The Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars?

In earlier blog about a recent ACCES meeting at Manchester Museum I discussed the careers of two northern collectors of Egyptology with links to the North West. One was Aquila Dodgson. The other collector, Thomas Sheppard, was a larger-than-life character (seen holding up the local antiques shop in a cartoon above) who has been described as ‘one of the most successful museum curators of the first half of the 20th century’. Sheppard’s success in creating new museums in Hull was largely down to his collecting activities. He collected practically anything and everything during his 40 year career, including Egyptology. The reason for talking about him at a seminar about  Egyptology in the North West was an unexpected link to the Manchester mummy Ta-sheri-ankh brought to my attention by Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and the Sudan at Manchester Museum.

Mummy of Ta sheri ankh (courtesy of Campbell Price, Manchester Museum)

Campbell told me that Ta-sheri-ankh came to Manchester Museum via Salford Museum, which had acquired her and her coffins from Newport Museum in South Wales. Sir George Elliot MP (1814-1893) donated the mummy to Newport in 1888, and this is where Sheppard comes in. In the 1930s Sheppard purchased a mummy from Whitby Museum. The museum authorities were rationalising their collection and Sheppard bought the mummy and its handsome coffin for £15. The Whitby mummy had been presented by none other than Sir George Elliot MP who lived at the town’s exclusive Royal Cresent. So both mummies, Ta-sheri-ankh and the Whitby mummy, came from Sir George Elliot originally.

Thomas Sheppard and the Whitby Mummy in Hull in 1935

This common origin may shed light on speculation that it was the mummy from Whitby that inspired Bram Stoker (1847-1912) to write The Jewel of Seven Stars, a horror novel, first published in 1903.  Stoker had an interest in ancient Egypt from contact with Egyptophile William Wilde, the father of Oscar, in Victorian Dublin. Stoker is known to have visited Whitby in August 1890 and on certain websites is said to have stayed with Sir George Elliot. Barbara Belford in her biography of Bram Stoker describes the stay in Whitby in some detail. It provided Stoker with inspiration for part of his Dracula story. But she does not refer to Elliot. So when it is claimed that this was when Stoker saw the mummy now in Hull Museums and that this inspired The Jewel of Seven Stars I ask what is the evidence for this connection with George Elliot?

What is much more interesting to my mind is the fact that in publicity about his acquisition of the Whitby mummy, Sheppard referred to the mummy as being that of an Egyptian princess, although he couldn’t be sure of the translation of her name.

Newspaper cutting referring to mummy as that of a princess

That Sheppard referred in the publicity to Hull’s mummy being the mummy of a princess is interesting but not unusual, as royal pedigrees were commonly given to mummies to add to their attraction. In reality, there is no reason to consider the mummy in Hull Museums – in a plain coffin – to be a princess. However, of the two mummies once owned by Sir George Elliot MP in Whitby, the mummy of Ta-sheri-ankh is the more likely candidate for royalty, with her gilded coffin face, mask and brightly painted coffin. Is it possible that this information somehow got transposed to the other Egyptian mummy, the one that Sir George gave to Whitby Museum, and which was purchased by Thomas Sheppard? Was the claim that the mummy that went to Hull was a princess simply repeated by Sheppard for publicity purposes? That would certainly fit his M.O.

What I am  suggesting is that when Sheppard bought the Whitby mummy there some lingering memory at Whitby Museum of a mummy once owned by Sir George Elliot that was believed to be an Egyptian princess. This is, after all, what underlies the headline of the publicity surrounding the mummy that ended up in Hull. In Hull Museum’s documentation of this mummy it is noted that the mummy was once believed to be a princess, although CT scanning in the early 2000s for a TV documentary revealed it was a male.

