Darby and Joan

By Tom McGehee
Museum Home Director

This pair of figures, first issued by Royal Doulton of England in 1930, depicts Darby and Joan, a happily married old couple who epitomize sentimentality about love and marriage. They first appeared in poems 200 years earlier and, by the Victorian period, were still the subject of poets:

Hand in hand when our life was May
Hand in hand when our hair is gray,
Love will be with us forever then
Always the same, Darby my own,
Always the same, to your old wife Joan

Another Brit, Noel Coward, took a new slant when he wrote “Bronxville Darby and Joan” for Broadway in 1961. In that version, the pair sang:

We’re a dear old couple who detest one another,
We’ve detested one another since our bridal night,
Which was squalid, unattractive, and convulsive,
And proved beyond dispute,
That we were mutually repulsive.

The pair in the Bellingrath Collection is dated 1940 and was purchased by Mrs. Bellingrath along with a total of 36 others at Goldstein’s Jewelry Store, which was then located on South Royal Street in downtown Mobile. The 1943 inventory placed the entire collection of Royal Doulton figures in a basement storeroom. Darby and Joan have been on display in the Morning Room since the Home opened in 1956.