Letter from London

by Ian McKay, e-mail: <ianmckay1@btinternet.com>

Everything Must Go! The Michael Bennett-Levy Collection

Michael Bennett-Levy got into the business almost by accident. On impulse, he took over a friend's stall in Edinburgh Antiques Market that sold old 78-rpm records and gramophones, and in time that stall evolved into Gramophones et Alia in London, then became Mechanical Antiques & Curios, back in Edinburgh, and finally, in the 1980's, Early Technology.

Bennett-Levy had something of a scientific family background—his grandfather helped develop the World War I gas mask—and had read science at Edinburgh University, so this progression was fitting, and he now says that his life's work has been to find serious items of early technology in many diverse fields, some seriously valuable, some not, but some still important in their own right, and to preserve them for future generations.

Having decided now to retire to France, where he and his wife have been restoring a medieval property over several years, Bennett-Levy called in Bonhams to clear out his vast stock and collection from the cellars, attics, stables, and garages of his home at Monkton House, a fortified 17th-century house at Musselburgh, near Edinburgh.

It took three months!

Bennett-Levy feels that Bonhams could have done with an even longer sale, and in his own preamble to the 750-lot sale catalogue pointed out that many things still ended up being job lotted and bargains were there to be had, perhaps at a fraction of the price he had paid. "Somewhere in a mixed lots is one of the earliest electric torches with a carbon filament lamp suspended on springs and one of Oliver Lodge's first sparking plugs…so buyers please ask yourselves why I bought some odd item you might not immediately recognise, before you dispose of it too quickly as rubbish." Bennett-Levy even offered to respond personally to any queries buyers might have after the sale.

The September 30 sale catalogue was packed with all manner of scientific instruments, mechanical music machines, early typewriters, microscopes and telescopes, magic lanterns, old irons, diesel engines, X-ray machines, and so on. Some of these were historically or scientifically significant, others, like a 17th-century proto-food processor, a 19th-century burglar alarm, or a French wire-guided antitank missile of the 1950's, wholly unexpected, but the unique or the simply "different" always appealed to Bennett-Levy. A few of his favourites, among them that food processor, a life-size photographic reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry, and an acupuncture teaching model, are illustrated with this piece, but the main focus here is one of Bennett-Levy's principal interests and specialities: early television.

Bennett-Levy has written two books on the subject and since the 1990's has been pursuing models made before World War II put a temporary hold on development and broadcasting. Some 28,000 sets were made worldwide in that prewar era, mostly in Britain, but survivors are now extremely rare. It is believed that only 450 to 500 prewar sets exist, and Bennett-Levy had 25 of them, the largest collection in private hands.

There was also a television library that Bennett-Levy reckoned to be unparalleled anywhere in its breadth and scope. Strong in early British and U.S. books and ephemera and including scarce prewar material from France and Germany, it had been divided into 60 lots, but was first offered as a complete collection and found a private buyer at $190,800. The prewar TV sets, too, had been offered first as a collection, but with no suitable bid forthcoming were then offered separately.

A 17th-century Spanish iron and brass-mounted predecessor of the food processor. At the top is a folding knife, and other labour-saving devices incorporated in this curious object are a handle-operated coconut scraper, cheese and nutmeg graters, a vegetable cutter, and even a crinkle cutter for potatoes! It sold for $190 in the Bennett-Levy sale at Bonhams.

