All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  Wars, natural attrition, the proliferation of transatlantic collectors with money in their pockets, and the expanding interests of well-endowed foreign museums have taken a tremendous toll of Britain’s collectable objects. Although, quantitatively, the museums take little of the loot, what they do buy is generally the best, and in doing so they remove the pieces from the market indefinitely. The result of all this has been a steady increase in prices as demand exceeds supply. Record salesroom bids make headlines in London and New York, causing those who own remotely comparable objects considerable satisfaction. The effect on the “have-not-who-wish-they-hads” is distinctly less stimulating, deterring them from risking the humiliation of doing more than breathing on the windows of quality antique shops.

  In an effort to beguile the nervous small collector, British dealers are at pains to point out that while the pound has dwindled to a quarter of its value in the past thirty years, rising salaries have taken up the slack. Thus, an object that sold for £50 immediately before the Second World War can now command £200 without having increased either in price or value. Such consoling generalizations, however, do not take into consideration the all-important fact that popularity fluctuates and that some objects that were highly desirable in 1939 are not as sought after today, and therefore their prices have not marched as closely in step with inflation as have those of items whose popular appeal came later. Thus, for example, the still soaring enthusiasm for bottle collecting has had an amazing effect on the market. A bottle for which I paid less than $4 in 1952 was paralleled by another sold at Sotheby’s in 1968 for twenty-six times that figure, while in 1972 a slightly later example was offered to me at a figure close to $300. Yet another bottle, this one of no great importance, was bought in London for less than $10 but increased its price twelve times by simply crossing the Atlantic. In spite of dealers’ assurances to the contrary, it is prices such as these that are sidelining the less wealthy collector or thrusting him into new and as yet unexplored or exploited fields. Consequently, our interpretation of the collectors’ vocabulary (antique, early, desirable, important, significant, rare) is forever being modified downward, a descent reflected by the decision of the United States Treasury to change its customs definition of an antique from an item made before 1830 to one that is a mere hundred years old. Nowadays, such things as Victorian and later patent medicine bottles, which a few years ago were thrown out with the junk, are considered “collectors’ items,” and the connoisseurs of American glass insulators are as enthusiastic hunters as those who once pursued French paperweights.

  Changing interests are fostered, too, by lack of space. Homes are smaller than they used to be, particularly for urban people, and many a would-be furniture buff can be deterred as effectively by square footage problems as by an ailing bank balance. Small furniture, like oak joint stools (such cute side tables), has climbed in price much faster than larger pieces of comparable date and better quality. How many of us know just where to put an eighteen-foot Elizabethan refectory table? Spatial limitations may also have something to do with a growing interest in such small “collectables” as pot lids, card cases, mustache cups, infants’ mugs, buttons, tobacco tokens, and scores of other odds and ends which until a few years ago were studiously ignored.

  These small objects are not only easy to house but have the advantage of being relatively easy to find. As every novice collector knows, the one thing he cannot abide is being unable to find whatever it is he is after. Thus, at the outset at least, age and rarity are less important than availability. Alas, this is another factor leading to the drying of the wells—and to the burgeoning manufacture of reproductions, fakes, and unabashedly modern and totally worthless objects designed specifically for the “collector market.”

  Here and there, unaffected by fashion or the desire to compete, there still lurk a few descendants of the Tradescants, eccentrically collecting into their arks whatever pleases them, excites their curiosity, provokes their wonder, stirs their memory, or titillates their imagination. Though lacking relics of the Great Roc, the griffin, dodo, and unicorn, and bereft of an Abyssinian lady’s breeches, their cabinets might yet arouse the avarice of a latter-day Ashmole. One wonders, for example, how he would respond to the following:

  A vase of glass to hold a Roman’s tears.

  An ancient urn containing cremated human bones, and a red dish to cover it withall.

  Three human hands from Egyptian mummies most marvelously preserved, and in a leather box contained.

  Part of a fossilized worm.

  A baby’s leather shoe from the time of the Virgin Queen.

  A likeness of King Charles the Second of blessed memory, done in oils in his lifetime.

  A wine bottle made for Ralph Wormeley, Gent, of Jamestown in Virginia, before 1652.

  Another of about 1660 of remarkable small size, made for WH at the sign of the Rose, and found in Mrs. Ansty-Perks’s garden at Breaston, Derbyshire.

  A bottle filled with beer, found in the sea off Sandwich, and believed lost aboard a vessel wrecked in the Great Storm of 1703.

  Three pewter coins minted in the reign of King James the Second for use in the American plantations, but found in the River Thames at Billingsgate.

  The notebook of a pornographic poet dated 1718, hidden behind a mantel in a house in Smith Street, Westminster—and found.

  Listed out of context, these objects appear to be less a collection than the contents of an idiot’s mind. The truth, however, is that they are indeed part of a collection. I have described them in the language of the Musaeum Tradescantianum to make a point, namely that rarities and oddities still hold the power to intrigue—regardless of more than three centuries of education and enlightenment. Furthermore, the objects listed do have something in common; they reflect the changing interests, adventures, and maturing of a single collector. They are, of course, my own.

