A Touch of Gold

The Reminiscences of Geoffrey

Munn

just as the mourners file past the grave and the clods of earth thunder onto the coffin lid, one invariably hears the following lament: ‘If only he had bothered to write it all down!’

I have asked myself what possible justification there is for someone like me to write it all down since, superficially, I have had an unvarying life. I have never lived anywhere but England and all my adult days have been spent in London, where I have worked in the same place for the best part of 50 years. With this in mind, I honestly do not think I would have begun this account but for the insistence of an old friend who maintained I did indeed have something to say. By way of encouragement, she gave me a digital recorder and, when this did not work, a laptop computer followed. Nobody could have hoped for greater support, but the most powerful incentive was to come from an unexpected direction.

In my long career in the commercial art world, I have done my best to kindle the enthusiasm of potential collectors and enthusiasts. The most effective way I have found, is to show that a work of art is a silent witness, not only to a previous era, but also to a previous human intelligence. Ideally, this is achieved through some sort of visual reference, perhaps the artist’s first design, drawing or maquette or, even better, a painting or photograph in which the piece is seen in the very environment for which it was made. However, by far the best and most haunting method is to raise the voice of someone long gone describing the amazement and joy a precious object generated in its own time. Echoes are heard in letters and in wills, but the most articulate voices resound from the pages of autobiographies. During the course of my research, I have read many and discovered it is not necessarily the stature of the writer that makes a lifestory valuable, simply an ability to give a vivid account of his era.

A memoir is rather like a photograph in that nothing seems more contemporary at the time it is made. However, even the most amateur of family snapshots quickly becomes a thing of the past, a surreal and separate actuality and, for this reason alone, an object of deep curiosity. The same is

true of the written word and the life stories of our predecessors.

It is surprising how few from the commercial art world, never mind the aesthetic one, have written their memoirs. This is regrettable as my predecessors had so much to share in recounting what is a narrow yet beguiling social history.

One of those who did take up the challenge was the historian and Cork Street art dealer Lillian Browse (1906–2005). This she did despite a swingeing reproof from her business partner Gustave Delbanco, who warned her that writing one’s autobiography was the most arrogant form of conceit. Perhaps he was right, but Lillian’s memoirs (published in 1999 under the title Duchess of Cork Street: The Autobiography of an Art Dealer) remain a uniquely entertaining and increasingly valuable resource for all students of modern British and French art.

Conceit or not, I hope the many shortcomings of my own story will become less apparent as its historical value increases, and that in writing it, I have managed to convey a little of the kaleidoscopic excitement that coloured almost every day of my life.

The art historian and dealer Lillian Browse by Emmanuel Mané-Katz (1894–1962).

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023/© The Courtauld / Bridgeman Images

School’s Out

my formal education was close to a complete disaster. It began at the local primary school in Henfield. Flat-roofed and newly built, it was a kind of heaven made up of sand pits, poster paints and plasticine and women teachers who spoke in soppy toddler speak. The first day was fine and the second too but by the third I was already bored and decided not to go to school that morning or any other morning for that matter. My mother, however, had other ideas and when I had finally been subdued and broken like a new pony I was delivered, red and moist and full of shame, into the headmistress’s sympathetic care. She took my hand and guided me towards the other toddlers playing in the sand pit who had been specially primed to give me time and space to pull myself together. I, however, was determined to have the last word and, looking over my shoulder to my mother, screamed: ‘Well I didn’t know I had to go every bloody day!’

Although this is not quite true of school, it certainly is a fault of adult working life, and I can vividly remember the clammy horror I felt when it finally dawned on me that long indolent summer holidays were a thing of the past.

I failed to thrive at the primary school and one day my mother was summoned to be told the possibility that I had learning difficulties. My parents were understandably shocked and wondered what best to do. All I cared about was that the longed-for Christmas holidays should soon be upon us and I had already made a card for the form teacher in the shape of a cut-out Christmas tree. She sent me one in return. My parents were less excited than I was when they read what was inside:

Dear Geoffrey thank you for the lovely hand made fur tree you made for me this Christmas. With love Miss Brown