Of course the biggest obstacle to the mummy of Ta-sheri-ankh having inspired Bram Stoker is the fact that the latter is said to have visited Whitby in late July/August 1890, when Sir George Elliot had given Ta-sheri-ankh to Newport in 1888. However, Ta-sheri-ankh was a visually stunning female Egyptian mummy, and perhaps Bram Stoker had access to information about her mummy at Sir George Elliot’s residence in Whitby, if that is indeed where he stayed or the residence he visited. Did Bram Stoker visit Whitby at an earlier date but everyone refers to the 1890 visit because that is what inspired some of the Dracula story? I don’t know but if this were the case, it would make Ta-sheri-ankh the source of Stoker’s inspiration, rather than the Whitby mummy, later acquired by Hull Museums. Or could Stoker have seen the mummy later acquired by Thomas Sheppard of Hull Museums at Whitby Museum? We know he used the library in Whitby. Could the Whitby museum authorities at that stage have used information originally referring to Ta-sheri-ankh in their documentation of the mummy they’d acquired from Sir George Elliot?

Is it possible that Thomas Sheppard’s press release about the mummy of a princess from Whitby, then confirms that he was drawing on information transposed from the mummy of Ta-sheri-ankh? If that happened, could not Bram Stoker have had access to the same information?

Sir George Eliot gave Ta-sheri-ankh to Newport, and in time she came to Manchester Museum via Salford. Could Manchester’s mummy then claim to be the mummy that inspired Bram Stoker to write The Jewel of Seven Stars?

Of course we can’t be absolutely sure and any additional information about Sir George Elliot MP and his mummies would be very much appreciated.

Anna and Campbell

Thanks are due to Campbell Price and Anna Garnett who kindly shared information about the Newport mummy and to Paula Gentil, Curator of Archaeology at Hull Museums, who provided the wonderful photograph of Thomas Sheppard with the Whitby mummy. The mask that Ta-sheri-ankh wearing in the photograph has been conserved and can be seen in the Egypt Room in the Discovery Centre at Manchester Museum.

ACCES Meeting at Manchester Museum

ACCES meeting at Manchester Museum last Friday

Last Friday, November 15th 2013, Campbell and Anna kindly invited me to contribute to an ACCES Workshop at Manchester Museum about ‘Egyptology in the North-West: Contextualising your Collection’. There were people there from the Garstang Museum, World Museum Liverpool, Kendal Museum and Macclesfield West Park Museum. I spoke for about 20 minutes about two collectors of Egyptology in the North of England: Aquila Dodgson (1830-1919)  and Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945) of Hull Museums.

Although both are best known for their work east of the Pennines, Aquila Dodgson’s first job was as a Congregational Minister before later switching to a career in textiles in the North West. This financially more lucrative employment provided opportunities to travel to Egypt and to fund the work of researchers such as William Flinders Petrie. As Campbell remarked, “Dodgson’s a mini Jesse Howarth!”.

Dodgson had a collection of Egyptology which was partly dispersed at his death, and so Dodgson Egyptology can now be found in Manchester Museum, Leeds Museums and Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne in Australia. I showed photos of Dodgson objects acquired by Leeds some years ago and Campbell and Anna brought out some of the recently-acquired Feather collection which also includes Dodgson specimens.  It was very useful to confirm that a distinctive type of label with a red border was indeed a Dodgson and not a later collector’s label. If any readers out there happen to have Egyptology labelled in this way, do let us know.

Dodgson Egyptology from the Feather collection at Manchester Museum

Dodgson objects in Leeds Museums (N.B. red border labels)

The other collector, Thomas Sheppard, was a larger than life character who has been described as ‘one of the most successful museum curators of the first half of the 20th century’. Sheppard’s success in creating new museums in Hull was largely down to his collecting activities. He collected practically anything and everything during his 40 year career, including Egyptology. The reason for talking about him at a seminar about  Egyptology in the North West was an unexpected link to the Manchester mummy Ta-sheri-ankh brought to my attention by Campbell. As this is quite a long and involved story I’ll write about this in a separate blog.

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!

More on Feuding Museum Curators

Sketch of William Morfitt

In a recent blog I explored the background to the animosity shown towards the Morfitt family of Atwick by Curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard. The origin of this feud seems to have been a quarrel over objects for the collections of Hull Museums and the so-called ‘East Coast Museum of Antiquities’ at Atwick in Holderness in East Yorkshire. After 1903 Sheppard does not have a good word to say about the Morfitt family and the Atwick collection, despite the fact that previously he’d praised the sons of William Morfitt, Aaron and Beaumont, for rescuing and piecing together a red dear skeleton found on the Holderness coast in East Yorkshire. I used the example of the press coverage of an Iron Age gold coin to show how Sheppard denied the Morfitt fmaily and their collection the ‘oxygen of publicity’. Comments made about the coin in the Hull Museum collection seem to reflect on a coin found by William Morfitt, although the latter was not named.