Among the later televisions to fetch high prices was this Bush TV22 model of 1949-50. In an Art Deco style Bakelite case and with a 9" screen, this was one of the most popular sets of the era and a design classic, but the estimate of $300/450 reflected its condition. These faults included the box fitted on the right to accommodate a conversion fix needed to receive the new BBC2 channel (launched in 1964), holes drilled in the top to support a magnifying screen, and a cracked top caused by someone lifting it from the top instead of at the bottom. Despite this, it brought a bid of $2670. In the final stages of World War II, RCA developed a television monitoring system for what was a forerunner of the cruise missile. B17 Flying Fortress bombers, stripped out and stuffed with explosives, were fitted with a Block III television camera guiding device in the nose. These aircraft were to be flown from U.K. bases by a crew of two, who would bail out just before leaving the British mainland, the aircraft then being guided to its target by a mother plane, flying ten to 20 miles in the rear and remotely controlling the missile guiding device. Two B17s blew up in practice runs, probably due to high voltage sparking an explosion when the pilots switched on the camera before bailing out. One of those who died in this way was Joe Kennedy, the elder brother of John F. Kennedy, who had been due to return to the U.S. but had volunteered to join this secret and dangerous operation. In fact, the television sets were considered so top secret, they were each fitted with seven small explosive charges that would allow them to be destroyed if there were any chance of their falling into enemy hands. Two aircraft did get close to their targets, but one was shot down on approach and the other overshot the target. With all explosives long since removed, the Block III in the Bennett-Levy collection was valued at $75,000/100,000 but sold in the end for $57,240. A carved and painted acupuncturist's figure dated to the 19th century proved unexpectedly popular in the Bennett-Levy sale. This 43" high carved female figure, the light gesso coating painted with Chinese characters, was bid to $26,710. The most expensive of the postwar television sets in the Bennett-Levy collection was this 41½" high Lyric television and wireless (radio) console marketed in 1946 by John Logie Baird Ltd. It cost its original owners around $1000, but in the Bonhams sale the price was $30,530. The finest prewar set made by the man who invented and first demonstrated television, John Logie Baird, was this cabinet console of 1937. Featuring a mirror-lid screen, which at 15" was the largest then available, the 48" high x 57½" wide console also offers a wireless (radio), a record player, and, at bottom left, a cellaret! In original condition and with a spare Mullard TSP4 double emission valve still in place, as sold, this example of a deluxe model whose production numbers would probably have been in single figures went at $28,620.

In 1872, the photographer Joseph Cundall was granted permission to make a full-size photographic reproduction of the great Bayeux tapestry, a record of the invasion of England by William the Conqueror that was made circa 1080-87 in England but is now displayed in Bayeux in Normandy, the home town of William's half brother, Bishop Odo, who may indeed have been the man who commissioned it. Over a period of two months Cundall and his assistants produced 185 glass plates that give a panorama extending to 226 feet overall. Six copies were made by the Arundel Society, a company specialising in the reproduction of medieval art, using the Woodburytype process, and these were hand coloured by students from what is now the Royal College of Art in London. They were priced in 1874 at what was then the huge sum of $1000.

Two copies went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which still holds the original plates but has only one of its two examples in viewable condition. A third was acquired by, or perhaps given to, Bayeux, which has since misplaced it, and one other is known to be in a private collection. Bennett-Levy's example, the linen-backed photographs still on the original Arts and Crafts oak stands, was sold for $9540.

Pictures of India—The Fraser Brothers Story

Among early colour-plate books dealing with India and the Himalayas, the name of James Baillie Fraser is special. James Baillie was a member of a family of Scottish landowners whose brother, William, had been employed by the East India Company since 1799. James himself arrived in 1814 in Calcutta, where he operated as a merchant, but in his spare time he did a great deal of sketching, painting, and writing. In 1815 he also spent time travelling in the Himalayas with William, who was a political agent to General Martindale at the time of the Nepal War.

This was a region that was little known at the time and remained so until the 20th century. In 1820, James published a fascinating and very valuable account of his travels, Journal of a Tour…, that is still regarded as essential reading on the Himalayas, but it is the series of coloured aquatints produced from his original drawings that are a major, if rarely seen, salesroom attraction. Copies of that large-folio collection, Views in the Himala Mountains, have made as much as $65,000, and a series of 24 Views of Calcutta and its environs, another collection of his colour plates issued in the 1820's, is another very desirable and costly work.

James and his brother William also commissioned a series of watercolours by local artists, paintings by various Indian artists whose individual identities are often unrecorded, but whose creations are generically known as Company School pictures.

A group of 90 such drawings found 30 years ago among the Fraser family papers is one of the earlier and finer groups of such work. The album displayed the diverse range of people to be found in Delhi and the surrounding area and included portraits of the Mughal Emperor and his courtiers, dancing girls, musicians, Afghan horse traders, ascetics and villagers bringing in their rents. Local costumes, customs, architecture, and scenery were all recorded in exquisite detail in these pictures.

Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, co-authors of The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35 (1989), wrote of these drawings that they "…not only made a great contribution to knowledge of the work of Indian artists in early nineteenth century Delhi, but provide an unsurpassed record of life in and around the old Mughal capital before chaos and the new British administration brought that rich culture to an end."

The Fraser Album was sold at Sotheby's in the summer of 1980, and it seems to have been subsequently broken up and dispersed. In 1992, examples that were by then in the Bachofen von Echt collection reappeared at Sotheby's, among them a portrait of an Indian soldier regarded as one of the finest in the Fraser Album, which reached $82,000. In 2007, at Sotheby's New York, another leaf from the Fraser Album, A Trooper of Skinner's Horse, was bid to $132,000.

Two other pencil and watercolour drawings from that album were to be found in an October 7 sale at Christie's South Kensington of works of art from the collections of the renowned Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005. Both are illustrated here, along with examples of James Baillie Fraser's own work, as seen in copies of his two major plate collections that sold for record sums in recent years.

James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856) continued to travel and to record his adventures in Persia and elsewhere, but in 1835, William, who was by then Resident and Agent to the Governor-General in Delhi, was assassinated. According to my old Dictionary of National Biography, the actual assassin was caught and executed, but the order for the murder was finally blamed on "…Shana-ud-din, Nawab of Firozpur, against whom Fraser had issued a decree." He, too, was tried and hanged, and in a masterpiece of unintentionally ironic understatement, the writer of this DNB entry concludes, "His trial greatly excited the Muhammedans of Delhi."

Seen at left is one of the 24 coloured aquatints after James Baillie Fraser that make up his Views of Calcutta and its environs, an oblong folio collection of 1824-26. This plate comes from a copy that sold for $52,767 as part of the Robert and Maria Travis library, a pictorial record of India and Far East dispersed at Sotheby's in May 2005. Seen at right is one of the 20 coloured aquatints from a copy of James Baillie Fraser's Views in the Himala Mountains (1820-27), which made $65,959 in the same sale.

Thugs and Thuggery

Like James Baillie Fraser, the Hungarian-born painter August Theodor Schoefft (1809-1888) was an artist drawn to travel in exotic places, and especially to the East.

In 1835, the year in which James' brother William was assassinated in Delhi, Schoefft left Pest and journeyed to India, via Turkey. Whilst in India, Schoefft found employment in Lahore, at the court of Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler known as the "Lion of the Punjab." It was there in 1841 that he painted his best known work, a monumental depiction of The Court at Lahore in which can be seen over a hundred individual portraits*, but seen on October 7 at the Christie's South Kensington sale of the Ismail Merchant collection was The Thugs of India: Halt at the Shrine of Ganesh, another large oil of the period but one that was almost certainly executed on his return to Europe.

The subject was one that fascinated many in the 19th century, especially in Britain. Thugs or Thugges were a brotherhood of robbers and murderers whose trademark method of dispatch was strangulation. Active in India for almost two centuries, the Thugs would attempt to gain the confidence and trust of travelers before killing them by throwing a short length of material around their necks and strangling them. They would then strip their victims of all valuables before burying them.

The Thug heartland was the rocky and arid district of Madhya Pradesh in Central India, and the brotherhood's activities went largely unnoticed by the British until the 1820's, when the apparently unaccountable disappearance of treasure bearers led Lord Bentinck, the Governor-General of British India, to order an investigation. Under the direction of Major William Sleeman, a systematic destruction of the cult was instituted, and during the 1830's, some 3000 Thugs were captured. In more recent times there has been some argument as to whether such a cult really existed, or whether their persecution was a British ploy to tighten their grip on India.

In Schoefft's picture, a shrine to Ganesh, the elephant headed Hindu deity, is the scene of a Thug attack, and the turbaned male figure in the left foreground twists a white turban cloth which he intends to use on the Akali Sikh warrior seated in front of him, who is distracted by musicians and the recumbent female. The finished work is a grand salon or stylised history painting, but Schoefft is known to have visited Thug prisoners in the Delhi jail and even to have helped a local potter produce scenes of their banditry activities in clay.

