“This was our golden moment. Our business was suddenly taking off. Then we get a letter from Buckingham Palace saying that she’d torn the jumper and could it either be replaced or repaired,” Osborne remembers. The palace sent them the sweater to inspect. Upon reviewing the damage—a detached cuff—they decided to simply send her a new one without telling anyone about it. On September 28, they wrote back: “I know Her Royal Highness will be very glad to have this sweater back and be most grateful to you for having redone it.” Osborne and Muir explain that, despite the black sheep being in a new place in the second design, no one noticed the two were different.
Meanwhile, they put the original in storage and forgot about it over the decades. They figured it must have been lost during one of their multiple moves. In fact, when Osborne found it in her attic, she didn’t think much of it at first. They had been surrounded by piles upon piles of black-sheep jumpers for nearly 50 years, so it wasn’t surprising that one or two from their old store were still lying around.
But then something caught her eye—a missing cuff: “I thought, My God, I think it’s the actual one because it had this cuff problem. Occasionally things went wrong with the sweater, but the cuff never fell off. It’s the only time this has happened.”
After the initial shock of the discovery wore off, they realized the next thing they needed to do was to pass it on to someone else. The sweater’s survival had been improbable enough: Without the protection of the cotton bedspread, theorizes Osborne, it would have been decimated by moths. “We don’t really want the responsibility of looking after this,” Osborne recalls thinking. Muir adds: “The very idea of having it is terrifying.”
So they called up Sotheby’s. One spring morning Osborne put it in a bag and hopped on a train to London. She presented the sweater, wrapped in a shroud, along with letters from Buckingham Palace.
A…
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