From that moment on, my days at the local school were numbered, numbered on the fingers of one hand and, in the early new year of 1959, I was on the bus to Brighton in a light grey blazer, clown-like

shorts (‘He’ll quickly grow into them, you’ll see…’) and a matching cap trimmed with bright blue beading, all brand-new from Daks in Brighton. The fear of a new school, fresh relationships and a future seemingly as limitless as space itself was fixed in the smell of wool from my new school clothes. They were the uniform of St Michael’s, a prep school for 20 pupils founded by an old dame called Dorothy Willis in a converted Victorian villa at 2 Harrington Road. Miss Willis was an aged tartar who to a small boy seemed to be older than God. In fact, she was born in 1888, the year of Queen Victoria’s Silver Jubilee, and was 77 when we first met. Her face was lined like that of a heavy smoker, which she was not, and her pepper-and-salt hair was gathered in a no-nonsense chignon. One or two random moles punctuated the contours of her face and horn-rimmed, half-moon spectacles completed her forbidding physiognomy. Her ample breasts were gathered tightly into a dress made of floral fabric, buttoned down the front, and belted beneath the bust. She wore thick, opaque flesh-coloured stockings and her shoes were brown lace-up brogues. When Miss Willis (known to us as ‘s’Willis’) spoke, her teeth, long, gum-less and brown could be seen working up and down against the dark void of her mouth. They consisted of one brown incisor above and one or two teeth below. My father was fascinated by them and referred to them as her ‘pickle chasers’. Here at assembly in the morning, we sang hymns and Miss Willis read her favourite texts from the onion-skin pages of her floppy, gilt-edged Bible. In the morning we learned joined-up writing and were allowed to choose pencils laid out in every colour of the rainbow. ‘There’s a sight for sore eyes!’ she would say every time the technicolour box was opened. Each one of them had a pencil rubber on the end, bound in a little collar of brass. Later, we were trusted with dip-pens and white porcelain inkwells lodged in special receptacles at the top right-hand side of heavy oak fliptop desks. We learned Latin and French and studied more of the Bible. Dorothy Willis believed children should be treated exactly as adults and this extended to the appreciation of poetry. In some ways I think she was right and if I have an ear for the music and the resonance of a word or phrase, then I have to thank her for that. However, I am not sure even the most precocious of 8-year-old students is quite ready for ‘Death the Leveller’ by James Shirley or ‘On His Blindness’ by John Milton. These and other classics we learned by rote from the anthology, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 and later revised by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92).

In the morning we drank milk, subsidised by the state, from 1/3-pint bottles and ate Rich Tea biscuits at break time. Sometimes there would

be beef stew for lunch, made up of tough little chunks of iridescent meat cooked with carrot cubes until grey and hard; yellow stripes of wobbling fat turned me right off. And on Fridays there was fish. This was none too fresh and presumably akin to that encountered by Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) at the Garrick Club, which he described as ‘a piece of cod that passeth all understanding’. These veined and sallow flakes of flesh were absolutely repellent, and I could not eat them. The only solution open to me was to transfer my fish surreptitiously to a handkerchief and then to my pocket where it lay, forgotten gently putrefying over the weekend. On Monday morning, after a hot weekend, the sickening effluvia of rotten cod was quite impossible to ignore.

In the main, St Michael’s was cosy and nice enough even if from time to time one would be summoned to Miss Willis’s study for a dressing down for giggling in prayers or for a private recitation of the Latin noun mensa whose declension had been such a disappointment in class. On went the metronome and with the tap of a ruler she echoed its rhythm:

Steyning Grammar School by Richard Nibbs (1816–1893). This room was known as Big School. To this day, little about it has changed since its foundation in 1614. Brighton and Hove Museums

Mensa, Mensae, Mensarum…Men… what Munn?... Dooo try to pay attention! We will run through it again and again until you get it right, you lazy little ass! (Pronounced, in all innocence, as arse!)

This is when I dried up completely. I prayed to God to let me disappear into the glass paperweight full of bubbles on Miss Willis’s occasional table and on which, in my despair, I had fixed my gaze. No such luck, the ordeal went on interminably and, in the end, I emerged brain-washed, dazed, hoping only to join the other boys at their beef stew as inconspicuously as possible. Miss Willis was not a cruel person but I think she knew very well that isolation is what children dread more than most things. Despite her best efforts to drum Latin into me aged 9, nothing seemed to work. She wrote on my school report in 1962: ‘He does not think and consequently he makes stupid mistakes.’ In fact, I was thinking about all manner of things, though I admit Latin was not one of them. As she was a stickler for discipline, I was terrified of Miss Willis but she was a formative influence and somehow she always held my respect. When she died, the news of it reduced me to tears.

