All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  It is questionable whether the collector is ever as interesting as the collection, but it cannot exist without him, and for this reason I cannot escape from these pages. Nevertheless, in an effort to present as fleeting a target as possible, I propose to dispose of a few essential autobiographical confessions at once in the hope that I can be kept firmly in my place thereafter.

  I was raised as an only child in England in a family whose memories of the way things used to be served as a bulwark against the cold wind of present reality, and so from a very early age I was drawn toward a world of make-believe, to the theater, to history, to archaeology, and to a fierce but outdated patriotism. Tales of past British glory, of battles, heroes, kings, and castles, were more important to me than mathematics, football—or even cricket. I was dispatched to my first boarding school at the age of six, and thereafter my thrice yearly return home for the vacation months was met with minimal rejoicing. Under the eye of a succession of housekeepers, I was deterred from making unsuitable friends by being denied the opportunity, and was encouraged to make my own amusements—quietly. Consequently I learned to find pleasure in solitude.

  Early in 1942 we moved to the prewar yachting haven at Salcombe in south Devonshire, where the wild, spray-swept headlands and deserted coves well suited my developing temperament. Local legends told of hidden treasure, of lantern-waving wreckers who had lured eighteenth-century merchantmen onto the rocks, and of smugglers’ caves and of tunnels cut through the cliffs from the beach to a distant village church. Intoxicated by these stories, I spent months searching but found only one tunnel, and that turned out to be well known. Nevertheless, the tales of wrecks and wreckers were often true; there were documentary records to prove it, but more convincing to a treasure-hunting boy was the sight of the occasional Spanish silver coins found in the sand after a winter’s gale. There were cannon, too, salvaged years ago from the 90-gun man-of-war H.M.S. Ramillies that went down near Bolt Head in 1760. Beaten to pieces on the granite rocks, little of the great ship remained to be salvaged, but another four-masted sailing ship, the Herzogin Cecilie, which went aground close by on the Hamstone Rock, was pulled off and towed to a sheltered bay—where she sank (Fig. 3). On a still day, at slack tide, and with the sun at the right angle, her hull and barnacle-covered spars were visible resting on the bottom, and by the hour I would hang over the side of my dinghy, peering down into the water and seeing in her all the romance of Britain’s maritime past. It was not, as it happened, a very remote past; the Herzogin Cecilie was one of the last of the great clipper ships; built at Bremerhaven in 1902, she had been lost in 1936 homeward bound with a cargo of Australian grain. But that made no difference; to me she was the Golden Hind, the Marie Celeste, the Flying Dutchman, anything I wanted her to be.

  Five miles east along the cliffs and clinging to a ledge no more than six or eight feet above normal high water stood the deserted remains of the fishing community of Hallsands (Fig. 4). The roofless and crumbling walls of a handful of cottages were all that was left of a village whose life had abruptly ended on a January night in 1917. A storm of unprecedented ferocity had hurled waves and shingle against the cliffs high over the houses, stripping the roofs and felling the chimneys, pouring thousands of gallons of water into the rooms until doors and windows burst out, and finally carrying more than half the buildings away in the undertow. When the seas subsided only one house remained habitable, and it continued to be lived in by a stubborn survivor until her death in 1964. The old lady’s stories of life at Hallsands in the years before the storm (her father had been landlord of the London Inn) and her memories of the storm itself were as fascinating to me as the legendary seaman’s tales that inspired the youthful Walter Ralegh.

  3. The grain ship Herzogin Cecilie after hitting the Hamstone Rock on the South Devon coast in 1936. She subsequently broke her back and sank in Starehole Bay.

  It was these ruins, the wreck of the Herzogin Cecilie, and a house that I will come to later, which were to be the principal influences directing my future—but not just yet. Realizing that my peculiar antiquarian and unfashionably jingoistic interests best fitted me for a life of dilettantish ease (and knowing that dilettantism and impecuniosity made impossible bedfellows), I took the only remotely appropriate course and volunteered to accept a commission in the Indian Army. Invalided back into the real world in 1945, a series of accidents of no relevance enabled me to escape into the never-never land of the museum profession. In 1949 I joined the staff of London’s Guildhall Museum to assist the curator in the recovery of antiquities revealed during the rebuilding of the bombed city which was then beginning. A week later the curator came down with pneumonia and never returned, and his deputy quit, leaving me to do battle alone against the bulldozers and mechanical grabs for possession of the remains of two thousand years of London’s history. Six years of hard-fought but generally losing battles ensued before I surrendered and accepted an invitation to move to Virginia and take over Colonial Williamsburg’s department of archaeology. Ever since I have remained deep in the eighteenth century—with occasional forays deeper into the seventeenth century and forward into the nineteenth century.

  4. The ruins of Hallsands, a Devonshire village washed away in the great storm of 1917. The sea and the gulls make the only sounds still heard there.

