Norwich Antiques Roadshow

Welcome back to Norwich for our second programme

from the city's Anglican Cathedral, an 11th-century gem.

And while our experts reassemble in the cloisters, I thought we'd have a peep inside.

You'd expect a cathedral to have fabulous stained glass and lashings of religious art,

and Norwich comes through on both those counts, but what is really special here isn't quite so obvious.

For example, there's a collection of carvings that are so high up

in this vaulted ceiling that you need a telescopic lens to see them.

Luckily, we have one.

The beautifully carved keystones or ceiling bosses are unique

and are amongst the greatest hidden glories of Medieval art.

Created by stonemasons between 1300 and 1515, there are more than a thousand of them.

Some are inspired by stories from the Bible, others by scenes from medieval mystery plays.

Among the less obvious symbols, this row of jagged teeth is supposed to represent the mouth of Hell.

Three damned souls are guarded by a toad-like creature.

More than 70 feet below those carvings,

the tip-up seats of the choir stalls have these carved flaps.

They're called misericords, from the Latin word for "mercy", and it's easy to see why,

because they were to support frail and aged monks

who had to be on their feet through eight hours of services a day.

The stalls date from the 15th century so they've acquired a nice polish from ageing bottoms.

The carvings include an extraordinary array

of exotic creatures and some fairly enigmatic symbolism.

A mermaid suckling a lion represents the seductive force of a temptress.

This man riding a deer is thought to be the personification of lechery.

Antlers are an ancient symbol of adultery.

But there are everyday scenes too, which, like the ceiling bosses,

offer an authentic view of life in those days.

In 1996, to celebrate the cathedral's 900th birthday, the Dean and Chapter

commissioned some new misericords which will give future visitors a glimpse of the way WE were.

One of them shows hard-working students

at the University of East Anglia, another has two of the heroes of Norwich City Football Club.

Meanwhile, over in the cloisters, our experts have taken their pews for another Antiques Roadshow.

This is a wonderful photograph of a very grand house somewhere.

And I'm guessing there must be a relationship with these little creatures we've got here.

-Tell me the story.

-It's the story of my grandparents' romance.

That's my grandfather. He was the under-gardener.

-And his name was?

-Ernest.

Ernest Reeve. And Granny worked in the house at the back, and they always called her Nellie next door.

And the people in the family here, they set up a romance between them.

The lady of the house said, "Ernest we've got these lovely apples,

"and Nellie next door comes from a large family - give some to her to take home."

And he took them home for her.

And anyway, they got married, and of course my mother came along, and the housemaid, who I gather was

one of these two, bought that bunny for my mother on 29th January 1904.

And you date it so precisely?

-Well, she was four days old.

-Well, these little creatures,

-they look as if they've got a story to tell. Do you like them?

-No.

-Neither of them?

-No.

-Oh, shut its little ears up!

They've always lived under the back bedroom bed in a pillowcase.

Well, I'm just stroking this rather lovely velveteen coat of this little bunny.

Do you think he was new in 1904?

I'm convinced he was new. My grandmother wouldn't have anything second-hand in the house.

-She didn't like it.

-Well, I don't think he was second-hand either,

but he would have been really quite an expensive present.

-It would take up the best part of a week's salary for a housemaid.

-Really?

-It would.

-When she bought him, he would have had a little pair of slippers on.

-I remember those.

-You do?

-My mother said he had a blue jacket, but I don't remember that.

And do you know where he left his little blue jacket?

-I don't know.

-In Mr McGregor's garden.

-You think he's Peter Rabbit?

-He IS Peter Rabbit.

-He is a Peter Rabbit?

-He is a Peter Rabbit, made by a German company called Steiff.

-Really?

It was in fact Beatrix Potter who asked the Steiff factory to make

-Peter Rabbit cuddly toys...

-Yes.

..because they were the best company, she felt that they would

best represent him in the most accurate ways. And who's his friend?

Well, he's the teddy.

He came later. My mother had measles quite badly when she was about four, and the lady of the house said,

"Poor little Susan, she must have something nice" and sent him.

Let's have a look and see if she bought a better-quality toy, and I actually don't think that she did.

He is almost certainly German.

He's made out of a nice silvery-coloured plush.

You can just see where he's not too threadbare.