From St. Michael’s, I went to Shoreham Grammar in 1963, which, despite its name, was a fee-paying school. When I arrived, it was in the throes of a melt down from above. Discipline was at very low ebb and although the school rules demanded all pupils should wear a uniform the challenge was to do so in a way that implied insolence and contempt. Ties were secured in a tight knot positioned at the height of the third shirt button and the cap, always too small and severely crumpled was worn at the very back of the head in a way intended to affront the adult world.

At lunchtime the pupils of Shoreham Grammar were banned from the cafés in town, so they chewed on tiger nuts and liquorice laces instead. More often, they slouched on street corners; invariably with one hand behind their back to conceal the pungent blue trail of smoke coiling upwards from a cheap cigarette. Number Six and Extra were the favourites but my first experiment with smoking was Dunhill menthol cigarettes. The artificially cool fumes were easier to inhale but, as a result, their effects were doubly toxic. I made myself so ill I had to feign a fever and lie down in the sanatorium for the whole afternoon. How the staff did not smell the smoke on our breath I will never know; I can only assume they were heavy smokers themselves. Certainly, the air was acrid and sour when the door of the staff room was opened at break.

To be caught smoking might bring about the endless penance of a thousand lines or even a caning. Although the latter increased one’s kudos with the other boys, it was a truly fearful experience: staggeringly painful

the applicant was chosen. Instead, Kenneth and my colleagues decided to employ one Caroline Watney. She is the three times great granddaughter of James Watney (1800–84), the founder of the famous brewery. On her maternal side, Francis Hopkinson (1737–91) signed the United States Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 and it was he who designed the first official flag of the newly independent United States. Twin portraits of Caroline’s grandparents were made by the famous modern British painter William Nicholson (1872–1949).

However, none of the above was relevant to the interview at Wartski during which Kenneth Snowman’s first and foremost question was: ‘Can you type?’. From my point of view, his choice was not only meant but heaven-sent because Caroline and I would be married on 9 April 1983. As well as being the devoted mother of our two sons Alexander and Edward, she has been a constant in my life ever since.

Caroline Munn with Lady Charlotte Bonham Carter at the Wartski exhibition

‘Artist’s Jewellery’ on 7 March 1989. Caroline was 31 Lady Charlotte was 96.

Prudence Cuming

Good Old London Town

having left home once and for all, my first home in London was a tall Victorian villa called 503 Fulham Road. The landlady was a rather imperious woman called Miss Collins. Presumably as a result of diminished circumstances, she had partitioned the larger rooms into compact bedsits. There was a washbasin in the room but the bathroom and lavatory were up the stairs on the right. A single bed was positioned against the partition wall. It had a laminated wooden headboard with post-war sunburst effect and a rose-pink candlewick bedspread covered the rest; a matching wardrobe and chair were the only other pieces of furniture in the room. There was a single gas ring in the corner on which to boil a kettle. French windows opened onto a narrow balcony above the busy road below. At my parents’ home in the country, the velvety silence of the night had occasionally been disturbed by the shriek from a passing owl or the haunting bark of the vixen but here the traffic noise was incessant, and the thin curtains allowed the orange street light to keep me awake. At about midnight the muffled noise from the television in the next room faded away and I could hear the creak of floorboards as my neighbour shuffled about his room. A light switch on the other side of the partition was flicked off and within seconds I realised someone had got into bed beside me. The only thing separating us was a thin sheet of plasterboard. We slept this way, side by side, week after week, and I never saw his face. I could tell he was a heavy smoker by the smell from under his door. He snored and, in the morning, he coughed incessantly but this was all I ever knew about this lonely man except to say he is almost certainly dead by now.

