Bruce Chatwin (34 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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Six months before he died, on 27 August 1988, Bruce focused his rage against Wilson and Hewett. He claimed to have resigned from Sotheby’s because he was being forced by them to sell the Pitt-Rivers collection “fraudulently” to America.
This was the tale he might have written, in Cary Welch’s words “a nasty novel to undo the wretched crook of the ‘ahtworld’”.
The deal involving the Pitt-Rivers museum in Farnham is labyrinthine and mired in secrecy. The truth of its dispersal stays out of reach, spread around the world with the contents of a miraculous collection. The story involves the museum, the tight circle of gentlemanly rogues of which Bruce had become a part, and the descendants of a Victorian nutter, Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.
Pitt-Rivers is respected as the father of modern archaeology. He established a methodology, insisted on accurate records and brought to his find-spots the same scientific analysis as when examining the 477 men and officers of the 2nd Royal Surrey Militia: “all the men were measured naked, except the officers”. A cold man, prone to violence, he once slashed his daughter’s face with a riding crop. Unmoved when she was killed by lightning on her honeymoon, he reserved his emotions for Egyptian boomerangs, Benin bronzes and the scale models of his digs. He spent his fortune on two ethnographic collections. The most famous he endowed to the University of Oxford as a teaching museum. From 1881, he housed some of his most treasured pieces in a private museum near his Dorset home. Bruce had been on his way to this museum with Digby-Jones when he suffered his nervous collapse.
The Farnham collection, housed in a converted farmhouse school for gypsies, was varied and remarkable. Intended for pottery, locks and keys, it grew to embrace ethnographic works from West Africa and the Pacific. Outstanding were the contents of Room Nine: 240 works of art from Benin retrieved as bounty by British troops during an expedition in February 1897.
The bronze plaques, heads and figures ranged from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The rituals behind them would find an outlet in
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
For the present, these Benin bronzes, the largest collection in private hands, were the nub of Bruce’s quarrel with Sotheby’s.
By the time he came to know the museum, ownership of the collection had passed to the General’s grandson, an ethnologist of Fascist sensibilities who had worked in the South Seas. Captain George Pitt-Rivers possessed the best command of invective of anyone Bruce had met and was, of all the collectors he dealt with, the oddest. Interned in Brixton in 1940 for his political beliefs, Captain George was a convinced Mosleyite who disciplined his son Julian – “because I’d fought on the wrong side in the war, i.e. against Hitler.” He is said to have cut out arrows in his cornfields to guide Goering’s Luftwaffe and everything in his house at Hinton St Mary was German, including his car and his dog. His sexual habits were mysterious, but a nurse with whom he ran off to Genoa reported them as “rather terrifying”. He was, on the other hand, passionately anti-homosexual. When his eldest son Michael was imprisoned for the offence in 1952, he disowned him, explaining to everyone it was the doing of that Jew Churchill. Of Maidstone prison, Michael says: “I had an extraordinary prison life because I was used to lunatic associations. It was just like going home.”
In 1959, seeking an expert to reorganise the Farnham museum, Captain George had approached Hewett, Bruce’s overlord in Antiquities. “I knew a lot about Benin,” said Hewett. “I went down, took stuff out of cases and correctly labelled it.” Hewett and his partner Sandy Martin sometimes visited once a week. Often they took Bruce. What began in innocence, removing valuable Benin masks and heads from damp cases and making an inventory, by degrees became something else.
In 1927, Captain George had reached an important agreement with the Inland Revenue: death duties would be exempted so long as the Farnham museum remained intact. By the 1960s, the museum was in a terrible mess and no longer open to the public (although accessible by appointment until 1966). The total takings, claimed Captain George, barely covered the cost of the heating. Defeated, he offered the museum to the nation. “They wanted a capital endowment of £600,000, and for him to have nothing to do with it,” says his third son, Anthony. “The one time he tried to do something good, he was rebuffed.”
“Then George got a little more cranky,” said Hewett. “His income was £70,000 a year and he spent £75,000. He started to get keen to sell and he turned to me, a dealer in Bond Street.”