What I think is particularly charming about him, though, is this wonderful

kind of lopsided smile created by being cuddled against a cheek for decades.

And so his little smile's got very lop-sided. No, he's charming.

And boot-button eyes here.

Value today...

I think the little bear we'd be talking about perhaps £400.

-Good heavens!

-But the bunny, I think, would be a little bit more than that.

Even as he is, I think he's probably going to be around £500.

In lovely condition with his jacket, he'd fetch many thousands,

as much maybe as the world record of 20,000.

No!

So I think it's worth making the hunt for the missing pieces but I think...

-That is amazing.

-It is amazing.

But I also think what is so wonderful is that we've been able to pinpoint

them, not just in a date line, but also in a family line.

Yes! I think that's why I hang on to them, because they are sort of part of the family, really.

It was given to my dad

by his ex-boss, who remarried and moved to Malta.

Yeah.

-He said, "Yes, please" but gave it to me because he hated it.

-Hated it.

And he gave it to me because we'd just bought our first caravan.

And he said, "Would you like it for the caravan?"

It bounces along in your caravan.

-No, we never did put it into the caravan.

-No?

I just put it in the cupboard and saw a programme on

television one day, and somebody mentioned Clarice Cliff.

And I thought, "I recognise that name," looked at the dinner service and thought, "Clarice Cliff,"

and it's just sat there ever since.

And have you been following Clarice Cliff ever since?

Because there's her signature in the printed mark.

Biarritz is the range, made at Royal Staffordshire,

and then the number in there tells us it's 1933.

Each one will have the date on it.

You've got what, six...

-plates of everything?

-Six of that one and the top two there, and then one of that, that and that.

So you're getting on for 24 pieces in total.

Well, this is actually quite an unusual pattern with this little inset landscape.

I've not seen this pattern before.

It's going to appeal to Clarice Cliff collectors.

It's nice, jazzy, wonderfully rectangular, really '30s stuff.

You're sitting on a dinner service that is probably going to cost you,

if you buy it at auction, in the region of £1,500, maybe £2,500.

Really?

Lovely. Thank you!

Never in the whole history of the world

-has anybody ever achieved metalwork like the Japanese.

-Yes.

They were staggeringly good,

and they were good because they were a very warlike nation,

they were always fighting each other,

and for that you needed swords,

-and with the swords came sword guards and scabbard furniture.

-Mm-hm.

And it was from that, when they banned swords in the 1870s,

-that the metalworkers turned to making objects for the West.

-Yes.

-And that's what this is.

-Ah!

How did you get it?

-It belongs to my mother.

-Oh, yes.

But it came from my grandmother.

We believe they went on a cruise to the Far East and picked it up.

That's all we know.

Pre-war. Before the war.

I'd be kind of hesitant about that story.

This was made for the West...

-Right.

-..in about 1890,

so the question we have to ask ourselves is what was it still

-doing in Japan when your grandmother took her cruise, which would have been probably the '30s, right?

-Yeah.

-I don't think it's as late as that.

-Right.

What it certainly is is a very charming box.

It's made of...

Oh! It's made of a very heavy cast metal,

which has been patinated to this black colour.

And the great joy about it is that nobody's cleaned it.

People say, "Oh, black, must be silver, therefore it must need polishing." But nobody's done that.

We've got a little bit of surface wear on here but it's not too bad.

We've got silver snow on Mount Fuji up here.

We've got an eagle perched on a very high relief rock,

which is looking at its lunch down here.

-Do you have an idea what that is?

-Well, I think it might be a fox.

-Right.

-One would have expected a rabbit, or a hare, more likely.

And then details in gold.

We've got a praying mantis, a snail, a...

Put the glasses on.

A stag beetle, a crab, dragonfly and a bat, a batty bat! Erm, a hornet...

I mean, it's just a joy.

It's just a joy. I love it.

And this would have sat probably on your grandmother's dressing table

and taken a necklace or jewellery of some sort.

Well, I love it.

I think it's a wonderful thing.

And presumably it's going to come to you one day, is it?

Possibly, I've got a twin sister, though. We might have to share it.

I think it's great fun. Erm, I think

it needs an insurance figure on it

of £1,800, £2,000 on it for insurance.

-Fantastic.

-It's a nice thing.

This is certainly to my memory one of the best pieces we've ever had on the Roadshow.

