Archive sheds light on ancient forgery

Bronze figurine of the god Mithras in the Manchester Museum collection

More time ago now than I really care to remember I wrote something about the Mithras sculptures found in Hulme during the 19th century and showed the small figurine of Mithras from the Manchester Museum collection. At the time I remember thinking there was something rather odd about the figurine and that suspicion was strengthened when Jan Kindberg Jacobsen (Curator, Department of Ancient Art in Copenhagen)  got in touch in January 2013 to say he was aware of two other similar figurines and to ask if ours was a forgery.

There the matter rested until this morning when during one of the curatorial team’s joint working meetings we looked at some archival material that David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Palaeontology, had found in store. We had great fun going through archive correspondence from the 1920s  allocating the paper documents in the folders to different disciplines and recognising names of important donors. In this age of digital media it is salutary to reflect how much important information is lost when email accounts are closed, whilst copy correspondence a hundred or more years old may yield vital information for research.

Investigating the archive at one of our Wednesday curatorial meetings

One of letters we looked at this morning was written by Francis Haverfield (1860-1919), one of the first serious academic students of Roman Britain. He held the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. On 6th May 1903 he wrote:

My dear Sir,

The little bronze of which you have been good enough to send me a photograph, is a forgery. The inscription is a blundered copy of a real inscription on stone, now at Paris. Other forgeries from the same original are known – all very likely, by the same forger, who may have lived in the 17th or 18th century. See F.Cumont, ‘Textes at monuments relatifs au culte de Mithra’ ii pp 398-445. I am,

Yours very faithfully,

F.Haverfield

In the same bundle is a note on a card from a Mr J.S.Hall:-

Dear Mr Hoyle,

Many thanks for your letter. It is disappointing to hear that the figure is a forgery, but it seems to be a forgery of some antiquity and interest. I picked it up for 3/- 6d (42 pence in today’s money!) in a “Marine (?) Store” in Nottingham and I feel sure that the man who sold it me & told me the story was only reflecting what he had been told by the man who sold it him. In any case I do not think he (illegible word?) over-charged me! Very truly yours, J.S.Hall

Haverfield’s letter dated 8th May 1903

 

A letter of 16th May 1903 from a French correspondent says (in translation):

Sir,

Thank you very much for sending the bronze figurine that you recently acquired. But I’m afraid that this is a modern piece. A series of similar figurines  with the inscription DEO INVITO were reported in Germany and Italy and seem to be the work of some Renaissance forger (c.f. Texts and Monuments Relating to the Mithraic Mysteries Vol.II p.445).  Besides you have perhaps already noticed yourself that I am pleased to be able, thanks to you, to add another example to this small collection.

Believe me Sir, most sincerely yours,

 

The signature is difficult to decipher but appears to be Franz Cumont of 75 Rue Montoyer, Brussels, and author of the work referred to earlier.

 

Amazing what you can find in the archives isn’t it?

 

 

 

 

 

Genuine after all?

Letters to the press

In previous emails I’ve explored the controversy over two bone points found in Holderness in East Yorkshire in northern England during the early 1920s.  The Curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard, accused the people who found the objects of being charlatans. As we have seen this was the not the first time that the Hull Curator had come across the Morfitt family. In the early 1900s he had been a regular visitor to their cottage at Atwick in Holderness. Sheppard and Mr William Morfitt had a serious falling-out at the end of 1903 and afterwards Sheppard criticised the family relentlessly. In 1922 A.Leslie Armstrong published two bone points from the Morfitt collection and argued they were Maglemosian or Mesolithic. Sheppard implied they were forgeries. Two committees of enquiry met to decide whether they were authentic but the finds were so ambiguous both Sheppard and the Morfitt family claimed victory.

One of the committees noted in its report that the evidence on which Thomas Sheppard’s  judgement was based ‘was no longer verifiable’. This was rather mysterious and it would be some eight years before the truth emerged. The comment was picked up by Armstrong who responded: ‘Mr Sheppard’s charge of forgery is based upon certain evidence said to have been given him by a person now dead – therefore unverifiable’. (1923). Who was this dead person and what had they said? It was only after the last member of the Morfitt family had died that Sheppard revealed ‘The Maglemose harpoons were made by Mr B. Morfitt in the presence of his sister who was spending a weekend with Mrs Sheppard and I and told us how it was done’.