That example may be more or less convincing but there is another archaeological discovery that may shed light on the relationship between Sheppard and Morfitt. In 1913 builders working on the site of the intended Hornsea ‘Hydro’ or Turkish baths came across skeletons and associated grave goods. The Morfitt family who lived a few miles north of Hornsea at Atwick heard about the discoveries and a short article appeared in a regional newspaper. We know that the family recovered brooches and other finds because our old friend Canon William Greenwell wrote to William Morfitt on 4th April 1913:

‘The brooches are Anglian (Saxon) and there is no doubt they came from a cemetery… It is a great pity that the burials which have already been found should have been so carelessly treated [by the workmen on site]. There are no doubt many other graves on the site, but I fear it is too much to expect that any proper examination will take place. It is most regrettable that you are now unable to make an examination yourself…’

The material collected by the Morfitt family from Hornsea Hydro is now in the Yorkshire Museum, which acquired the Morfitt Collection many years after the events in question.

Anglian brooches found by the Morfitt family at Hornsea Hydro (Yorkshire Museum)

The objects include Anglian bronze brooches dating from the 5th-6th centuries. However, the Morfitt brothers and their father clearly didn’t get everything because Thomas Sheppard also heard about the Hornsea finds and made a personal visit to the site of the Hydro…

There is a very entertaining account of Sheppard’s encounter with the developer, which did not go according to plan, initially at any rate. Sheppard ran up against the same problem that the Morfitts faced, which Greenwell’s letter hints at, in the shape of the developer of the site. The developer sent the Hull Curator on his way with little ceremony, saying he was too busy with the new building work.

In the paper in the Hull Museum Publication series Sheppard writes that he withdrew to gather his wits before trying again. This time he pretended to have an interest in Turkish steam baths and engaged the developer in conversation. For some desperate minutes Sheppard admits he was on decidedly thin ice as he talked about the water supply, heating and provision of steam needed for a hydro before he succeeded in gaining the developer’s trust. Even so he daren’t mention the archaeological discoveries and he was immensely relieved when, as he was about to leave, the developer told Sheppard he could investigate ‘the other matter’ if he wanted.

Sheppard returned with one of his staff, planned and excavated the cemetery, and published an account of the Hornsea Hydro excavation in the Hull Museum Publications in 1919. This is where it gets interesting because in the text there is another of those intriguing oblique references to the Morfitt family which appear to be quite innocent, but if you are aware of the background they acquire an altogether different meaning:

‘Together with my assistant I visited Hornsea and found that a number of human bones had been excavated and that various small beads, and one or two brooches had been found, and had been divided among the workmen and others interested (my italics)…’

‘…although one or two objects had disappeared before we arrived, I fancy the remainder found a fit and proper home, as we excavated most of the skeletons’

T.Sheppard (ed.) Handbook to Hull and the East Riding – the chapter on Anglo-Saxons in East Yorkshire (Hull, 1922: p.234)

These comments would certainly rub salt in the wound. Sheppard had talked round the man who’d thrown the Morfitts off the site and then acquired the objects for Hull Museums, at the same time inferring the Morfitt collection was not a fit and proper home! What do you think?

To be continued…

Skulduggery at the museum and a bruising encounter

Thomas Sheppard

Following up on the recent blog about the Morfitt family and the plough pebbles given to Prof.William Boyd Dawkins for the Manchester Museum collection, it occurred to me that I’d only told part of the story. Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945) was the Curator of Hull Museums. Appointed in 1901 as curator of the Municipal Museum on Albion Street, he was advised to arrive at 10am, smoke a cigar, read the newspaper and take anything that was given…

It’s hard to imagine anyone working in a local authority being told to do this as part of their induction nowadays!  Sheppard, fortunately, disregarded his instructions and, when he retired 40 years later, he’d created seven new museums in Hull, some of them the first of their kind, such as Wilberforce House (1906) commemorating the campaign to abolish British slavery, the Fisheries and Whaling Museum (1912), and the Transport and Commerce Museum (1925). He was full of energy and was a passionate advocate for museums.

