The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

IN 1987, MRS BATA, FOUNDER of the Bata Shoe Museum, received a phone call from Sotheby’s in London. She tells me, ‘They had a very rare pair of slap-soled shoes from the mid-1500s, supposedly owned by Queen Elizabeth I. They asked whether I would be interested to view them. Of course I was, and on my next trip to London I made a special appointment to examine these shoes.’

  She was shown a large nineteenth-century glass case ‘with a pair of magnificent slap-soled high-heeled ladies’ shoes inside. They had an engraved bronze sign stating that they had belonged to Queen Elizabeth I.’

  Slap-soled shoes were a high-heeled fashion of the seventeenth century. When the heel was first introduced into western dress at the end of the sixteenth century men, who were the first to wear the new style, often slipped their heeled footwear into a pair of flat-soled mules so that their heels wouldn’t sink into the mud. When the mules and heels were worn together they made a ‘slap slap slap’ sound when the wearer walked. When women fancied a pair of these shoes too, a fashion began for a style where the heels of their shoes were affixed to the soles of the mules so that they could pad around noiselessly. Even though the shoes no longer slapped as they walked, the name stuck.

  Mrs Bata and her museum specialists decided to buy the shoes and investigate the story behind them. They found out that the shoes were more than likely made in Italy, for indoor wear only, as a gift for Frances Walsingham (or a member of her family). Walsingham (1569–1631), was a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth I. Her father was Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s most trusted advisor. He was head of her spy network, and was responsible for foiling a number of assassination attempts on the queen, orchestrated by angry Catholics. Mrs Bata told me she thinks Frances Walshingham would have worn the slippers to a wedding or other special occasion.

  The shoes are made from cream-coloured kid leather, elaborately decorated with gold and silver braid, sequins and pink ribbon trims and once had big ribbon rosettes on the instep. They are a really extravagant pair of slap-soles and among the last to be made in the style. Since buying them, the museum has collected more and more, but these are the most richly decorated.

  Frances Walsingham had three husbands. The first was Sir Philip Sidney, a soldier, courtier and poet whom she married in 1583 but who died three years later. In 1590, she married Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Queen Elizabeth was very fond of Robert and so was not pleased about the match. Robert was executed in 1601. Frances’s third husband was Richard de Burgh, Earl of Clanricarde and St Albans. They had two children. The shoes remained in the family of Robert Devereux until they were handed to Sotheby’s to auction and Mrs Bata decided to buy them.

  Although they are a part of her museum’s collection, Mrs Bata keeps them under lock and key, not in her museum in Canada, but in England, because they are a part of England’s cultural heritage so they can’t leave the country for long. When she first bought the shoes, she sent them to Hampton Court for conservation, and since then they have appeared in major exhibitions in the museum in Toronto, or been kept in a safe in England.

  When I visited the Bata Shoe Museum’s archives in Toronto, the shoes happened to be there, in the stores, in an archival box, as they had just been on display. But they were about to be shipped back home.

  The archives are filled with the collection of shoes put together by Mrs Bata. She has so many that only four per cent can ever go on display at one time. Her background is in architecture. She married into the Bata family, who make shoes. If you’ve ever been to India, you’ll see Bata shoes being sold everywhere: flip-flops, plastic shoes – all styles. Bata’s flip-flop, at the time of its launch, was the most affordable shoe ever sold and became, for many, the first shoe they had ever worn.

  Shoes began to intrigue Mrs Bata; she wondered ‘why people with the same feet wear totally different things on them’. She began collecting – in China, Japan and the Arctic – and, by the 1980s, she had a huge collection. People asked to see them, so she started to hold little exhibitions and, in 1995, built the museum. Today the museum has the largest collection of shoes in the world.

  I asked Mrs Bata what her favourites were. ‘Oh, whatever the last shoes to come in were,’ she told me. ‘At the moment I have someone collecting shoes in Mongolia, along the old Silk Road. She’s going into Buddhist monasteries, buying shoes and filming the people who made them, so that we have a record of traditional shoe-making techniques in the area.’