Charlotte Morfitt

The sister was Charlotte Morfitt who died in 1914. Sheppard claimed to have held back this information out of sensitivity to old William Morfitt’s feelings. William died in 1923, Beaumont died in 1929 and Sheppard revealed the source of his information – and why he was so certain that the Maglemosian points were forgeries – in 1930. Perhaps surprisingly Sheppard tried to acquire the Morfitt collection for Hull Museums when the future of the collection was under discussion. However, Hornsea District Council planned to put the collection on show though nothing ultimately came of this proposal and in the end the collection was transferred to the Yorkshire Museum, where it still is.

When the bone points were bequeathed to the British Museum after William Morfitt’s death, Thomas Sheppard obtained casts and put them on display in Hull Museum’s ‘fakes and forgeries’ cabinet. It looked as though Sheppard had had the last word. Or had he?

Another barbed point was found amongst ‘moor log’ dredged from the bed of the North Sea on the Leman and Ower banks off Lowestoft in 1931. In 1932 a bone point was found on Hornsea foreshore but it was not published until after the Second World War.  Sheppard retired in 1941 and died in 1945. No less than thirteen – thirteen! – were found in the vicinity of Brandesburton, not far from Hornsea, during gravel extraction. Some of the latter were reported by J.B.Fay, Assistant Director of Hull Museums, who, like Sheppard, spent most of his life working for the institution. In 1956 Clark and Godwin wrote ‘In view of an old controversy it may be added that close examination of the Skipsea and Hornsea specimens alongside those from Brandesburton can leave no further doubt as to the genuineness of the earlier finds.’

If the bone points were authentic what are we to make of Sheppard’s accusations and his motivation? Sheppard made much of the fact that the circumstances of discovery of one of the points seemed non-sensical. It’s in the entertaining poem quoted in an earlier blog:

‘Til Mr Morfitt passed one day,
With iron rod to find his way.
And fourteen feet it penetrated
And then it stopped; or so ’twas stated.

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt. Beaumont is standing on the right. Is he holding the iron rod he used in prospecting?

How could Beaumont (the Mr Morfitt in question) have inserted an iron rod into peat deposits and then dug down to recover the object he had detected by probing? It doesn’t add up, does it? It doesn’t if Beaumont was standing  on the ground surface and digging down. But what if was standing at the base of a cliff that had been eroded by the sea? Beaumont could be fourteen or more feet below the ground surface as measured from the top of the cliff, but still be standing on the foreshore and probing the deposits horizontally. See photo below. The object Beaumont found would be a depth of fourteen feet relative to the top of the cliff  without Beaumont having to dig down to reach it.

Skipsea Withow

And what of Sheppard’s statement that no peat had been found at Hornsea (in which the Hornsea example was said to have been found)? In August 1902 the Hull Scientific and Field Naturalists Club visited Hornsea to see a section exposed during the erection of a new gasometer. Beds of gravel, shell marl and peat (my italics) were observed, recorded and published in the Naturalist (1902, p.366) by none other than Thomas Sheppard!

The main point of evidence – that Charlotte Morfitt told the Sheppards that her brother had made the bone points as a joke at the expense of their father could not be verified because Miss Morfitt had passed away in 1912. Elijah Howarth of Sheffield Museum said that ‘Beaumont was always fond of a joke, and had a very entertaining fashion of humour but there was no shadow of deceit about him’. There were some curious lengths of bone with crudely-forked ends and an incised groove apparently for winding string in the Morfitt collection. They are illustrated in Hull News (1/2/1902). William Greenwell refers to them in his letters to William Morfitt though he did not know what they were. Is it possible Charlotte saw her brother making them and told the Sheppards and that these fabrications became confused with the bone points that were genuine? If on all other grounds the Holderness points or harpoons are to be considered authentic, might this confusion or misunderstanding explain the controversy? Or was there a darker motive?