Many writers were drawn to the story of the Thugs, among them Philip Meadows Taylor, whose 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug led to the word entering the English language; Mark Twain, who wrote about them in Following the Equator; and John Masters, whose 1952 novel The Deceivers was later made into a film by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, starring Pierce Brosnan.

The sale also included a lot comprising six pencil and watercolour Patna School depictions of gangs of Thugs, capturing, garroting, and burying a traveller, as well as worshipping the goddess Kali. Dated to 1830-40, the set sold for $9516.

*The Court at Lahore was acquired by The Lion of Punjab's son, Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was famously removed to England to be educated and westernized—see M.A.D. for July 2007, page 2-E—and it hung at his English home, Elveden Hall in Suffolk. It was later returned to Lahore, where it is now displayed alongside the collections of his daughter, Princess Bamba.

Charles Jeffries—A Favourite Squeeze

Squeeze-boxes, or as I should say, concertinas, have not figured large in these columns over the years, but a Bonhams musical sale of October 7 offered three of them, all dated to around 1900 and all attributed to the same maker, Charles Jeffries. You can find out all you need, or rather all there is to know about the man, on line at (www.concertina.com/jeffries/con certina-maker/index.htm), but for my purposes a summary of the life and work of this elusive figure will suffice.

As far as is known, Jeffries had no technical training and was never employed by any of the established concertina makers, such as Wheatstone, yet somehow he managed to produce concertinas that are widely regarded as among the best ever made. No manufacturing or sales records have survived, and the Web site authors explain that they have not found even one price list, brochure, or advertisement issued by Jeffries and only occasional mentions of secondhand instruments in the advertisements of concertina retailers. John Hill MacCann's The Concertinist's Guide, a virtual "Who's Who" of the late-Victorian concertina industry, contains no advertisement for C. Jeffries, but lists among the concertina makers "Chas. Jefferys, Parade Street, Paddington, W."—a doubly misspelled reference to Charles Jeffries, Praed Street.

Today the instruments made by Charles Jeffries command the greatest interest (and the highest prices) of any vintage concertinas.

Two of the instruments in the Bonhams sale were examples of his "Anglo" concertinas, engraved on the nickel-fretted endplates with the legend "C Jeffries Maker 23 Praed Street London W," which dates them to 1891-1908. Each with six leather bellow folds and with gilt decoration to the hexagonal ends, they sold for $5150 and $5250, but the most expensive of the group was a later instrument.

This, too, was engraved with the name "C Jeffries Maker" between the buttons on both of the pierced metal endplates and on an oval, but on a separate plaque on the body appears the address "12 Aldershot Road, Kilburn," which dates the piece to 1923-30. This later example of his work was bid to $6295.

Driving on the Roof of the World

It was just over one hundred years ago, in 1907, that the first automobiles crossed the Himalayas and entered what was until that time the almost unknown land of Tibet. These two French-built motor cars had to be carried there, of course, but once safely unpacked and reassembled on the Tibetan plains, off they chugged. The motor car had arrived on the Roof of the World.

One of the cars, an 8-h.p. Clement, was intended as a gift for the Panchen Lama, who presided over the Tashilhumpo monastery near Shigatse and who in the Tibetan hierarchy was second in importance only to the Dalai Lama himself. The other car, a Peugeot, belonged to a Captain O'Connor, who had been posted to Gyantse as the British trade agent under a new Anglo-Tibet Convention.

Freddie O'Connor (or Sir Frederick as he later became) had seen many years of military service on the Northwest Frontier and, as a Tibetan-speaking officer, acted as a secretary to Sir Francis Younghusband's famous Lhasa mission of 1903-04. That mission was in effect an invasion by Britain, aimed at preventing undue Russian influence on the Tibetan rulers and ensuring that the country acted as another buffer state between Russia and British India.

Staying on as the trade agent, O'Connor struck up a close friendship with the Panchen Lama and in 1905 took him to Calcutta to meet the future King George V of England. When the time came to leave Tibet, O'Connor made a gift of the Peugeot to the Panchen Lama, who may thus have had the honour of being the first two-car family in his country.