  I wanted to know what shoes Mrs Bata likes to wear. ‘I used to wear only heels and elegant shoes, but now I wear loafers for comfort, except when Pm going to a cocktail party,’ she laughed. If she wanted, she could take her pick from every type of shoe and boot in the world, just from the ones stored in the basement of her museum.

  The rooms filled with footwear make a colourful, visual feast. One room is lined with Native American shoes, which are stored according to their geographic position, from South to North America. At the southern end of the room there are shelves full of moccasins and, further along the room, reflecting the cooler climate further north, ankle boots become the norm until, right up the far end, there are rows of seal, salmon and polar bear boots from Alaska. These have to be kept at 16°C (60.8°F): any colder and they would become brittle; any warmer and they’d go mouldy. As well as the boots, there are lots of straw insoles that go inside them.

  As well as ethnographically interesting shoes, the archive also contains pieces of shoe history. It contains a wooden pair of sandals made in Egypt in 2500 BC, Napoleon’s socks, Nelson’s shoe buckles and a letter written by Wellington in April 1815 ordering a pair of (Wellington) boots. The handwritten, signed letter reads: ‘Mr Hoby – The last boots you sent me were still too small in the calf of the leg & about an inch and a half too short on the leg. Send me two pair more altered as I have above directed. Your most faithful sevt. Wellington.’ It is dated Brussels, 11 April 1815. The Battle of Waterloo took place in June of that year.

  Perhaps the most unexpected shoes in the collection are the ones that were made for the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010. I didn’t know this, but a limited edition of shoes was quickly made for them, shoes that could be rolled up and sent down into the mine. Mrs Bata collected a pair to go in her vast museum storage facility.

  She explained how her collection all fits together. ‘On the surface, shoes are an indication of personal taste and style, but a closer examination yields a different picture. If you look at the development of shoes chronologically, you notice the subtlest shifts in a society’s attitudes and values. Footwear illustrates entire ways of life, indicating the climate, religions, professions, attitudes to gender and social status of different cultures through the ages.’ She concludes: ‘Whether they are objects of beauty or instruments of torture, shoes are surely signs of the times.’

  [The slap-soled shoes]

  [Nelson’s shoe buckles]

  Another piece of shoe history stored at the Bata Museum.

  [A letter handwritten by Wellington (1796–1852)]

  He wrote this letter ordering a pair of (Wellington) boots, a few months before the Battle of Waterloo.

  IN 1671, COLONEL THOMAS BLOOD (1618–80) used this dagger, now stored in the archives of the Tower of London, to steal the Crown Jewels. The aptly named Blood made friends with the elderly Keeper of the Jewels, Talbot Edwards, by posing as a wealthy man who was offering his (non-existent) nephew as a husband for Edwards’s daughter.

  Edwards kindly invited Blood to come over and take a look at the Crown Jewels. Blood accepted the invitation and took along his son, and a Mr Perod. He carried a cane, inside of which he had hidden this dagger. When Edwards let the threesome in, they tied him up, knocked him out and stabbed him. Then they leapt into the vault containing England’s Crown Jewels.

  Blood squashed the Imperial State Crown – by bashing it with a mallet – to make it easier to hide underneath his cloak. His son started sawing the Royal Sceptre in half and Perod stuck the Orb down his breeches. Just a
s they were about to make a get-away with as many jewels as they could possibly carry, Edwards’s son popped over to his father’s quarters in the Tower, found him in a terrible state and raised the alarm. Blood pulled a gun but didn’t manage to get away with his jewels. This dagger was taken off him and he was arrested. He and his son were imprisoned in the Tower.

  Strangely enough, Blood requested an audience with King Charles II with no one else allowed in the room. The king granted his wish. Blood was pardoned, with no punishment, and instead was offered a pension. What did he say to get himself off the hook? We will never know.

  The Crown Jewels are kept in cases, guarded by men with guns. Meanwhile, the dagger that was used in the attempt to nick the lot is in the Royal Armouries archive. It is a ballock dagger; its name comes from the hilt’s phallic appearance. It is dated to 1620 and was made in England or Scotland. It isn’t on display in the Tower of London museum, as no one is quite sure who owns it. It came to the Tower Armouries in 1926, as a gift from the Royal Literary Fund, who were given it by Thomas Newton, a relative of Sir Isaac Newton. The Tower Armouries don’t exhibit it because they figure they have a better chance of keeping it if it’s tucked away on a shelf in storage rather than out on display where other departments might notice it.

