne crate

A treasure trove of photographs found in an old champagne crate has inspired the Science Museum’s new blockbuster exhibition.

A curator stumbled upon the pictures, taken by an English tutor working for the family of Russia’s last Tsar Nicholas II, while researching its previous show about the country’s cosmonauts.

Natalia Sidlina, who discovered the photographs in the archives of the Science and Media Museum in Bradford, said: “Among the pictures of the spacecraft and cosmonauts and space dogs, I found what looked like a champagne crate from Harrods, and it had 22 albums I had no idea existed.

“They were albums assembled by the English language tutor for Tsar Nicholas’s nieces and nephews.”

The pictures, which span 1908 to 1916, show the family’s domestic life before the revolution which saw the Tsar, his wife and five children murdered by Bolshevik captors in 1918. Ms Sidlina was then asked to put together the huge exhibition which shows how medical science influenced the Romanov family’s story. This includes the secret treatment heir to the throne Alexei received for potentially deadly haemophilia, to the DNA testing that allowed their bodies to finally be identified and laid to rest. Ms Sidlina said: “These connections started building up with our own collection, the year 2018 was coming and it is 100 years since the family were murdered, and there was the medicine.

“We started looking at the role of medicine in history because we all know about the wars, we all know about the dynastic marriages, we all know about the power struggle but the fact is that an illness like haemophilia could be a major contributor to bringing down an old, very influential princely house which ruled one of the two largest empires at the turn of the century.”

Among the exhibits are one of Empress Alexandra’s maternity dresses and two Fabergé eggs made on the orders on the royal family. A Steel Military egg was sent to Alexandra by Nicholas in 1916 when he was at the Russian front.

The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution opens tomorrow