Offered as part of "India & Beyond," a travel sale of pictures, photographs, and books held by Bonhams on October 6, was an album of 45 photographs that may have belonged to an army mechanic responsible for servicing the cars. Most of the photographs are portraits of Tibetan and European figures, including regimental groups, but three of them feature these first Tibetan cars.

Two of them show Captain O'Connor in his Peugeot, and in the third we see a figure believed to be the Chinese Amban, or representative of the Chinese Emperor in Tibet, in the Clement. Whether he is driving or just sitting in the car is not clear.

The album made a much higher than expected $8585.

Whilst looking for more detail on motoring in Tibet, I found that it was not until the 1950's that the first Tibetan motor repair facility opened, but nowadays you can rent a car, just as you can pretty much anywhere else in the world, and as car sales slump around the world, the Xinhua News Agency reports that in Tibet sales have risen by 20% over the past year!

Severin Wundermann's Chelsea Wünderkammer

How many M.A.D. readers, I wonder, would think of assembling a collection of glass newel post finials? I had no idea they were once so popular, but packed onto the shelves of elegant fitted wooden bookcases in one room of the Chelsea (London) home of Severin Wundermann, the flamboyant Belgian-born businessman, purveyor of exclusive Gucci and Corum watches, art collector, and philanthropist, were hundreds of the things.

As part of a September 30 Bonhams sale of Wundermann's Chelsea collection, they were offered in 20 lots, each of around 20 or more examples. Seen is a sample group of 24 red, purple, clear, and opaque glass finials that were estimated at $700/1000 but sold for a staggering $36,250!

This remarkable result is somehow quite in keeping with the extraordinary story of the man who collected them. The youngest son of a Jewish glove maker, Severin was just three years old when the Nazis invaded Belgium and his parents paid a Catholic priest to hide their three children-Severin being sheltered in a school for the blind before eventually joining his older sister in California at the end of the war.

Escapes from death framed the beginning and end of Wundermann's life. In 1996, he was diagnosed with an aggressive strain of lung cancer, but this time he was able to survive not by hiding away, but by using his great wealth to gain much more than the month that he had been given. He found a doctor ready to treat him with an experimental range of drugs, promising him $1 million for every year that he stayed alive.

Wundermann survived for more than a decade and wasted not a minute of it, continuing to fly constantly in his own private aircraft between homes, villas, and chateaux in California, London, Paris, the south of France, and Switzerland.

His philanthropy was equally extravagant. For nearly 50 years he collected objects and memorabilia associated with the French artist, poet, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and in 2005 gave this entire collection, the largest of its kind in the world, to the French Riviera town of Menton, where a new museum devoted to Cocteau will open in 2010. With Stephen Spielberg, he founded the Severin Wundermann Collection of Child Survivor Testimonies from the Holocaust at the University of Southern California, and to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum he gave a collection of all the work created by the artist Josef Nassy during his time in Nazi internment camps. Wundermann also gave large sums to support medical research on both sides of the Atlantic.

Reflecting Wundermann's brushes with death, another room in his Chelsea house displayed his collection of memento mori skulls and polished bones, arranged around the walls in the manner of the wünderkammer of an earlier age, and also illustrated with this piece is a pair of late 19th- or early 20th-century carved marble skulls crowned with laurel wreaths which made far more than anything else in this line. Estimated at $1100/1600, the pair of skulls sold for $34,345.

Much of the sale catalogue was filled with more familiar pieces of furniture, objets d'art, pictures, etc., but I have added just one other lot that reflects the eclectic nature of Wundermann's acquisitions—a sweet (candy) dispenser.

Next, the Trouser Press

As someone who now rarely has occasion to check into hotels, I really don't know whether such things are still found in bedrooms, but there was a time when the luggage stand was a familiar feature, especially in the older, more traditional type of hotel. Sometimes it consisted simply of leather or even rubber straps stretched across a four-footed frame, but some I recall were of all wood construction. The luggage stand was not something that stayed in the mind; it was just there, like the Gideon Bible and the trouser press.

There may been others, but this is the first time that I have spotted a luggage stand in a London salesroom. A Victorian mahogany piece on turned legs and dated to the third quarter of the 19th century, this is more likely to have come from a guest bedroom in a country house than a hotel, but it remains something of a furnishing novelty. I am now on the lookout for an antique trouser press! In a Christie's South Kensington "Interiors" sale of October 6, this 30" wide luggage stand was bid to $3194.