  To see it, I was taken up a winding staircase within the Tower. It wasn’t really my kind of place: there were a lot of guns, some belonging to Henry VIII, a jousting kit and a mummified cat that used to be kept inside the roof of the Tower. I found a pile of medieval castle decorations made entirely out of scrap pieces of weapons – bullets, knives and swords. They aren’t displayed any more at the museum, as they are out of fashion at the moment among the curators. There was one I liked, a snake made solely from bullets, but I wouldn’t put it up at home …

  What interests me about the Tower, not being so keen on weapons and prisons, is that for over 600 years it was home to a royal menagerie. Founded by King John in the early 1200s, it filled up with exotic animals given as royal gifts for the entertainment and curiosity of the court. The first animals to arrive were lions, an elephant and a polar bear, which would hunt for fish in the River Thames. Later came tigers, kangaroos and ostriches.

  The menagerie was as big a tourist attraction at its height as the Crown Jewels are today. However, it closed in 1835, as the Duke of Wellington couldn’t stand the smell and the animals in the Tower became the first animals in London Zoo, in Regent’s Park.

  The skulls of two male Barbary lions from North Africa, once kept as royal pets and now an extinct subspecies, were found in the moat surrounding the Tower of London. They have been carbon dated, one to 1280–1385, and the other to 1420–80, making them the first lions to live in Britain since the Ice Age. The skulls are in the archives of the Natural History Museum in London.

  I also saw a stuffed Barbary lion in the vaults of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. It’s not on display because it’s in an unnatural, quite camp pose – paw lifted off the ground – unbecoming of a ferocious lion. It’s mane runs half way along its body and it has a golden halo around its face. The lion is part of a genetic study called The Barbary Lion Project which is trying to work out the genetic code of the species and then use living lions, in zoos, which are genetically close to the Barbary lion, to selectively breed back the species.

  Nowadays, the Tower of London’s most famous animals are the ravens. ‘If the ravens leave the Tower, the kingdom will fall…’ is the old superstition. However, the earliest reference to a raven in the Tower dates back only to 1885 (a picture in Pictorial World newspaper). Today, seven ravens (including Baldrick and Marley) are kept at the Tower. They each have a wing clipped to ensure they can’t fly far, although one – Grog – made it as far as a pub in the East End in 1981 on foot – or claw. All but one of the Tower’s ravens died from stress during the Blitz. A piece of the bomb that fell on the Tower of London during the Blitz is in the Royal Armouries archive beside Blood’s dagger.

  [Blood’s dagger]

  The dagger is kept in the Royal Armouries archive. It is a ballock dagger; its name comes from the hilt’s phallic appearance. It is dated to 1620 and was made in England or Scotland. It isn’t on display in the Tower of London museum, as no one is quite sure who owns it.

  [The menagerie]

  This was as big a tourist attraction at its height as the Crown Jewels are today. However, it closed in 1835, as the Duke of Wellington couldn’t stand the smell, and the animals in the Tower became the first animals in London Zoo.

  THEY TOOK AN ENORMOUS PILE of rubble made up of fragments of 3,000-year-old sculptures and laid it out on a warehouse floor. Nine years later, they had completed the puzzle and 30 magical sculptures of scorpion-men, griffins, gods and goddesses which once adorned a great palace were brought back to life.

  The sculptures were built in what is now Syria at the beginning of the first millennium BC. They stood inside and guarded the gates of the palace, which was built by Kapara, an Aramaean ruler in an area now known as Guzana.

  In 1899, Max von Oppenheim, a banker’s son from Cologne (1860— 1946), was working as a diplomat in Cairo. He was taken by a Bedouin guide to a mound the locals called Tell Halaf. He started to excavate the site and immediately found a wall with relief slabs and the remains of great sculptures. He had stumbled across the ancient palace, covered over by the sands of time.