My conversations with my landlady were cold and courteous. She was interested in art but liked nothing more exciting than English watercolours. After several heated debates, I realised the futility of trying to convince her of Picasso’s genius. There was something about the house that was old and hopeless, and I was desperate to leave. Tim, my friend from school, suggested I take a room in the flat he shared with friends and within a few weeks I handed in my notice. The landlady kept a good

Death the Leveller

sir roy strong (b.1935) once said that in order to assure the success of any artistic enterprise it was essential to have at least one of the following three ingredients: death, sex or jewellery. Happily for me, my professional life can be seen an unholy cocktail of all three. Thus far in this memoir, I have described a good deal of jewellery and hinted at a little sex and so now it is time to consider death and its part in my life. From a very early age I have been fascinated by church architecture and decoration and the funerary sculptures that are invariably part of them. These range in quality from the plain slate ledgers on every chancel floor to the magnificent ‘cloudy trophies’ adorning the walls of abbeys and cathedrals, the most costly and magnificent of which were carved by the finest sculptors of the time, such as the white marble monuments in Westminster Abbey by John Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770) and LouisFrançois Roubilliac (1702–62)

By the late eighteenth century, the burial grounds in most cities – and particularly in London – were quite full and, despite gifts of land from the Church for new cemeteries, these too were rapidly overflowing. Under these unfortunate circumstances ‘overflowing’ is exactly the right word and the consequences were not only grisly in the extreme but also particularly unsanitary, polluting drinking water and spreading all manner of diseases, including cholera.

In the mid-nineteenth century, steps were taken to solve the urgent problem and plans were submitted for all manner of catacombs and elaborate mausoleums. Some of these were quite outlandish and a little ridiculous. One such was the Metropolitan Sepulchre, known as the Pyramid of Death, designed by Thomas Willson in 1820. It was intended to tower 950 feet above Primrose Hill in London and have enough spaces for 5 million bodies. Unsurprisingly, it was never built. A more practical solution was found in the suburbs of London, where over time a series of spacious cemeteries called the Magnificent Seven were laid out to receive the dead. One of these was situated at Norwood and boasts a number

of celebrated burials including the cookery writer Isabella (Mrs) Beeton (1836–65), Sir Henry Tate (1819–99) the sugar magnate and founder of the Tate Gallery, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and model Maria Zambaco (1843–1914), and the famous architect William Burges. However, the importance of Norwood Cemetery derives not so much from the celebrity of those interred there but from the architectural importance of the tombs designed to commemorate them. The range of inspiration is enormous; many elaborate, not to say fussy mausoleums line the thoroughfare. In sharp contrast, a simple but truly majestic monolith casts a long and mournful shadow at dusk in memory of the antiquary John Britton (1771–1857), who hoped it would last as long as Stonehenge; against considerable odds, there is every chance it will.

In 1986, Caroline and I were living in Upper Norwood, which, as the name suggests, was on the hill above Norwood Cemetery. In common with the other Magnificent Seven London cemeteries, Norwood was in a pitiful state of neglect. The positive side of this was that the 40 acres of 42,000 graves had become a quiet wildlife haven full of fascination. In the autumn, we would gather a limitless supply of rich plump blackberries that Caroline turned into the best jam. Lack of maintenance and vandalism were a serious threat to Norwood’s exceptional funerary sculpture but the worst enemy to its unique heritage was the owner of the cemetery itself: Lambeth Council. It had recently instigated a policy euphemistically dubbed ‘lawn conversion’. Apparently, the idea was to help grave owners make ‘each cemetery a green and pleasant garden of rest and remembrance for years to come’. These were honeyed words indeed but of course the bitter truth was a destructive incentive to remove the majority of tombs dating from before 1876. That done, the spaces were, of course, rendered available to be resold as fresh burial plots and the proceeds used for the Council’s benefit. On one occasion, Caroline and I witnessed the demolition of a fine Victorian monument and asked the driver of the bulldozer who chose which tombs were to go and which were to stay. He replied: ‘I do Guv!’. As the marble statuary crashed left and right, I decided that enough was really enough. Armed with my research into the best tombs within the Magnificent Seven, I wrote a protest piece for The Times newspaper drawing special attention to those in urgent need of protection. Certainly, the Berens Tomb in Norwood, designed by Edward Barry (1830–80), architect of the Palace of Westminster, took pride of place. My piece was published as a full page on 26 July 1986 under the title ‘Where Great Art Lies Dying’; and, I am happy to say, it caused a real rumpus. Lambeth Council attempted to defend the indefensible with yet more municipal pap, and the private cemetery owners were also on the

run. The article gave fresh impetus to a growing group of conservationists, lead by the Friends of Highgate Cemetery in 1975 and followed by the Friends of Norwood Cemetery in 1990. It was then, in Norwood at least, that the bulldozers finally fell silent forever.