The Ottoman Effect—Arts of the Islamic World

The most recent round of Islamic art sales in London saw steady business, with all the main salesrooms seeing around two-thirds of the lots shifted and less evidence than we have seen in the past on heavy bidding from just a few telephone bidders. As has been the case before, demand for works of art made in the Ottoman Empire, or of particular interest to that market, was strong, and this was reflected in the week's two best sellers.

For Christie's, the high flier was an Ottoman chart of the Mediterranean which sold for $1,711,425, while at Sotheby's, where one lot quite unexpectedly accounted for almost half of the entire sale total, it was a 16th-century prayer rug that may have been a gift to the Ottoman ruler Sultan Murad III.

A Safavid silk, wool, and metal thread prayer rug made in Isphahan in the late 16th or early 17th century, it was estimated at around $125,000/190,000 in an October 7 sale but was eventually sold for $4,339,500—a delightful surprise for the descendants of Rudolf Martin (1864-1925), a professor of anthropology in whose family it had remained for around a hundred years.

The key to its success may lie in the inscriptions, which suggest that it could have been a diplomatic gift from the Safavid Persian court to that of the Ottoman Turks. The poem with which it is woven in nasta'liq script translates as…

As long as there is trace of this earth and sky,
Let the Ottoman house be the supreme lords
On the throne of justice and good fortune
May it be perpetually joyful and successful
Let the name of Sultan Murad
Be the beautifying ornament of sermons and coinage
In Iran, as well as in Anatolia and the Arab lands
Let your might be that of a hero
May your new Spring never ripen to Autumn,
Be young as long as the World is in existence
Let the dust of your carpet, like Mirza Makhdum,
Be the most noble caller to prayer.

Executed around 1600 in ink and wash on paper, the two-part chart of the eastern and western portion of the Mediterranean seen at Christie's on October 6 was described as a navigational chart, but as the salesroom themselves acknowledged, there are good reasons for believing that it may not really have been intended for shipboard use.

There was some discussion in the on-line cartography forum (www.maphist.com) about possible Chinese influence and derivation, but there is evidence that charts such as this were familiar to Ottoman mariners in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and what material does survive suggests that there was interaction in such matters between the Islamic and Christian states bordering the Mediterranean. It is also believed that Islamic chart making centres existed in North Africa before they did in Istanbul.

The present example is certainly a very fine chart-better than many that were being produced in Western Europe at the time-but the lack of multiple compass roses or rhumb lines is just one hint that this chart was not seen simply as a navigational tool, and here the Mediterranean has been tilted so as to fit neatly into two large square sheets, leaving the longitude lines at a slight angle. If indeed they are lines of longitude, and not a copying device or a different form of projection.

Professor Beatrice Gruendler of Yale University, who advised Christie's in the cataloguing of the chart, put forward the suggestion that the chart could have been used by an Ottoman admiral for planning naval campaigns. She notes that the detail and accurate marking of many coastal locations other than just port cities are important for possible landing sites and sheltering ships. The marking of castles with perspective plans along the coastlines supports that argument.

Professor Gruendler also points to the production of "blank" maps in Istanbul in the 17th century, and another scholar, Svat Soucek, suggests that mariners, unable to make such charts themselves, might acquire charts showing only coastal outlines and then fill in the toponymy appropriate to their needs.

The presence of satellite towns such as New Tripoli and New Alexandria suggest a date of the late 16th or early 17th century, something confirmed by the analysis of the paper, which was made using wire moulds, a technique not introduced in the Ottoman world until this time.

Comprising two parts, each measuring roughly 47" x 52" and each in turn formed of several pieces of paper, the chart has the names of cities and ports in Ottoman Turkish written perpendicular to the coast, and some of the major sites are marked with a small red perspective plan. Islands are coloured red or green and shallows marked with small dots. Just one compass rose, topped by a European fleur-de-lis, appears in the Ionian Sea.

A few other highlights from the Islamic sales, all in this occasion drawn from the Sotheby's event, are also illustrated and described here.

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