It's a very fine English shotgun,

but, unlike most English shotguns, it's barrels are over and under

rather than side by side. Where did you get it from?

Because it is so unusual for a gun of this period, from the 1770s.

Well, I was given it by an old gentleman in the 1950s,

-late 1950s, and I've had it ever since.

-Really?

It's made by a chap called Bunny,

who was based in both Birmingham and London and was one of the leading makers of the day.

And it's unusual because even though it's an over-and-under configuration,

both the barrels aren't actually fired by separate locks.

It relies on one lock.

And very cleverly, when one barrel has been fired, you just simply

rotate it round to produce the other by pulling back on the trigger guard. Have you ever actually used it?

Yes, I have, yes.

What I can't quite get over is that you can actually prime

the second barrel completely in the flash pan and turn it over, and it works perfectly.

When you fire the first one, just draw it back to half-cock,

pull it back full-cock, and you're ready to go.

And that gave you a very, very quick second shot.

And at the time that this was made, most sporting guns were

single barrel and relatively long, and before 1787,

with the invention of Knox patent breech,

you needed that huge barrel to get the ballistics so that the powder burned.

This relies on a very much shorter barrel because you

can compress the two, and it's a really very, very manageable gun.

-I don't think it's actually very much different from a modern clay-pigeon gun.

-No, it's lighter.

Yes. And it's very, very typical in terms of decoration and style of the period,

that lovely graceful dropped butt

and this fine engraving on the lock plate

and the side plate and also on the tank.

I think that because it is so unusual, and I have wracked my brains

to think of where I've seen any others... I think that there's one in the Royal Armouries,

and I believe that there was one in a very significant private collection, but I don't think it was sold.

And I think that a gun like this, of this period, of this quality, and it's absolutely exquisite quality,

with this unusual configuration

and mechanism is really going to set the British sporting shotgun collecting fraternity on fire,

and I think anywhere between £10,000 to £15,000.

-Well, thank you very much!

-Thank you for bringing it. It's absolutely wonderful.

I shan't sell it!

A few years ago, I fell in love, and I fell in love with a place

called Venice, and Venice is where your pot came from.

-Did you buy it there?

-No, we didn't.

-My husband bought it from a shop in London because he liked the colours.

-Simply fell in love with it.

-He just completely fell in love with the yellow and the blue.

-The colour of it IS splendid.

If you just look at these wonderful greens, the blues, the yellow,

the wonderful manganese on his hair, it's a splendid thing.

And if you go to Venice, even today in the pharmacies,

the farmacia as they are in Italian, they still have these wonderful drug jars.

Do you have any idea how old it is?

About 100 years old. 200 years old?

-So would it surprise you if I said 300 years old?

-Yes.

Well, that's exactly what it is. It's a 17th-century Venetian drug jar.

Fantastic.

And it's fabulous.

It's unfortunate that the best side, in my opinion, is this wonderful...

It's almost like a wonderful fabric, you can imagine some great Venetian

noble with a magnificent robe, all these wonderful colours.

It has, what we say in Newcastle, a ding on it.

It's been hit there, and it's rather shattered.

Fortunately, I suppose the face is still perfect.

-But even like this, what do you think it might be worth?

-Well, he paid a few hundred pounds for it.

He didn't actually tell me how many hundred pounds, because I think he was nervous to tell me at the time.

Well, even with the damage it's going to be worth £2,000 to £2,500.

Wow! Really?

If it was perfect it would be £6,000 to £8,000.

But even like this, even with this crack in it, £2,000 to £2,500. It's a splendid object.

So I'm not to be cross with him any more that he bought it?

-He deserves a big hug, I think!

-I think he does!

-Yep.

This looks tantalising.

I always like to see things wrapped up. Have you ever opened this?

-No, I haven't.

-No?

-No.

And it says on the upper cover "MS of the Iron Horse".

I imagine that means "Manuscript of The Iron Horse".

It's a novel by RM Ballantyne, 19th-century novelist.

-My great-grandfather.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-The author of Coral Island...

-Yeah.

-..was your great-grandfather?

-Yeah.

So this has been in your family?

This was left to me by my grandmother, his daughter,

and there's two more that were left to my brother and my father.

-Wonderful!

-And we've been clearing out my mum's attic and they've come to light.