That is not to say that the London cemeteries were completely safe, far from it. Spectacular sculptures by the best artists were still at risk not so much from municipal philistinism but the insidious danger of tree roots, subsidence, frost damage and, worst of all, gratuitous vandalism.

The reality is that the costs of maintaining the cemeteries were prohibitive and they still are. That said, I did think there was the strongest case to permanently preserve one the greatest masterpieces of nineteenthcentury sculpture: the exquisite catafalque in the Brompton Cemetery designed in 1892 by Sir Edward Burne-Jones for the patron and art collector Frederick Leyland (1831–92). Loosely inspired by Byzantine prototypes, it is made of Portland stone inlaid with highly sophisticated

The tomb of Frederick Leyland designed by Edward Burne-Jones, 1892.

Vindice/Alamy Stock Photo

bronze ornaments in the form of ivy and lilies and roofed in repoussé copper. When I first encountered this beautiful work of art in the late 1970s, next to nobody had a clue that it was by Burne-Jones and this revelation added enormous art historical weight to my campaign. Apart from the usual weathering, the Leyland tomb remained in fairly good condition, which was almost entirely due to the protective railings that were part of Burne-Jones’s very practical design. Nonetheless, it was extremely vulnerable and in need of permanent preservation. Strange as it seems, the ownership of tomb furniture usually belongs, not to the cemetery in which it stands, but to the descendants of the deceased. Preservation orders are now in force for the very best examples, but this was rarely, if ever, the case in 1986.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has a number of tombs in its collection and its associations with Sir Edward Burne-Jones are too numerous to recount here. Suffice it to say, he has been described as the most important British artist of the nineteenth century and so it seemed to me that the Leyland tomb would not only be a spectacular addition to the Museum’s collection but its long-term safety would be assured. All I needed to do was trace Leyland’s descendants. Once again, I resorted to advertising in the Daily Telegraph in the hopes of finding them; and I did. Over a cup of tea in a Victorian house by Wandsworth Common, I was told informally that if the Museum would accept the tomb, then they would donate it with pleasure. The costs of dismantling it would surely be less than the commercial value of a comparable masterpiece by BurneJones and, so, it seemed the way forward, if not completely clear, was very much within sight. With only these costs as my remaining obstacle, I made my proposition to the Museum. To my enduring frustration, I bumped into a curatorial wall and, despite reviving the idea on more than one occasion, I have completely failed to advance it. The feeblest excuse offered to me for leaving the Leyland tomb to its increasingly uncertain fate is that the dereliction of funerary sculpture is part of its history and charm!

Six years after my article was published, another appeared in The Times on 20 August 1991. It reported the necessity for a patrolling policeman in the Brompton Cemetery to protect visitors from vandals and to prevent the theft of valuable metal lettering from tombs.

Since I began my incentive to secure the Burne-Jones tomb the scrap value of all metals has risen dramatically, and thefts have become commonplace and increasingly audacious. Church roofs are frequently stripped of lead and even a monumental sculpture by Henry Moore, weighing several tons, was stolen for melt in 2009. So, I fear that the Leyland tomb will not survive intact for much longer. My only hope is

Opium of the Masses

in 1843 the social revolutionary Karl Marx observed that religion was the opium of the masses. Now that society is increasingly secular, it is not so much faith that distracts humanity from its perpetually unresolved condition, but television.

In 1968 the concept of 15 minutes of fame became associated with Andy Warhol (1928–87). ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes’ has become an increasingly prophetic remark though nobody in the pre-digital age could ever have imagined social media would fit the prophesy like a glove.

If everybody has had a quarter of an hour of fame, then mine – just a tad longer – owes almost everything to the iconic BBC television programme, The Antiques Roadshow.

Running since 1979, it regularly attracts more than 8 million viewers nationally; and, add to that viewers from broadcasts in the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada and a good proportion of Europe, the figure rises well into the billions. So, it seems my childhood fantasy that our television set had a supernatural life all of its own is not too far from the truth. The medium is all-pervasive, slipping invisibly through the ether and allowing the faces, the voices of individual personalities, of contributors to imprint themselves on the memories of a good chunk of all mankind. This phenomenon is called celebrity and, glamorous as it sounds, it has absolutely no consistent relationship with merit. Joanna Lumley once said that television, and only television, has the ability to elevate perfectly ordinary people to a new and previously unimaginable status.