  FOUR

  In Search of Bald Sextons

  FROM THE VERY FIRST TIME that I held an ancient artifact in my hand (it was an Athenian coin given to me by an old Greek lady whose long-dead husband, so she claimed, returned to visit her on wet days), I have remained angrily frustrated by my inability to know what an object has known or to see what it has seen. It was a frustration that took on a new importance on my first day as the Corporation of London’s only archaeologist, and my first encounter with someone who had known the answers to the questions I was asking (Fig. 21). It was a cold, wet Sunday in December, 1949; the promised volunteer helpers had failed to show up, and I was alone in the midst of a vast construction site, working in drizzling rain to uncover the bones of a Londoner who had died in the sacking of the city during the Boudiccan Rebellion of A.D. 61.

  Although I had been given the awesome responsibility of salvaging two thousand years of London history before it was swept away in the postwar rebuilding, I was the greenest archaeologist who ever held a trowel. I did not know enough to tell whether I was looking at the skeleton of a man or a woman, and I do not recall whether I ever found out; but I shall always remember peering into that rain-soaked face and silently asking, Who were you? What were the last sights you saw and the last sounds you heard? What might we have had in common?

  The City of London was virtually uninhabited at weekends, and on that miserable day there was hardly a sound to be heard, save for the occasional mournful hooting of tugs on the river and the steady patter of rain in the puddles. All around me the scorched red clay of the burned Roman town was being eroded by the rain, reddening the water as it ran down into the gravel below, and reminding me of the thousands of Londoners slaughtered in what had been one of history’s most violent acts of retribution. The bones of this victim (if that was what they were) lay as I might have found them two years after burial; the succeeding years had changed nothing—except for the invisible carbon 14 and fluorine content of the bones. I was intrigued by the thought that for the person whose mind had inhabited that skull, time had ended in A.D. 61, but for me it would not
begin until 1927, and so for the two of us the intervening 1,866 years did not exist. Perhaps by means of controllable retrocognition man will eventually find a way of bridging time, but until he does, conscious imagination remains our only vehicle, a time machine powered by the images and artifacts that the past has left in its wake.

  Who has eaten at this table or sat on that chair? What kind of man was he who blew this bottle or who decorated that dish? What was he thinking about as he worked: his God, his children, his neighbor’s wife? Here is a wine glass, a thing of fragile, colorless beauty, yet strong enough to have survived the centuries. How? Where? What role did it play—making weak men brave, strong men weak, happy men sad, or sad men merry? We can only guess; but in doing so the glass ceases to be a mere artifact, instead it becomes a fragment of life.

  Fascinated as I am by the elusiveness of time, it is only natural that I should find clocks intriguing. No collector’s home should be without at least one antique clock, preferably made in or before the period that most interests him—always supposing, of course, that he is not a collector of classical antiquities. There is something tremendously satisfying, almost hypnotic, about the sound of a ticking clock stoically commenting on the passage of one’s own life just as it has through the lifetimes of its previous owners. The tall-cased grandfather varieties of the late seventeenth century usually have a small window in the door through which we can watch their enameled pendulums swinging back and forth—an even more mesmerizing experience. Although my own tall case clock has such a pendulum, the case was not made until the 1740s and so lacks the window, and therefore I am denied the pleasure of peering into grandpa’s navel. It is, however, the tick that entrances, representing as it does one of the few sounds that can claim to have survived unchanged through the centuries. Today, of course, the preservation of sound poses no problem; we transfer it to discs or to tapes, and can expect our voices to be heard a thousand years hence—providing there is someone left to listen.

  It is true that many musical instruments have survived from earlier centuries, but with the exception of such mechanical devices as musical boxes and barrel organs they do not play themselves and therefore their sounds are controlled in large measure by the musicians; furthermore, the instruments have usually been restrung, reskinned, or rereeded. An argumentative reader may contend that natural sounds have remained the same—dogs still bark as they did, birds still sing, crickets chirp, and wind still whistles. But to the true historical audiophile (there must be such people somewhere) these are all modern copies. Clocks, on the other hand, tick and chime just as they did when first made. I submit, therefore, that there can be few more satisfying mental exercises than sitting beside the light and warmth of a log fire on a winter’s night (preferably with port in hand) simply listening to the voice of a clock and trying to imagine the part it may have played in the great moments of history.