-Fantastic. Shall we open it?

-Yeah, go for it.

-Let's take the string off.

Very worried about doing this, you see. That's why I've never done it.

I'm hoping this is what I...

It's going to be.

Fabulously wrapped contemporary newspaper.

And yes, I recognise this handwriting.

This is certainly Ballantyne's hand, and I think this genuinely is

the manuscript of the novel The Iron Horse.

And from the look of it, I would have thought it's absolutely complete.

I don't know how many pages we've got here.

332.

And it finishes with the words "The End, RMB Edinburgh 16th August 1871,"

so yes, here we've got one complete manuscript by RM Ballantyne.

This looks like another complete manuscript.

The Lifeboat: A Tale by R M Ballantyne again with illustrations.

This is rather longer, I would imagine this is 400, possibly 450 pages.

Again it looks absolutely complete,

which is tremendous - another complete novel in manuscript.

-Do you think this is a third?

-I think so.

-Fighting the Flames: a Tale of the London Fire Brigade".

-Yeah.

He was a wonderful novelist, wasn't he? Very hands-on, very exciting.

He always, as far as I understood it, worked doing the things he was then going to write about,

so if he wrote about the fire brigade he'd have actually gone and done some work for the fire brigade.

-And been a fireman.

-And the lifeboat, the same thing, and probably worked

-on the trains doing that before he wrote the books.

-How fabulous.

-So he was writing from experience as well as from...

-That's right.

..the Boy's Own side of things, which is where he comes from.

Well, even one of these would have been quite an exciting discovery,

but for you to come along here and bring me three is really wonderful!

And especially to unwrap one which hasn't been unwrapped, I imagine, for 50 to 100 years.

-Is there a date on the paper?

-Yes. Let's have a look.

-1889.

-Wow.

-So it's been wrapped up since then. Isn't it tremendous?

-Fantastic, yes.

As far as value goes, I mean, he wrote an enormous amount.

You're probably aware he was a tremendous writer.

I think he wrote 80 novels in his career, so he wrote at great speed.

-Yeah.

-And there are examples of his manuscripts in collections

across the world, but, obviously, there are only 80.

-Yeah.

-So to have three is very nice.

I would imagine at auction today these would fetch

in the region of £2,000 to £3,000 each,

-so we're looking at three together at quite a substantial sum.

-Yeah.

And I think it's a very exciting literary discovery.

Yes, it's working out what to do with them - to leave them to a museum or...

-I don't know.

-I'm sure they'd be very happy if you did.

-Yeah, yeah. Fantastic.

Thank you.

When you and your friends pitched up with this earlier on, I thought,

"If you haven't got to the wrong queue, you've probably got to the wrong venue."

What were you doing here? Until I had a look.

This is fascinating. What can you tell me about it?

Well, my father gave it to me for Christmas 2001, a few years ago.

I wondered what it was. I kept asking him questions - where did he get it from?

And he bought it in an auction about 25 years ago in London, and he told me that it was

by an artist called Marcel Duchamp, who I'd never heard of at the time.

And I said, "What do you do with it?"

and he showed my how to spin it,

and it's actually a record, and he told me that it has Marinetti, a futurist poet,

his poetry from his own voice on the record.

I keep asking him to take it out and show me, but he's too scared that I'm going to drop it, so...

What's unique about it, what I love about it, is it's an optical illusion.

You can either see a red sphere in a black background or a white sphere in a red tunnel,

and I love looking at it just constantly trying to change my eye between the two.

I'm already feeling slightly spaced out.

Yeah, I think that's what he wanted to...

that's the image he wanted to convey to his audience.

I love all his artwork and the way he deals with optics, and he created many moving machines.

What we're dealing with here is the most exciting artist, as you yourself have perceived,

of the 20th century, in many ways.

Without Marcel Duchamp, we wouldn't have modern art as we know it and pop art and all sorts of other -isms

that have come out of the early 20th century would not exist without him.

Of course, he's the man who did the urinal, as well, as you know, and got away with it.

Put it in front of him, signed it and, yes, it was the Marcel Duchamp, the great seminal work of art.

He was a very interesting, confrontational, edgy figure.

You have got part of the set - sadly you haven't got the other five

or six that probably came with it, nor indeed do you have, or do we have, access to the back, so we can't

work out whether or not it may be a greater original than just a reproduction of the set of six.