In 1989, I, as one of those perfectly ordinary persons, with only a narrow knowledge of Fabergé and antique jewellery, was invited to join the team of The Antiques Roadshow. In those days the industry was rather more relaxed and, consequently, I was offered next to no guidance on how to make my burgeoning secondary career a success. I was simply plonked in front of the cameras without even the assurance that every inconsistency, including coughs, stutters and

noises-off could be edited out in the interests of a thoroughly chamfered and polished production.

One of my earliest shows, in 1990, was in Brighton, where a charming woman had brought me a gilt metal tiara in the form of a wreath of corn, each ripe grain represented with a yellow citrine. After both she and I had been plastered with the mandatory theatrical make-up, we positioned ourselves at the table and were immediately corralled by tripods and cameras with telescopic lenses. I don’t know who was the more nervous. Indeed, I was quite literally trembling with fright but managed to steady my hands on the table-top. Happily, thanks to the skilful editors, the sequence turned out to be more than alright on the night.

During the next few episodes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realised this famous programme was less about the object, and more about the owner and, certainly, precious little about me. I was simply a catalyst, and my job was to engage with the visitor and discover in a light conversational manner exactly what their piece of jewellery meant to

The Queen (then Duchess of Cornwall) with the author and co-presenter Fiona Bruce, during Her Majesty’s visit to the Antiques Roadshow at The Eden Project, 6 September 2022

Hugh Hastings/Getty Images Entertainment

them. I needed to discover if it was a purchase, an heirloom, an emissary of love or, most moving of all, a souvenir of love beyond the grave. Faced with the unblinking eye of the television cameras, emotions inevitably run high and some owners betray theirs as never before in private, never mind to millions of viewers throughout the world. Very occasionally they are brought to tears.

The cornerstone of the programme’s foundation is to provide a valuation and it has to be said this is sometimes a false barometer. Some rare and fascinating objects are very modestly priced, and some deeply unworthy works of art are worth a fortune. Part of my challenge on the Roadshow was to point out this contradiction. Once again, I relied on the advice of my English teacher, Pamela James, from many years before. She told me if you want to be heard never use a cliché. In my written work I always kept this advice in the forefront of my mind, and I believe it has served me well in my recordings.

Over the course of three decades on the show, one or two sequences stand out not only in my memory but in that of the viewing public. In 2012, at Houghton Hall in Norfolk I was required to stay late to film a collection of jet that, frankly, was not the most exciting prospect of my television career. However, in the lengthening shadows of an exhausting day, a hesitant man had been waiting patiently to see me. Once the jet was in the bag – in both senses of the word – he advanced and opened the palm of his hand to reveal a massive ring made from a plait of three strands of gold, gleaming buttercup-yellow in the afterglow. He had found it in the ground, exactly where it had had lain for the best part of 1,000 years. The miracle of this beautiful piece was that it was made of pure gold and being completely incorruptible it had emerged from darkness into light as if it had been made yesterday. Furthermore, it was an object full of emotional contradictions. The present owner’s surprise and joy in finding it must have been equal and opposite to the deep sense of loss, of anguish, experienced by his nameless predecessor, more than likely his ancestor, a millennium before.

The population of East Anglia in the 9th century was a tiny fraction of what it is today and, since the ring was made of a hefty chunk of gold, I suggested it had fallen from the hand of a high-ranking

A Saxon ring made up of plaited strands of pure gold.

individual, even a King. Suddenly the mists of time parted and gave a brief glimpse of his ghost in dun-coloured clothes and furs, hurtling on horseback through the misty fens when the ring dropped from his frozen fingers. This was a faceless ancestor with whom we share every human emotion but next to nothing of our dazzling modern world. Remarkable as it is that the ring has survived untarnished, the greater miracle is the continuing survival of the flickering flame of human life itself. Against all odds through plague, famine, fire and war, it continues from one generation to another, bright as pure gold in the sunshine.

The Saxon ring was a lucky find indeed and it has earned a welldeserved place in the heritage of The Antiques Roadshow. I pitched it at £10,000 but this is the merest fraction of its emotional value to the owner and the millions, nay, billions of viewers who share the indelible memory of that special day.

