How I cracked the mystery of my father and the biggest jewelled egg in the world

What happened to make him discard us? I still don’t know the answer. At the time, I threw myself into student life and parties, seeking escape in hedonism. Judaism, like jewellery, felt like an inheritance that no longer belonged to me.

Egg hunt: (clockwise from left) the Kutchinsky family c. 1910; Paul with his parents, Lily and Jo; Jo, Lily, Roger (in shadow), Paul, Brenda, Katrina, Serena, and cousins Natasha and Tanya at her grandfather's 70th birthday party, held at the Dorchester Hotel; the writer's parents; Serena today; the writer's parents with a newborn Serena in 1979[Missing Credit]

My book Kutchinsky’s Egg was not conceived as an act of reconnection. It began with a question: what happened to the world’s largest jewelled egg? Created by my father in a blaze of ambition and hubris that cost him his business, his marriage and, I believe, ultimately, his life. It became both legend and taboo within our family.

[Missing Credit]

For years, the book existed as a low hum in the background of my life. I would tell the story of the egg at parties, half flippant, half protective. I would pull out the photo of my father standing beside it, proud and slightly defiant. But I did not fully interrogate my motives. It took me several years from the moment I first publicly told the story as a journalist to commit to my egg hunt. In many ways, it was decades in the planning, because I needed the distance that time provides.

Once I began in earnest, the quest consumed me. I burrowed into archives and family papers. I interviewed former employees, business partners, and ex-lovers. I returned to the showroom that had once felt like our family theatre. I travelled across continents, hired private investigators and travelled back to the 19th century.

In the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, I found traces of my ancestors’ lives. Marriage announcements, jewellery adverts, an interview with my father, write-ups of robberies, even the notice of my own birth. Seeing those affirmations of how the Kutchinsky name had established itself within British Jewish society was unexpectedly moving. Evidence that my great-great grandparents, who had arrived as immigrants fleeing persecution in their native Poland, had woven themselves into the fabric of a new country. My final discovery hit the hardest. Dated March 7, 2000, it was headlined Jeweller killed in Spanish road crash. Confined to two tight columns, it made no mention of my father’s greatest creation. Kutchinsky’s egg was buried with him. 

Researching our East End beginnings was equally transformative. I joined walking tours, stood in streets in Spitalfields and Whitechapel, and realised that I had lived and worked in the same areas my ancestors had once inhabited. I had drunk in bars and danced in warehouses built on ground where they had toiled to build a better future. My life had been traced over theirs, layer upon layer; the culmination of generations of risk, reinvention and hard work. My family’s rise from East End workshops to a glittering showroom in Knightsbridge was one of audacity and calculation.

My grandfather built the business through a mix of nefarious activities and the ingenious scheme of allowing young couples to take engagement rings home to try on before they had spent any money. His decision to move the business into the West End was a huge gamble – but one that paid off. The House of Kutchinsky was at the epicentre of swinging London in the Sixties, its playful, bold creations attracting a crowd of celebrities and socialites including the Beatles, Diana Dors, Robert Redford and even the politician John Profumo, who became embroiled in one of the 20th-century’s most notorious sex scandals.

By the time my father took the helm, The House of Kutchinsky was riding high. There were polo matches with Prince Charles, charity balls attended by Princess Diana, and glittering nights at Annabel’s, “the poshest basement on the planet”. The egg, for all its excess, had its roots in a tradition of ingenuity and persistence fossilised down the generations.

Writing this memoir forced me to see my father not as an isolated figure who rose and fell dramatically, but as part of a continuum. It also required honesty about his flaws. His ambition, his susceptibility to flattery, his determination to outdo his own father, all played their part. To write about him was to hold love and criticism in the same hand.

I found the egg, which had been sold in 2002, after my father’s death. Its unlikely resting place is the Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. Having precipitated the fall of The House of Kutchinsky it been bought by a Japanese businessman, whose family donated it to the museum after his death. As I stood before it one sunny October afternoon in 2023, its beauty overwhelmed me.

Hatching secrets: (left to right) Paul and Serena celebrating a Kutchinsky polo team victory in 1988; Paul and his daughters; Paul; the £7 million creation[Missing Credit]

And now that my hunt is complete, the dominant feeling is not triumph but peace. I no longer see Judaism and jewellery as tied exclusively to loss.

They are strands in a larger tapestry. Being Jewish, for me, is not primarily about religious observance. I do not keep the rituals or traditions in any formal sense. But I find myself speaking about my heritage more openly, sharing these stories with my children and acknowledging the thread that runs through our family history. When a fellow journalist heard about my book and expressed surprise that I was, in fact, “one of the tribe”, I felt an unexpected flicker of recognition. I realised that I no longer hesitated to call myself Jewish – a small but meaningful shift from the half-joking “Jewish-ish” I had retreated into.

In tracing the arc from a Polish shtetl to Swinging Sixties London, from East End workshops to a two-foot-tall diamond-encrusted egg on national television, I came to see that the story was larger than catastrophe. The deeper I dug, the more I realised that the House of Kutchinsky’s story was not only preserved in archives and photographs, but also in the fragile, sometimes contradictory memories of those who had lived it.

For a long time, I believed that with my father’s death those worlds were lost to me for ever. Writing Kutchinsky’s Egg revealed something different. They were never entirely gone. They had simply been waiting – buried in memory, scattered through family stories, and hidden in plain sight – until I was ready to claim them.

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​Kutchinsky’s Egg: A Family Story of Love, Loss and Obsession, published by Simon & Schuster, is out on March 26​