Sheppard’s bruising encounter with William Morfitt in 1903 changed the nature of their relationship. Having been humiliated in this way, did Sheppard allow his personal feelings to colour his judgement? No matter what the Morfitt family found, I suspect that Thomas Sheppard would have found some way to cast doubt on it or belittle it. The Morfitt family was eventually vindicated but archaeologically the controversy may have been more damaging. The mesolithic site at Star Carr is rightly famous for the preservation of a range of organic and other evidence, including the oldest dwelling. Had the discoveries along the Holderness coast at Skipsea and Hornsea been taken seriously, is it possible that this kind of evidence might have been found many years earlier? Might we be talking about Skipsea as the type site for mesolithic archaeology? We’ll never know of  course because sadly the sea has long since washed the deposits where the bone points were found away.

The Curator Strikes Back

This Blog continues the series about the relationship between Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums and the Morfitt family of Atwick in Holderness. In the last instalment Leslie Armstrong claimed two bone points or harpoons in the Morfitt collection were Maglemosian or mesolithic, i.e. about 10,000 years old. Thomas Sheppard insinuated that the bone points were forgeries. A committee of enquiry was called to investigate the matter…

Casts of the Holderness harpoons in Hull Museums (the originals are in the British Museum)

A fortnight after the  British Association meeting in Hull Mr M.C.Burkitt, Prof.J.E.Marr and Dr A.C.Haddon met in Cambridge to compare the Holderness barbed points ‘harpoons’ found by the Morfitt family with similar specimens from Kunda in Estonia. The ‘Cambridge committee’ as it came to be known concluded that ‘in type, general facies, colour, and in the partially mineralised condition of the bone, the Holderness harpoons were identical with those from Kunda… both the Holderness harpoons are genuine antiquities’. However, another committee consisting of Sir Hercules Read, Prof A.Smith Woodward and Prof. P.F.Kendall was appointed by the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute to investigate the matter in London on 6th December 1922. Its conclusion was curiously ambiguous:

‘In general we see no evidence in the objects themselves that is conclusively against their genuineness… A curious feature is that the workmanship of the barbs is so similar as to point to their being the work of the same individual’.

This enabled both parties to claim victory. Leslie Armstrong and other supporters of the Morfitt family felt vindicated because the committee had said there was nothing against them being genuine but Shepaprd seized on the same committee’s comment that they seemed to have been made by the same individual. Admittedly there was a lot of  confusion over the context or layers in which the points were found. The Skipsea point was said to have been found ‘in silt beneath 5 feet of peat.’ When Beaumont Morfitt was called to the podium at the British Association Meeting in Hull in the autumn of 1922 he said “the points were 12 or 14 feet down and resting on boulder clay”. Sheppard argued that no-one could dig that deep on the Holderness coast and beds of peat of that depth had never been found. And if they were indeed made by the same individual it didn’t make sense. If they were found in different contexts deposited with an interval of hundreds, if not thousands of years, in between them, then that person must have lived an awful long time!

Thomas Sheappard

The Morfitt family had kept details of the discovery of the bone points in note books but the books were not produced in evidence before the committees, very likely because the entries would not have reflected well on the Morfitts, who made spelling mistakes and often wrote in what can only be described as ‘stream of consciousness’ style. The Hornsea point was said to have been found ‘on the margin of the mere whilst excavating for a new gasometer at Hornsea at a depth of 16 feet below the surface in a lacustrine bed amongst the roots of sedges and reedso. The discovery is dated 1915. A sub-committee satisfied itself that no such bed of peat deposits existed at Hornsea.

In publications the dates of discovery of both the Hornsea and the Skipsea points shifted in a way that suggested to Sheppard at least that the claims were mischievous. The Hornsea bone point is also recorded as having been found in 1905; the Skipsea example in 1902 . As there is a letter from Canon William Greenwell to Mr Morfitt dated 27th January 1902, I think the date of 1902 for Skipsea is reliable even if other dates were later published for its discovery. It seems this confusion may have been more down to human error and shoddy note-keeping by the Morfitt family rather than conspiracy. Even if one committee had ruled in favour of their genuineness, the second had raised doubts which Thomas Sheppard exploited ruthlessly. Ultimately it all looked rather damning for Armstrong and the Morfitts.