The acts committed were not illegal since the museum was private – but under the terms of the 1927 agreement the collection had to be kept intact. Clear beyond doubt is that a lot of people made money from the break-up of the Pitt-Rivers collection.
What was sold, and to whom, is impossible to trace. One reason was the mysterious disappearance of the catalogue, a meticulous and encyclopaedic copy with watercolour drawings that listed all accessions made between I88I and 1900. Captain George, travelling across Paris or Vienna, inadvertently left it in a taxi. Thereafter it was impossible for the Inland Revenue to point a finger.
Captain George’s second son was Julian Pitt-Rivers, an anthropologist who worked in Iraq with Seton Lloyd. He was in no doubt that something fishy was going on. “When I was still on speaking terms with my father, I went to see what was in the museum, in particular a small white ivory Benin head which I had liked. At last, I discovered the head hung unnecessarily high up over a doorway so it could not be seen from close to.
I understood at once it was a copy.
I then realised Stella, my father’s common-law wife, was selling off bits of the museum.”
Stella Howson-Clive was the daughter of a Midlands industrialist. She was a large, striking figure with a wicked sense of humour and a streak of white through her dyed black hair. “She met my father in the Ritz, having tea,” says Anthony, “and they discovered both had been in prison during the war.” They never married. Stella changed her name by deed-poll to Pitt-Rivers. George being famously mean and Stella being on the contrary seriously extravagant, she frequently needed to replenish her funds. Directed by friends in the art world, she set her sights on the Farnham museum.
Captain George, through Hewett, discreetly sold several items. When he fell ill, Stella picked up the flame with a steadier passion. Needing money to subsidise “Stelladoux”, her house in France, and her French lover, a conman from Marseille called Raoul Maumen, she made of the museum at Farnham her milch-cow. By the mid-1960s rumour was rich. Locals talked of lorries arriving at the museum late at night. Duplicates of the objects sold were arranged through Hewett so that she could pretend the originals were still there. Hewett’s partner, Sandy Martin, confirms that Putzel Hunt (Hewett’s third partner, based in Ireland) had a Benin mask copied at this time.
Captain George died in June 1966. He had secretly agreed before his death to sell Stella the museum. No one in the family, not one of his three sons, knew about this arrangement. “I asked Lord Goodman to bring a law suit, to find out what had happened,” says Michael. “But it had been so cunningly done, it was practically impossible to find out. Goodman said to me, ‘I don’t know how much you’ve got to spend on this case, but if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, it will cost you a million pounds, and you may not win’.” Michael decided not to pursue the case. By then, it was too late. Immediately after Captain George’s death, Stella left for France to join her lover, while at Farnham it was discovered that in effect a clearance sale had taken place. Apart from some potsherds and British antiquities, the major treasures had been scattered to dealers and private collectors in New York, Switzerland, France and Germany. “Naïve as my father was, he did not think Stella was a great white hope,” says Anthony, “but he cannot have imagined how quickly the snouts would be in the trough.”
Under the terms by which she was able to buy the museum, Stella had been required to find between £50,000–80,000. (The most modest estimate calculates the museum to have been worth five times this figure.) Kenelm Digby-Jones had known George from the 1950s, when he was at the Courtauld. He was also a friend of Stella. He became her adviser. Aware of Peter Wilson’s predilection for special terms from the days when he worked as his assistant, Digby-Jones contacted his former boss. Wilson was prepared to advance Stella a loan on the understanding that she would sell the collection at Sotheby’s when George died. The Sotheby’s chairman perceived the Pitt-Rivers collection as a honey pot that he could syphon into Sotheby’s to boost sales. He advised George to set up a trust with Stella as sole beneficiary.
One does not know what stories Bruce was told, or how far he was in cahoots with Wilson. But he must have known Wilson and Hewett were up to
something.
One weekend he drove down with Elizabeth. The museum was locked. They were let in by a Peruvian buder. Inside, Elizabeth remembers glass cases containing astonishing “lur” bronze horns and ivory leopards. Wilson and Hewett were there too. “They all said: ‘You haven’t seen this, you don’t know anything about it, you’re not to tell anyone.’ It would have cost Bruce his job if he’d said anything.”