  Since I entered the museum world through the back door, it is, perhaps, no surprise that I am more at home in the storerooms and laboratories than in the ordered sterility of the galleries. I find potsherds as stimulating as intact objects, and the commonplace of yesterday more evocative than its treasures. As a collector I take the same view, being happier searching the dusty shelves of junk shops than being guided by obsequious assistants through the salons of expensive dealers. I find it infinitely more exciting to hunt the unrecognized and the unidentified through the antiquarian thicket than to have my prey handed to me all patched, polished, and packaged, with nothing left to do but pay. I must confess that the pursuit of a bargain has often been as much a necessity as a pleasure, for my desire to acquire has frequently been bludgeoned into whimpering quiescence by the need to remain solvent. Like most people, I dream of being free of such restraints, but as this is unlikely to occur, I argue that fiscal responsibility injects a useful hazard into the game and makes winning that much more delectable.

  Limited not only by price but also by space, most of my collecting has been directed toward relatively small objects, most recently to ceramics in use in British and American homes from the sixteenth century onward. Always my interests have developed in step with my professional career, moving ever later as my “need to know” draws closer to our own era. When my digging days were devoted primarily to Roman London, I was enraptured by the sophistication of classical artifacts and could see no merit in anything surviving from the squalid, medieval world.

  Later, however, I would be moved to see this supposed squalor as a captivating simplicity to which the florid vulgarity of the subsequent British renaissance was no better than whorehouse haberdashery. So it went, step by step through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each alleged lowering of my standards punctuated by anguished cries of “Thus far and no farther!” I almost choked on the Industrial Revolution and swallowed it only by looking beyond its belching chimneys and its grimy terraced dwellings to the clean air of the countryside and the rural craftsmen who continued to do their own thing through most of the nineteenth century. For years I looked with disdain on the development of transfer printing on earthenwares and condemned it as the death knell of the creative potter’s art. Today, the need to understand and evaluate these wares in their own contexts has taught me to see beyond the mechanical multiplication to the source of the engravings, to the hand that held the burin, and to the girl who applied the tissue-papered print to the vessel and whose efforts to conceal the joins revealed that there was still room for human frailty. I confess, nonetheless, that I have yet to coax my Vicar-of-Brayism past the mid-nineteenth century, and even
if I should survive for another thirty years, I doubt whether I can expect to discover aesthetic pleasures in a plastic cup. But while I may balk, others will not; as the supplies of collectable antiques dwindle and as new generations of collectors grow up, so our yesterdays become their ancient history and our rubbish a legacy from another age.

  My choice of pottery as the principal thrust of my collecting stems in part, as I have said, from the ease with which it can be housed, but more from the fact that pottery making is one of man’s oldest artistic achievements; it survives from cultures that bloomed almost at the dawn of history, and through its stylistic and technological evolution one is able to trace the rise and decline of civilizations. Through ceramics we can watch the development of a nation’s taste and, as often as not, the influence of foreigners upon it. I venture to suggest that we can read the character of an era in a single piece of pottery. A mold-decorated Gaulish Samian ware bowl of the second century A.D. (Fig. 5) epitomizes to me the brash, mass-produced provincial Roman culture, the glory of the gods glowing still, but the sharpness of the Augustan Age weakened by repetition, the edges smeared, and the image not as clear as once it was.

  5. Press molding, an early ceramic technique, seen here in the making of a Samian ware bowl attributed to the potter Comitialis of Rheinzabem in about A.D. 160–170. Diameter 9/2 inches.

  6. A London delftware dish, decorated in blue, green, orange, and yellow in a design of some antiquity. About 1640. Diameter 14 inches.

  We can see the England of the first Stuarts in a tin-glazed dish decorated with Adam and Eve in the garden, all in bright yellow, orange, blue, and green; the whole naïve, God-fearing, and not too far removed from the Catholicism of its Italian maiolica predecessors (Fig. 6). The maturity and elegance of mid-eighteenth-century Britain abides in a redware coffee pot adorned in relief with Chinese figures and rococo foliate scrolls, together embodying the lightness and purity of line, the taste for chinoiserie, and the slightly frightening confidence that was England at the end of the Seven Years’ War (Fig. 7).Such a piece is a far cry from the hideous, transfer-printed effusions of leaves and flowers garlanding a molded Gothic pitcher that is my ceramic portrait of Victorian Britain a century later, or the brown-glazed cuspidor which I see as the embodiment of the United States in the same period (Fig. 8). Such fanciful thinking will doubtless be condemned as thoroughly unprofessional, yet the collector who thinks along similar lines can find comfort in the realization that he can do so only after first acquiring a better than passing knowledge of the histories and ceramics of the periods thus portrayed.

  7. Sprig molding was an ancient technique, but it is seen here in its elegant eighteenth-century form, decorating an English redware coffee pot of about 1760. Height 7¼ inches.

  8. An American tortoiseshell-glazed cuspidor, mold-decorated with stars and stripes. Perhaps made in Baltimore in about 1870. Diameter 10½ inches.