I have had many, many magical discoveries on the Roadshow but very few of them can compete with the ancient mystery of the Saxon ring. Another of my more exciting finds was, in contrast, comparatively modern; in fact, it had been made in the age of the motorcar and the telephone. Its fame was indisputable and, consequently, its value was not only enormous but record breaking.

As you will already know, Fabergé has had far more than a walk-on part in my life; in fact, it has always been centre stage in my day-to-day career. When writing about my subject over many years, I have often tried, and seldom succeeded, in articulating the essence of Fabergé’s flower studies. These completely charming and utterly useless objects are made from some of the rarest materials found on this – our equally improbable – earth. Usually of gold, cast and engraved to simulate a bract or opening bud, the stems and twigs are supported in specimen vases of the purest waterwhite rock crystal; not glass but a natural stone. In these tiny transparent

A study of pear blossom by Fabergé, c.1900. Gold, rock crystal, enamel and diamonds. The Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars

In another showcase was a battered tobacco tin containing tufts of pubic hair that the murderer John Christie (1899–1953) had collected from at least eight of his women victims before he was caught, convicted and hanged in 1953.

These were truly horrifying souvenirs but some of the other objects on show had been confiscated by police simply on the grounds that they had offended public decency. One such were earrings incorporating human embryos made by the sculptor, artist and jeweller Rick Gibson (b.1951). He had shown them at an exhibition at the Young Unknowns Gallery in London in 1987 but almost immediately the earrings were seized by the police and Gibson and the gallery owner were charged with committing a public nuisance. They were fined £500 and £300 respectively.

One of the final exhibits was a silver-mounted skull cup of the type made to Lord Byron’s order. There was little or no provenance on the label but it seemed quite at home with the 500 grisly exhibits surrounding it.

My visit to the Black Museum was terrifying and repulsive in equal measure. Indeed, I felt shocked, sullied, even contaminated by the ghastly things I had seen but this was not the end of it. Just in front of the exit from this virtual charnel house was the final showcase within which was placed an innocent looking fountain pen. My imagination raced as I tried to guess what hideous crime it might have implemented. Perhaps it had once contained a fatal dose of cyanide or even a lethal pellet of uranium, but no. The label informed, in the Museum’s own dispassionate curatorial style, that this was the very pen used by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother when she signed the visitors’ book in her 83rd year!

Royal Flush

14 december 2011 was a cold, cold day and a bitter wind cut through Kensington Gardens. I had been invited to a service to mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the death of Albert Prince Consort (1819–61); fittingly, the location was the resplendent Albert Memorial.

Given the gravity of the occasion and the possibility that some of the Prince’s myriad descendants would be present, I decided on a dark suit, white shirt, even darker tie, black shoes and a black three-quarter length coat.

As it turned out, the service was disappointingly small and the congregation might, at best, be described as intimate. I doubt there were more than 15 of us gathered in the Prince’s honour but it did include the Mayor of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, clothed in her red velvet robes, lace jabot and elaborate gold chain of office. The officiating priest offered apologies on behalf of The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Prince of Wales and The Dukes of Gloucester and Kent. We then learned this was just the beginning of an embarrassingly long list of absentees, including Albert’s descendants both from home and abroad. Apparently, the Landgrave of Hesse and by Rhine regretted his absence, as did His Imperial Highness the Prince of Prussia, and there were probably many more of Albert’s family who, for one reason or another, had offered their apologies.

Victoria and her ‘beloved Albert’ were married on 10 February 1840 and had nine children. It is a startling statistic that the offspring of this love match between first cousins number nearly 1,000 people alive and kicking today. Despite the Prince’s fecundity, attendance at this curious little commemoration suggested Albert’s memory was very much on the wane.

The priest, undeterred by his scant congregation, led prayers for His late Royal Highness and then a pathetically inadequate tribute to Albert’s many achievements was laid at the foot of his colossal effigy, towering above every previous hero of the arts and sciences, and entirely covered in pure gold. It was a small wreath of plastic laurel leaves, hardly bigger than a side plate.