The London committee had also concluded ‘Mr Sheppard appears to have had strong grounds for doubting the authenticity of the harpoons, but the evidence on which his judgement is based is  no longer verifiable.’

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt with one of their prized discoveries (Beaumont is on the right)

No what on earth did that mean? To answer that question we really have to fast forward to 1929 after the last member of the Morfitt family, Beaumont, had died. Thomas Sheppard finally revealed the strong grounds for doubting the authentity of the ‘Holderness harpoons’. But that’s the subject of the next blog in this series…

The Revenge of the Curator?

Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums

Over the last  few weeks I’ve posted a number of blogs about the campaign waged by Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull Museums, against the Morfitt family of Atwick in East Yorkshire. Although Sheppard was initially a friend of the family, in 1903 something changed. I believe that the rivalry over collecting objects for their respective collections was so strong that William Morfitt and Thomas Sheppard had a violent falling-out, which seems to have had rather painful consequences for the Hull curator! Whatever happened Sheppard never forgot it. It is striking that after 1903 the Morfitt family, if it is mentioned at all, is often referred to in an oblique or coded fashion. In this way Sheppard disguised what were snide and dismissive remarks. In 1922, however, Sheppard had his best opportunity yet to belittle the family way, as we will see….

Albert Leslie Armstrong who championed two of the discoveries in the Morfitt collection

In the autumn of 1922 the British Association of Science held its annual meeting in Hull. One of the speakers was Albert Leslie Armstrong, the enthusiast who had continued Prof.William Boyd Dawkins’ work at Creswell Crags and so someone who is well-known in Manchester and elsewhere. Armstrong gave a paper about two serrated bone points that he had seen in the Morfitt family’s collection. Armstrong knew of, or had seen, very similar points from sites in Denmark that had been dated to the Mesolithic period about 10,000 years ago. The Danish examples had been found at a place called Maglemose or ‘Big Bog’ and Armstrong referred to them as Maglemosian. Armstrong argued that the serrated bone points found by the Morfitt family in Holderness in East Yorkshire were so similar that they must be of the same date. If so they were some of the oldest archaeological discoveries from northern Britain! It was quite a coup, or would have been, had Thomas Sheppard not spoken out against them, saying that the discoveries were not as old as the speaker…

Casts of the Holderness harpoons in the Hull Museums collection

In the reporting of the conference in the local newspapers this satirical poem appeared:-

Long years ago – so long – none knows,
There came a man from Maglemose,
(How he got here without clothes,
From Maglemose to Holdernose,
Without the frost bite in his toes,
Is more than we can dare suppose).

This man a long bone harpoon throws,
Just like those found at Maglemose.
He aimed it an elk (or deer),
The harpoon pierced him like a spear;
It no doubt killed that elk (or deer)
In what was once called Skipsea Mere

From long ago, in silt (or clay),
The harpoon and the elk did stay,
Till Mr Morfitt passed one day,
With iron rod to find his way.
For fourteen feet it penetrated,
And then it stopped, or so ‘twas stated.

The rod touched something firm and bony
(So different from an object stoney).
Then Mr Morfitt dug deep down,
For fourteen feet and got renown,
By finding something quite unknown,
(Except for one in Hornsea town).

How he dug, well, no-one knows,
But he found trace of Maglemose.
He got it in his small museum,
Where “with the other” all could see ‘em.
They rested there for years and years,
Until the British Ass. Appears.

Came an Armstrong long and weary,
With a most enthralling theory;
About the man from Maglemose
(In the Baltic, that, one knows)
Came to Atwick, or quite close,
While in search of food and clothes.

When a Sheppard roared like thunder,
“There has been a fearful blunder,
The harpoon from Maglemose,
Is not as old as you’d suppose”;
And in a manner most indecent,
Said the harpoon was quite recent!