Sheppard achieved all this not only through hard work and determination but also by generating publicity. He was always putting snippets in the local and regional newspapers and  sometimes he’d disagree publicly about some point of detail in a report. This wasn’t simply correcting things ‘for the record’ but a way of stimulating a little controversy which made people sit up and take notice.

So it was that about 1908 when William Boyd Dawkins of Manchester Museum visited the sleepy village of Atwick in Holderness to see some archaeological sites known as pit dwellings, Sheppard was involved in a very public disagreement with Dawkins’ good friend, Revd William Gatty, and Canon William Greenwell, who claimed the pit dwellings were prehistoric and thousands of years old. The sites had been discovered by the Morfitt family. Sheppard said he’d found a piece of broken Wedgwood pottery in one of the pit dwellings, so they couldn’t be very old at all.

Sheppard seems to have had a good point but the tone of his comments contrasts very markedly with what he said a few years earlier when he was a regular visitor to Charlotte’ Cottage, home of the Morfitt family and the ‘East Coast collection of antiquities’. Sheppard congratulated the family on the recovery of a red deer skeleton on the Holderness Coast:

‘The care that has been taken in putting the numerous pieces together is characteristic of Messrs Morfitt, and the greatest credit is due to them.’

This was in 1898.

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt with the red deer skeleton

William Morfitt’s sons, Aaron and Beaumont, had gone out at low tide and recovered the skeleton as the water rose about them. Is this extreme archaeology or what? And Sheppard often led guided tours of the Holderness coast in his capacity of secretary of various scientific societies. No visit was complete without seeing the Morfitt collection in Atwick. After 1903 that stopped. All Sheppard’s comments thereafter are critical of the family, belittling them and their collection. So what went wrong? What soured the relationship?

To answer that question we have to consider Sheppard’s reputation as a collector, summed up in the cartoon above. Sheppard is depicted as a highwayman ‘sticking up’ the local antiquities dealer’s! He didn’t create six new museums without being very acquisitive. His mania for collecting was legendary.

He also had a great sense of humour. Sheppard himself encouraged the portrayal of himself as a highwayman, the ‘snatcher man’ and a burglar. “The most scandalous stories come from his own lips” said Mary Chitty. It was how he marketed himself. He was the man who could snaffle an exhibit for the Hull Museums from under the very noses of rival collectors. A quick response by telegramme often secured the specimen for Hull before rivals had woken up to the fact that they were going begging. This, understandably, led to tension with other collectors. One was Canon William Greenwell of Durham. Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be a falling out over collecting between Sheppard and William Morfitt. There is a fascinating line in one of Canon William Greenwell’s letters (dated 30th December 1903) that refers to a violent encounter between Sheppard and old William Morfitt:

‘Mr Jeff told me in a letter received a few days ago that you had tackled Sheppard and given it him hot. I am glad to hear that you applied the stick to his back which I hope still smarts under it!’

This could just be a figure of speech but the implication is that old William Morfitt assaulted Sheppard. Perhaps he felt the Hull Curator had been disloyal or disingenuous and was trying to obtain antiquities that Morfitt felt were ‘on his patch’. Was the occasion when the wily Sheppard got caught out? If this is what happened then the reason for the sudden change in Sheppard’s attitude to the family becomes apparent.

We can see an example of this different attitude in the report of the acquisition of an Iron Age gold coin for Hull Museums which appeared in one of the Hull Museum Publications. William Morfitt had also found a gold coin at Atwick about the same time. This is a photograph. It is in the British Museum.

Iron Age gold coin

This is what Sheppard wrote about the coin he’d acquired for Hull Museums:

Coin reference

‘Another somewhat similar though not quite so fine’ I believe is an oblique reference to William Morfitt’s coin. Sheppard shows he’s aware of the discovery but he doesn’t acknowledge the finder, thereby denying him the ‘oxygen of publicity’. ‘Near Hornsea’ becomes a coded reference to the Morfitt family at Atwick. What do you think?