However, on the basis that I think what it is IS what it is,

it's worth about £2,000.

Thank you very much.

I didn't realise.

Perhaps you ought to give it back to him now.

-Yes! Thank you.

-You'll take that back on the bus now, will you?

-Yes.

Don't drop it.

Well, it's a fantastic portrait.

You don't often get terracotta which depicts character so well as we have here,

and you've got a whole set of them, so tell me the story.

Well, they belonged to a great-aunt, and that's all I can tell you.

She lived in Hove, she never travelled,

but she did have a gentleman friend who travelled.

But I don't know where he went, what he did.

OK. Well, obviously they have travelled, they have somehow made their way from India to Norwich.

They are beautifully exotic little figures.

I haven't seen terracotta figures of this calibre very many times,

certainly not on the Roadshow,

and they were made in India,

obviously to cater for the Raj taste,

for people who were probably reasonably high up in the Indian army

as souvenirs of their time in India.

And of course, many of them, so to speak, went native - they loved India so much that they wanted to

stay there or they were homesick for India when they came back to Britain.

Terracotta is basically burnt earth - that's what the word means.

And if we look underneath them

we can see the natural colour of the clay here.

It's that sort of sandy-type clay.

It's a very difficult,

brittle clay to work, and to make figures like this you really do need to reinforce them.

And you can see here, peeping out at the bottom there are two pins, and these undoubtedly connect

right through the legs, through the body, they form the armature of the modelling.

So, you know, a lot of effort and thought has gone into these.

These are not mass-produced, each one is an individual sculpture,

which contrasts with all the porcelain figures we see on the show,

because they, by and large, are press-moulded and mass-produced.

I think these are absolutely charming, incredibly rare little terracotta figures.

They're probably 100 years old.

I would say that if you talk in terms of maybe £100, £200 apiece,

so that takes us, if we go for the upper limit,

that takes us to somewhere in the region of maybe £1,500, £1,800.

Good gracious!

Thank you.

What do you think this is?

My husband thought it was the top of a walking stick.

The top of a walking stick? What do you think it's made of?

I don't know. Horn? A horn of some kind?

You're right, it is a horn. That's absolutely spot-on.

It looks a bit like plastic, doesn't it? But it is horn.

This is actually inlaid in ivory, those pieces, and stained, and it's in the form of a cicada, I think.

And it's Japanese,

and it dates from probably in the middle of the 19th century.

-Oh.

-And those two holes are the clue as to what it is.

It's actually a netsuke, which is worn at the waistband like that.

Right.

I think it's a very unusual and rare object.

I think you wouldn't have much trouble getting around £1,000 for it.

Good heavens!

-Good heavens!

-A bit of a shock?

Well, it is. It's a big shock.

Good!

-Thank you.

-I'll look at it with different eyes.

-Well done.

The minute I open something like this

and I find I've got a row of no less than six

golfing buttons, it sets the pulse racing for a few people.

Do you come from a golfing family?

I don't. Not that I know, anyway.

-So you're not a golf widow or anything like that?

-No, no.

Well, they're printed on celluloid.

It's a sort of an early form of plastic.

The fact that they're wearing the sort of costumes that we've got here

dates them to probably around about 1910, maybe 1920.

Golf collectors, they're there on an international scale these days, you know, so if you were to

put something like this up for auction,

-what do you reckon they'd be valued at?

-I've no idea.

-Do you want to have a stab?

-£100?

£100? Actually, if you could get these for 100 you'd be doing

very nicely, because you wouldn't get them for less than £400.

Really?

-I wouldn't tell you a fib.

-No.

This is a copy of Black Beauty, which was one of my favourite books as a child.

Lovely story, too - Anna Sewell as a young child had an accident.

-I don't know whether you knew that. She sprained her ankles.

-Yes.

And so it meant that she was really quite confined in what she could do.

And she loved horses.

She wanted to write a book which

really set out the plight of reined horses,

she wanted to make sure people were much less cruel to them.

And we've got a copy here illustrated by Cecil Aldin.

-Have you had it for long?

-The book actually belongs to my mother.

I think she's had it for about 20 years or so.

She runs a big book fair in Norwich every summer, and I think it probably came through that.