Letters to the press

This is great fun and whatever one says about Sheppard no-one can deny he had a great sense of humour!  Though I’m not sure he wrote the poem. As a result of the controversy arising out of this very public challenge to the integrity of the Morfitt family, many letters appeared in the local press and two committees of enquiry met to decide whether the ‘Holderness harpoons’, as they became known, were authentic.

To find out what the committees of enquiry said visit this Blog next week!

Spurious Chinese Antiquities and a Manchester Sinophile

Stephen Welsh, Curator of Living Cultures, has just sent me a link to a story in the Daily Telegraph about a museum in China that has been exhibiting fake antiquities.

John Hilditch (1872-1930). Manchester Libraries Information and Archives

This reminds me of the story of a little-known Manchester scandal involving a collection of Chinese artefacts about which great claims were made during the 1920s. The owner of the collection, John Hilditch (1872-1930) wanted to become auditor for the Manchester City Council. He cultivated what can only be described as an affectation as a lover of all things Chinese. Hilditch had a ‘museum’ of Chinese objects at his ‘Minglands’ home in Crumpsal Manchester, complete with a temple at which he would conduct services in priestly attire and burn incense.

John Hilditch in Mandarin costume with some of his Chinese collection. Chetham’s Library

He claimed to have spent time in China and to have had some hair-raising adventures during his pursuit of antiquities that come straight out of the Indiana Jones school of archaeological fieldwork. On one occasion, for example, he claimed to have been buried up to his neck after souvenir-hunting on an ancient burial ground, from which predicament he was only rescued when his devoted Chinese man servant came back for him. However, there was no independent corroboration that he had ever spent time in China. Hilditch liked to tell people that he was as inscrutable as a Chinese Mandarin and that however much they tried to find out about him they would never succeed.

On one occasion he arranged for some friends to pretend to be a formal Chinese diplomatic delegation on an official visit to Manchester City Council. They were given a civic welcome and treated with great courtesy. The imposters were almost rumbled when they happened to cross paths with some bona fide Chinese people. They narrowly avoided being unmasked and Hilditch only later revealed that this was a stunt.

It is not clear what motivated someone who aspired to a position of responsibility in the local authority to behave in this way. He had a serious disagreement with the Manchester Art Gallery over his Chinese collection. He rated his collection very highly but curators from the British Museum and the V&A were not convinced. The Manchester Art Gallery curators must have had the last laugh because despite Hilditch’s exaggerated claims about its value, when the collection came up for auction it raised only a fraction of the supposed amount of money it was worth.

Was Hilditch a Sinophile who let his enthusiasm for China run away with him or was he a fantasist? Perhaps someone out there can shed some light on this intriguing story….

True Felicity in the Coin Collection

Giovanni Bernadi medallion of c.1536

There is a section in the new Ancient Worlds displays about fakes and forgeries and copies. So this relatively recent discovery at the Manchester Museum is very relevant.

The medallion in the photo above must have languished in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘secret museum’ (a cabinet of forgeries in the Coin Room) for the best part of a century. Keith says that although the antique style is absolutely ‘spot on’, he’s never seen a medallic piece like it that is Roman, but with Greek legend, and with no issuing city cited.

It shows a bust of Commodus facing right on the obverse within a wreath. On the reverse a lion is attacking a horse. In the portico behind, to the left, a standing figure is watching what’s going on. The Greek inscription refers to the Emperor Commodus (who reigned from 180 to 192 AD) and ‘Felicitas’ or happiness.

Keith was reluctant to accept that it was a forgery because it was so beautifully engraved, and it nagged at him  for the best part of 35 years, until he came across a reference, quite by chance, a couple of years ago. It turns out it is, in fact, a perfectly genuine and very rare Renaissance medallion of c.1536 by Giovanni Bernardi (1494-1553). Perhaps we should see this as a kind of tribute piece in the way that bands copy groups like Abba, the Beatles and Blondie, to name but a few!

It’s now been added to the trays of Italian medals in Numismatics. Keith couldn’t attend the recent staff briefing, so I took it along to show colleagues and it generated a considerable amount of interest. Thanks to Keith for sharing this with us.