A pair of battered, hobnailed boots and a decades-old newspaper cutting are among a trove of everyday objects unearthed during restoration work at Buckingham Palace, reported the BBC. The misplaced items are thought to belong to staff who worked at the palace decades ago and were found by workers carrying out the £369 million refurbishment. A ticket for a “whist drive” - a card game event hosted by the Palace on April 14, 1949 - was found embedded in a lump of brick. Several betting slips, a bottle of spring water, an empty Silk Cut cigarette carton and a newspaper article about the gang jailed for the 1963 Great Train Robbery were also found under floorboards. Blank Littlewoods Football Pool betting slips from 1957 and a scrap of West End theatre listings from The Standard newspaper in 1889 were also found, alongside fragments of Minton decorative ceramic tiles from a fireplace hearth, with the design dated to around the mid-1800s, according to BBC. Among the discoveries was a typed schedule detailing Queen Elizabeth II's plans to host a diplomatic reception in her Silver Jubilee year of 1977. It revealed the monarch would work the room in a “clockwise direction,” and that aides were asked to encourage the 350 British guests to mingle with the diplomats at the annual gathering. Also discovered were pages from the Daily Express newspaper in 1966 detailing the “maximum security” prison where the Great Train Robbers were incarcerated. The article had pictures of Durham Prison, revealing that “the men who were found guilty of stealing a fortune in mailbags spend their week stitching them for nine shillings.” BBC wrote that King Charles and Queen Camilla are currently residing in Clarence House, which stands beside St James's Palace and was once the Queen Mother's home. They will not live in Buckingham Palace after the refurbishment is completed.