In a future blog I’ll show how Sheppard’s animosity towards the Morfitt family was expressed in a far more damaging way over the so-called Holderness harpoons during the early 1920s…

Ploughman’s Hunch

Plough pebbles from Holderness in the Manchester Museum collection

I’m giving a talk in the Collection Bites series for Sally Thelwell up in the Collection Study Centre at Manchester Museum today. I tweeted it and wanted to include a link to the Ancient Worlds website, where, I was convinced, I’d already posted an entry on these enigmatic objects. It turned out that I hadn’t so here goes….

The objects look like pebbles you might dig up in your garden but if you look carefully you can see that they have a patch of wear or a facet on one side. Looked at under a  microscope you can scratches and striations. The stone is calcite, a very hard stone and clearly the pebbles have been in contact with something that has caused intense abrasion for them to be worn away in this way. In one case one of the stones has two wear facets. What’s going on?

Years ago, when they were collected, it would have been assumed that they were used for grinding and polishing stone axes but the level of abrasion needed and the difficulty of holding a rounded pebble at the same angle to create a facet like this  makes it unlikely. It was realised over 50 years ago that the stones were plough pebbles, i.e. they’d been inserted in the surface of a wooden plough and the facets were the result of contact with sand and stones as the plough passed through the soil. The pebbles were rather like studs to help protect the plough tip against excessive wear. Presumably this was done when the farmer had no access to iron, or perhaps because it was expensive, hadn’t been invented yet or was impractical to use in such soil conditions. Relatively well-preserved examples of wooden ploughs with pebbles still in situ have been found in peat bogs in Denmark. The date of these ploughs is Iron Age, though that doesn’t necessarily mean pre-Roman in a Scandinavian context. An example that was radiocarbon-dated from Scotland gave an early Medieval date round about 600 AD.

We don’t know much about where these fascinating objects came from save that they are labelled ‘Holderness’ and ‘the surface’. A quartz pounder associated with them is labelled ‘Lissit’, a village in northern Holderness. There can be little doubt that the objects were originally in the collection of William Morfitt (1831-1923). William Morfitt was a grocer from Goole who made enough money from supplying ships entering the important inland port to retire in the late 1880s.

 

Charlotte’s Cottage (copyright East Yorkshire Archives )

He took his family, including sons Aaron and Beaumont and daughters Charlotte and Margaret, to live in the sleepy Holderness village of Atwick. There they had the leisure time to collect items of archaeological and geological interest that were being washed out of the soft boulder clay cliffs by coastal erosion. Holderness has one of the highest rates of coastal erosion in the world. Over time they built up an impressive collection including mammoth teeth, fossil ammonites, stone axes and even animal skeletons revealed in the beds of ancient lakes and water courses.

Coast of Holderness

It was but a short step to excavating the features they saw sectioned by coastal erosion and to walking across ploughed fields and picking up objects on the surface of the soil. The family published little but they were happy for visiting archaeologists and antiquaries to write about their discoveries. They were very proud of their collection which became known by the rather grandiose name of ‘the East Coast collection of antiquities’. They attracted the attention of Canon William Greenwell of Durham Cathedral (1820-1918) and William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929) at the Manchester Museum. Dawkins visited Atwick in 1908 in connection with a row involving the curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945), over archaeological features known as pit dwellings.

Worthies at Atwick (1908). Dawkins is 3rd from left. Copyright East Yorkshire Archives

This is likely to have been the  occasion when the plough pebbles were given to Boyd Dawkins and later they entered the Manchester Museum collection. The term ‘the Surface’ was one of the terms used to discuss the stratigraphy of the pit dwellings. Correspondence and notes in the East Yorkshire Archives office in Beverley show that the Morfitt family picked up lots of plough pebbles in and around Atwick. Perhaps the glacial deposits that constitute the promontory of Holderness contain too much abrasive material in the area or perhaps pebbles of the right size for use in a plough happen to be available there. Whatever the explanation plough pebbles seem to have been unusually common there and were collected and some eventually, made their way to Manchester Museum.

The last member of the Morfitt family, Beaumont, died in 1929. He is buried with his father and brothers and sisters in Atwick churchyard. Their tombstone, appropriately, is a large glacial erratic. Sadly the family was largely forgotten after an unseemly row with the Curator of Hull Museums who belittled the Morfitts’ collecting activities. More about this in a future blog.

the Morfitts’ headstone in Atwick churchyard