  In 1910, he left his job and started excavating the site in earnest. Over the years – interrupted by the First World War – sculptures, pottery, inscriptions and colourful reliefs appeared out of the earth.

  Uncovering the treasure cost Oppenheim a fortune. He gave some of the sculptures and other finds to a museum he set up in Aleppo, and brought the rest to Berlin. The Pergamon Museum could not afford the price he was asking, so he opened his own Tell Halaf museum in Charlottenburg, Berlin, on 15 July 1930, his birthday.

  Samuel Beckett visited, as did Agatha Christie. Oppenheim showed her and her archaeologist husband around. She wrote in her diary that he stopped during the tour to stroke his enthroned goddess’ sculpture, cooing, Ah, my beautiful Venus.’ He was so fond of this sculpture the excavation team nicknamed her his ‘bride’. Agatha got museum legs during the trip: ‘there was nowhere to sit down. My interest, at first acute, flagged, and finally died down completely.’ She was there for five hours.

  When the Second World War broke out, museums in Berlin generally moved their collections to safe storage vaults. The Tell Halaf sculptures were too big to move and they had to take their chances with the civilian population. In November 1943, the museum suffered a direct hit. Everything made from limestone, including reliefs that showed the colours of the Tell Halaf palace, was utterly destroyed. The sculptures were made of basalt. They broke apart, and when fire hoses sprayed water on to the baking, damaged statues, they shattered into thousands of pieces, seemingly beyond repair.

  ‘Chin up! Bon courage! And don’t lose your sense of humour!’ This was the motto of Max von Oppenheim. He hoped the fragments could be gathered up and taken to the National Museum of Berlin and there, eventually, reassembled. ‘But what a horrendous task that would be,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘given that this collection has been smashed to smithereens. What I want most of all, of course, is to save the great enthroned goddess.’ That was the one he had stroked when showing Agatha Christie around. He died three years later, in 1946, never knowing that his dream would eventually be realized.

  Throughout the Cold War, the pieces of sculpture were stored in the vaults of the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin. Lutz Martin, who is now the curator of the Near East collection at the Pergamon, visited as a student and thought there was no way to reconstruct them. Little did he know he would one day become their curator and spend nine years proving his student self wrong.

  I met him at the Pergamon Museum. We jumped on a train out to the warehouse in Friedrichshagen where the fragments of rock were laid out on the floor and the sculptures were slowly rebuilt. Here they re
main, in storage.

  We hopped off the train half an hour later and walked along a peaceful suburban street to the warehouse. Lutz bumped into a friend who was cycling along the road. He knows a lot of people around here, as he has been coming for nearly a decade, checking up on the progress of his sculptures. We came to the warehouse. It was just off the street, surrounded by trees. The air was filled with birdsong. There was nobody inside, so we let ourselves in.

  Dappled sunlight streamed through the tall windows of the warehouse, bathing the majestic gods and mythical creatures. I spotted the ‘enthroned goddess’, the love of Oppenheim’s life. She looks like a work of ancient Cubism, sitting upon her throne. Once, she would have held an offering bowl in her hand, in which the Aramaean people put gifts for the dead. Beside the goddess is the weather god, Teshub. He was head of the pantheon of gods in Tell Halaf.

  The Aramaean gods lived in families, like humans. In the palace, Teshub would have stood upon a bull, with his wife, the sun goddess, and their son beside him, standing on lions. One of these lions was the first piece to be reconstructed, as it had the largest fragments of all the exploded sculptures. Beside the lions stands a wonderful, big-beaked griffin, made up of 2,600 fragments of broken basalt, and two scorpion-men who once guarded the gateway to the palace.

  Teshub looks a little forlorn these days. He is stored in two halves. His head and chest are one half, his body and legs the other. The halves are next to each other, placed on wooden platforms and secured in place by blue straps. It’s the best way to store him for now. It’s as if he is resting. After all those years of being worshipped each day, in the language that Christ spoke, being asked to bring good weather, he spent millennia in the ground. Then, he was dug up, brought to Germany, bombed, reduced to rubble and, at last, restored. These statues are real survivors.