At the end of the short service, the congregation was invited to the Albert Hall for a glass of warming Madeira. By then I was as cold as a brass monkey and was glad of my formal, if faintly saturnine, attire. In the process of crossing Kensington Gore, a woman suitably dressed for mourning, the rim of her felt hat jabbed through with a stiff black feather, approached me. Although hardly in the first flush of youth, she was still beautiful and her refined features and cutglass accent made me wonder if she was one, if not the only one of Albert’s descendants at this tragic little service. After the usual exchanges about the cold and the wind, she turned to me and said: ‘Forgive me, but I simply have to ask. You look so familiar to me. Are you the Mayor’s chauffeur?’. I was able to reply: ‘Well no. In fact, I never learned to drive and I doubt I ever shall.’

What my patronising new friend had presumed was not a fact, but neither was it was entirely a fiction. I was the managing director of Wartski but no matter how famous this family firm had become, I am, and always will be indelibly marked out as ‘trade’. In years gone by, this would certainly have precluded me from many aspects of what used to be described as society; it might even have prohibited me from the mournful occasion described above. However, following two world wars, the old order had virtually collapsed and even the most vociferous adherents found traditional levels of snobbery impossible to maintain. Inherited rank had been superseded by fame and in our own time it is celebrity that rules almost everywhere.

History shows that the British royal family has always been conscious of its standing in regard to duty, but it has also always been remarkably inclusive. Queen Victoria’s friendship with her servants is too well known to warrant elaboration here, but it is worth noting that it encompassed not only rank but race.

Since time immemorial, the immediate indicators of royal status have been the finest coloured silks, exotic feathers and furs worked up by skilful couturiers to rich and elegant effects and even today not much has changed. Jewellery is still the highest form of dress, and it remains the most powerful royal emblem of them all. Before photography and

An openwork gold brooch designed by Prince Albert on the third anniversary of his marriage to Queen Victoria, 1842.

Author’s collection

the dizzy electronic media of today, the monarch’s image was virtually unknown to the populace and jewellery was not just a prop but an absolute essential to the successful stage management of sovereignty.

Wartski’s part in all this, as a jeweller and specialist in Fabergé, meant the firm’s relationship with the British Royal Family has been an enduring honour. In fact, it spans six generations, beginning with King Edward VII and continuing with the Catherine, Princess of Wales, whose wedding ring was made from Welsh gold given by The late Queen.

Of all the luxury trades, jewellery in particular is very personal and inevitably implies a close connection between supplier and patron. During my part in that unique relationship, I have observed the great sense of duty that prevails amongst the senior members of the royal family, which in some cases is derived from a profound religious conviction. For instance, it is little known, and certainly never reported, that Princess Margaret maintained a deep sense of Christian faith. I came to realise this by rather a circuitous route in 1980, during the preparation of my book about Castellani and Giuliano.

Earlier that year, I had heard about the Princess’s small collection of Giuliano jewellery and so I wrote to her private secretary, Lord Napier and Ettrick (1930–2012) to ask if I might see it. I never doubted permission would be granted and when indeed it was, I set off on the bus to Kensington Palace dressed in a slate grey suit and flared trousers, my hair fashionably long and sporting an equally fashionable moustache. The journey gave me plenty of time to imagine what might happen next. I had never visited Christopher Wren’s historic palace before and that, together with the sight of the jewellery that would be laid out for me in an ante-room, was likely to be quite thrilling enough, but I was wrong.

The Princess was a genuinely artistic person with a great sense of curiosity about every aspect of life, particularly music and art. Luckily for me, she wanted to know more about my particular enquiry. On my arrival, her lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Paget took me into the hall past the Princess’s portrait by Pietro Annigoni (1910–88) and then a pair of lacquer torchères in the form of turbaned moors ushered us through double opening mahogany doors into a long reception room, papered in the Princess’s favourite colour: blue. To my great surprise, I was told this was where Her Royal Highness would join me shortly. The heady scent from a vase of hyacinths filled the air. Whilst waiting, I noticed an ottoman chair in the centre of the room but there was nowhere to sit because it was strewn with anthologies of prayers. They were to have a remarkable resonance for me, but more of that later.

Geoffrey Munn, a familiar face on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, is an acknowledged specialist in antique jewellery and has written several books on the subject. Geoffrey is Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries and the Linnean Society and was Fourth Warden of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in London. He is also an authority on the painter Richard Dadd and is a Trustee of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. In 2012, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to charity and in 2016 he was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order by Queen Elizabeth II. He lives in London and Suffolk.