Bruce was presumably brought in as Head of Antiquities on the understanding that he would take charge of what would have been a stunning catalogue and public sale. “The party line to him was: ‘Stella’s going to inherit: what do you think these things are worth?’” says Elizabeth. His function in the affair was to identify the plums and put a valuation on the individual pieces.
But the sale did not come to pass. Stella suddenly turned everything on its head. To Digby-Jones, she announced a change of mind. There was to be no public auction; she would, of course, repay to Sotheby’s the loan that had enabled her to buy the museum. “Nobody loved me then,” says Digby-Jones.
Stella had decided to sell privately, piecemeal and secretly, to buyers outside Britain. Why had she changed her mind? Julian Pitt-Rivers has no doubt. The breaking up of such a unique if little known collection, not to mention the covenant, would have caused a public outcry and the Government might have refused an export licence.
Furthermore, Stella wanted her money abroad. She needed to keep “Stelladoux” going. After George’s death, she lived there with Maumen, whom she married. “She married him to become a French citizen,” says Julian, “and therefore acquire the rights to export the loot into France and Switzerland.”
The best pieces from the Pitt-Rivers museum did not go to Sotheby’s, but the people who helped Stella to sell the major plaques, heads and early period musketeers were Peter Wilson and John Hewett.
*
In 1966, Elizabeth wrote about Hewett to Gertrude: “Bruce used to trust him till he started finding out a few things recently.” As adviser to the Antiquities department, Hewett had access to confidential information. He could get hold of a photograph before the catalogue came out and line up a private client. The Antiquities auction records for this period reveal that Hewett, the Sotheby’s expert, bought, on average, 10 per cent of each Sotheby’s sale. On 3 July 1961, for instance, he bid successfully under three different names: Hewett, Hewitt, Hewitt K. J., His presence was warmly felt at important auctions. On the opening day of the Ernest Brummer sale, catalogued by Bruce and Elizabeth, Hewett bought 29 out of the 101 lots. There was nothing illegal about this: as adviser to collectors and museums, he had every right to buy the whole sale if he had instructions. But he used his privileged position.
Hewett and Wilson were very close. “That gang,” says Richard Falkiner, Bruce’s opposite number at Christie’s, “would open Machiavelli’s eyes.” Wilson was Hewett’s best man; they lived cheek by jowl in Kent; and they played both sides of the street. One of their tricks involved fake telephone bids. For the Goldschmidt sale in 1958, Wilson arranged a telephone line to connect Hewett’s office with the auction room. “They were indirectly forcing up prices,” says Sandy Martin. “They were bidding on behalf of Sotheby’s to push clients up.”
Jack Hunt and his wife Putzel were two other members of the circle. Because of their political affiliations – conservative in the tradition of Captain George – the couple had to live in Ireland, where they dealt in medieval works of art. Wilson, Hewett and the Hunts formed an association with Wilson, not able to buy for himself, conducting, through Hewett, lucrative deals outside Sotheby’s.
The Pitt-Rivers collection became such a deal.
To begin with, Wilson was furious to have lost the sale for Sotheby’s. When he understood the reason, he said admiringly: “My God, what a piece of footwork!” But there would be no question of Wilson ever leaving the scene. “Peter Wilson did not like to lose,” wrote Robert Lacey. He was there at the trough. “I
know
Peter Wilson was involved in liquidating the Benin collection,” says Julian Pitt-Rivers.
The best pieces were diverted out of England through an offshore company based in Ireland, and reshipped to the Continent to avoid exchange control. Hewett knew the dealers and collectors who would buy. “I sold pieces to the US, to France, everywhere save in England,” he admitted shortly before his death. One of his clients was George Ortiz. One evening Hewett invited Ortiz to dine at his flat in Seymour Walk. Before dinner they drank two glasses of claret. Then Hewett said: “Oh, by the way, I know you don’t buy this stuff. I want to show you something.” Hewett went upstairs, brought back an object which he plonked on the radiator shelf. Stella, he explained, was selling one or two things from the Pitt-Rivers collection. Ortiz found himself staring at the great Yoruba cult head, known as “Bulgy Eyes”. Ortiz, as Hewett expected, said: “I must have it.” Ortiz was required to pay in Swiss francs, into a Swiss bank account.

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