  With rare exceptions, hand-thrown ceramic objects, no matter how mundane, display a fluidity and unity of form that plastic clay simply cannot avoid. So, too, does glass in the hands of a craftsman, though it lends itself to being assembled from a miscellany of disparate parts (bowls, stems, knops, cushions, feet, handles, spouts, and bits of fiddlededee) and thus too often falls victim to its creator’s bad judgment (Fig. 9). At its best, the splendor of glass lies in its simplicity, in its transparency, its reflective quality, its cold winter sparkle, and its strength in the guise of fragility. For me, however, glass remains aloof, evoking more respect than affection, and perhaps for this reason my interest in it has largely been directed toward wine bottles whose dark and often opaque colors pay no more than lip service to the material’s potential. Indeed, I have never collected bottles as glass, but simply as bottles. Like household crockery, they evolved with the passing years, and to the collector seeking an entree to the past, or to the archaeologist attempting to determine where he is in time as he digs into the ground, bottles are signposts most clearly marked (Fig. 10).

  When I first became interested in bottles in the early 1950s, they were not widely collected. In England the few people who were collecting them were predominantly men in the wine trade, and in America they were sought by collectors with a fairly scholarly enthusiasm for relics of the early American glass industry. Today, bottle collecting has become one of the United States’s most popular hobbies, and an early Coca-Cola is as prized as a sealed Piermont Water of the mid-eighteenth century is in Britain. A Dr. Davenport’s Snake Root or a Bulmer’s Bitters of the 1870s can aspire to the ultimate compliment of being copied for the benefit of connoisseurs unable to secure an original. The British have yet to come as far, and most collectors confine themselves to wine bottles; but as supplies shrink and prices escalate, it may not be too long before venerable milk bottles will be offered in the sale catalogues of Sotheby’s and Christie’s! If that prospect seems to tax credulity, it is worth noting that in the United States there already is a National Milk Bottle Collectors’ Club colloquially known among its members as MOO—Milkbottles Only Organization! Given the smallest encouragement, a sense of competition, and a club to belong to, people will collect just about anything.

  9. Ancient glassblowers were given to excesses. A green glass vase or unguentarium; probably from Syria, third to fourth century A.D. Height 7½ inches.

  10. English wine bottles being excavated from a tavern site in Williamsburg, Virginia. The bottles were buried in about 1745–50.

  TWO

  To Have and to Hold

  WHY DO YOU COLLECT?” I asked the large lady in the small red dress at an Antiques Forum cocktail party.

  “Have a sausage,” she replied. “Oriental Lowestoft. We collect Oriental Lowestoft. My husband just loves porcelain. We collect it all the time.”

  “Why?” I persisted.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you collect porcelain?”

  “Why does anybody collect anything?”

  “Ah,” I replied, chewing on my sausage.

  I realize that this was not one of the world’s more profound conversations, but it was typical of the responses I have elicited to the apparently simple question, Why collect? It is generally received first with jaw-sagging surprise and then, when no neat answer leaps trippingly on the tongue, with a kind of dismayed and defensive belligerence. Why is this idiot asking such a question? In fact, of course, there are many possible answers, the simplest being that collecting is a fundamental human instinct, and everybody knows that instincts are there—they need no explaining. By adopting that stance we can conveniently avoid the glum truth that just as many instincts are singularly unattractive, so the urge to collect is not one of our better traits. If it is any consolation, it is not ours alone; we share it with magpies, crows (indeed with all the Corvidae), with squirrels, pack rats, dogs, and even with an archaeologically oriented groundhog of my acquaintance. Though we all like shiny things, the human animal does not confine his evaluation of an object’s desirability to the quality of its reflective surface. We have the advantage over the aluminum-foil collecting crow in that, for us, paper money shines as brightly as silver or gold.

  There can be no denying that value has much to do with the collecting instinct, for once two people want the same object it acquires a commercial price. Here it is that we differ from our animal cousins; they have no means of obtaining their neighbors’ treasures short of theft or mayhem. We first try trading. Competition is a basic element of the collector’s makeup, and the competitive spirit, as everyone knows, is thoroughly praiseworthy and should be fostered in every contributing member of society from Cub Scouts and baton-twirling moppets to football-playing assassins. In the world of collecting, this healthy philosophy is often tastefully interpreted as “screwing the dealer.” It is, fortunately, a sufficiently reciprocal pursuit as to retain the essential element of sportsmanship.

  Sport and sportsmanship, like collecting, are words capable of diverse interpretation. Smiting a diminutive white ball a
nd riding after it in a small vehicle to see where it went (golf is such good exercise) is sport of a sort; so is sitting in a stick hut on a marsh making oral sexual advances to passing ducks. The sporting spirit of the collector is equally free and quite as bizarre. It is stimulated by greed, by love, by patriotism, by loneliness, even by madness—though the madness comes later as the collection takes command of the collector. I am not thinking of the little madnesses we display in hoarding pieces of string, collecting hotel match folders, or bringing home junk from trips to the beach. I am referring to the lunacy that will allow a collector to starve rather than sell his treasures, or to live in utter squalor so as to be able to buy things of beauty. It is the same mania that makes the collector so fearful for the safety of his possessions that he will lock them, and himself, away behind high walls and shuttered windows, eschewing almost all contact with the thieving and avaricious world outside. Through inanimate objects he finds the stimulation that the normal intercourse of life fails to provide; in short, either deliberately or through disuse, he loses touch with reality. Taken to its ultimate power, collectomania can transform one into Napoleon, Noah, or Queen Victoria.