  Figure 22 shows a clock far less elegant than the long-case patriarchs of the eighteenth century, yet with its bell, chain, and weight defiantly exposed, it has appreciably more character. Equipped with but one hand, as were most lantern clocks made before the 1670s, its dial reminds us that it was the work of “Edward Norris at ye [Crossed Keys] in Bethlehem.” The keys are pictorially rendered, not spelled out, and refer to the sign by which Norris’s shop was identified. Clearly it was located in the vicinity of London’s Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane (better known as Bedlam), but the use of the crossed-keys symbol is less readily explained. Norris was not the only London clockmaker to use it, for there is another rather similar lantern clock in the Science Museum inscribed “Thomas Kniston at the Cross Keyes at Lothbury.” As Saint Peter and his crossed keys were adopted as the patron and symbol of London’s locksmiths, it is possible that early clockmakers also made locks, or vice versa. Although this is typical of the kind of puzzle that keeps a collector on his toes, my point is that this relatively simple and unsophisticated clock has survived in working order for three hundred years. It has outlived kings and emperors; it has seen the morning glory and the evening twilight of the British Empire; it ticked on unmoved while its English owners feared lest their homes would be invaded by the Dutch, the Spaniards, the French, and the Germans, and now as an immigrant to Virginia its measured voice competes with the strident heralds of disaster heard each day on American radio and television. It is housed within sight of historic Jamestown Island, and within musket’s sound of Green Spring battlefield (where, in 1781, Britain won her last small victory before the final humiliation at Yorktown), and I often wonder whose hands wound the clock through the years of the American Revolution—and where the winder’s sympathies lay.

  21. The first of London’s bombed sites to be developed after the Second World War. To the right can be seen the church of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, which survived the German blitz. Below, the bending figure facing the dirt bank is trying to salvage painted wall plaster from the buried remains of a second-century Roman building. The human skeleton mentioned in the text had been found where the cement dispenser is standing.

  22. A brass lantern clock made by Edward Norris of London who became a freeman of the Clockmakers’ Company in 1658 and its Master in 1686. Height 15 inches.

  The Norris clock’s bell was cracked when I bought it, and there is no knowing to what degree the tone has been altered in the repairing of it. Nevertheless, suspended openly above the movement, the old bell chimes out the hours with bold disregard for whatever embarrassing voice change it may have suffered. You will appreciate, no doubt, that one does not have to be a horologist (and probably cannot be) to appreciate a clock in this way. Indeed, it is a safe bet that such people would be horrified at the idea of thinking of a clock as a dream machine rather than as an ingenious assemblage of escapements, cogs, wheels, and whatnots. They probably would be equally scornful of Shakespeare’s description of time as “the clock-setter, that bald sexton.”1

  Clock bells are by no means the only available source of antique tintinnabulation, and bells, as such, have a pleasurable and practical place in any antique collector’s home. Those of us who have had the depressing experience of visiting houses with electric chiming doorbells must know that there has to be a more dignified method of enabling us to announce our arrival. A knocker, be it of iron or brass, has the dignity, but one has to be sure that the door and the house can take it. A return to the jangling, wired spring-bells of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be an amusing alternative, but if the wires are to be hidden (as they were intended to be), it is an idea best left until major repairs are afoot or a new house is on the drawing board. I should add, too, that hanging such a spring-bell in the vicinity of the front door may be convenient and cute, but it is short on authenticity. Although resembling the bells used over shop doors, the domestic variety was not intended to be heard by the visitor; it was housed deep in the bowels of the building in earshot only of the servants.

  Spring-bells attached to wire pulls were commonly used in uncommon English homes by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and at least one rigger of such bells was plying his trade in Philadelphia as early as 1756. Nevertheless, not all fashionable American residences aspired to such campanological devices, and in 1800 Mrs. John Adams complained that in the executive mansion (not yet dubbed the White House) “Bells are wholly wanting, not one single one hung through the whole house.”2 By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, wired bells were common in town houses of quite modest proportions, the tones differing to let the servants know in which room the knob or cord was being pulled. Similar bells were hung on the outsides of houses in the deep South, usually on the wall closest to the kitchen or the quarters for domestic slaves. Much bigger bells, mounted in miniature belfries, were often employed to advise the field hands of meal breaks and the day’s end. Not many people have a use for such large bells today; but for anyone with a sizable garden some kind of bell is a much more attractive means of summoning the family than standing at the doo
r and yelling “Chow up!” or “Henry, it’s for you!” Old wooden-handled school bells are ideal for this purpose, and although most of those to be found in antique shops are none too ancient, they have changed so little over the years that accurate dating is almost impossible. The principal clues are to be found inside the barrel (the bell-shaped part); a cast rather than a wrought-iron clapper is a bad sign, and so is a machine-made wire shaft. On the other hand, considerable wear at any point where the clapper can be made to touch the inside of the barrel is evidence of much, if not long usage.

  For the would-be bell fancier who lacks a garden but has a maid, there are small silver or plated hand bells that tinkled imperiously from countless Victorian drawing rooms. To my coarse ear, however, they sound prissily pretentious. Bells of similar shape and materials were often hung in frames above the withers of wagon horses or attached to the yokes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oxen. Commonly called latten bells because most of them were of plated brass, these framed or boxed bells were both decorative and functional, serving to warn oncoming traffic of their approach along narrow, winding lanes.