I'll just turn into the book and see some of the illustrations, which are really beautiful.

I mean, Cecil Aldin

was really quite famous as an illustrator of animals. He had a tremendous feeling for horses.

Here we have Black Beauty as a foal with the mother,

which is a gorgeous image,

and propped up against my knees here is the original artwork.

How did you come by that?

Well, I work for Jarrolds,

which was a printer and publisher based in Norwich.

And they published Black Beauty in the first edition and then commissioned these illustrations

from Cecil Aldin in 1912, and we've got most of the illustrations still,

and they've been kept sort of hidden away, really.

If we look at it, we can see his sympathy with the lines

of the horse, the way he highlights, and it looks...

You can see the beautiful shine on her coat, the mare,

and little Black Beauty has got all that velvetiness that you associate with young horses.

It is something which is actually quite valuable.

It's likely to be worth £3,000 or £4,000 at least, possibly more.

Goodness me!

Gosh!

-Does that surprise you?

-Yes, it does.

We've got 13 of the illustrations.

I think there were 18 originally.

-We've got 13 of them.

-So you can do the maths for me.

-Yes!

Wow! Gosh, yes.

I've got this dish.

-It belonged to my grandmother.

-Belonged to your grandmother. Right.

It was her ashtray, actually.

-Her ashtray?!

-Her ashtray, yes.

On her bedside cabinet.

Goodness me! What an amazing ashtray.

-Do you think that was what it was made for?

-I have no idea.

It's got a few stains on the back. Looks as if it might be some nicotine that has crept in there, but...

Yes, and it seems terribly uneven, and crude, almost.

Yes, remarkably crude, isn't it?

Yeah. So I suppose you thought it might just be a bit of old junk.

-Well, I hadn't really thought.

-You hadn't really thought.

-It was just a quirky item.

-Yeah. And did you notice this in the centre?

-It looks like an anchor.

-An anchor - that's exactly what it is.

It's the mark of the Chelsea factory.

-Chelsea.

-Chelsea, and Chelsea porcelain is amongst the earliest porcelains produced in this country.

-Is it?

-Indeed.

So its crudeness is really a symptom of its early date,

because it was made between 1749

and 1751 at Chelsea in London.

So I can just picture Granny sitting in a smoke-filled bedroom...

-Yes!

-..stubbing out her cigarette ends on this delightful little thing.

-How on earth did it get to be there?

-I really have no idea.

A mid-18th-century piece of porcelain, amongst the earliest pieces made in this country.

You've surprised me, really.

She was well travelled, the old lady, but...

She had a couple of shops in the London area, especially during the Blitz.

-Right.

-They were newsagent's shops and tobacconist's.

Maybe someone bartered her for it or paid a debt or she had a debt paid off something like this.

A newspaper bill or something, yeah.

It was copied by the Chelsea factory from a much

earlier piece of Japanese porcelain in what we call the Kakiemon style.

The piece that it copied would have dated from about 1680,

so although this is mid-18th-century, you could regard it as a fake.

But because it's Chelsea, because it's early, because it bears this rare early mark,

it's worth £1,000.

A thousand...

For an ashtray!

Granny's ashtray makes £1,000.

And as an interesting aside,

the 1680 Japanese original which this is copying would only be worth £200.

So it's a measure of how special and how rare this piece of porcelain is.

A thousand pound!

John, I feel we should be dancing around this.

-This is a television icon, like the tower at Alexandra Palace, like yourself.

-My dear!

-Remind us what it is.

-This is the Anglia Knight, which we all know so well,

but it fact it was made in 1850 for the King of the Netherlands.

He was a patron of the Falcon Society -

horse riding and falconry and that sort of thing.

He was so confident he was going to win his annual competition that he had this made in London.

700 ounces of silver to make this fantastic figure. And it was won by an Englishman.

He never saw it again - it stayed over here.

It stayed until 1959, when Anglia went on air for the first time, and they adopted it as their flagship.

And Garrards made that to go on top, and one or two little minor adjustments, like his visor going

up and down, and it's been their flagship ever since - a marvellous thing, absolutely wonderful thing.

I always thought it was about three inches high, like other things in television.

Not me again!

-Where's it kept now? Do you know?

-It's the East Anglia Archive Centre,

and there it, hopefully, will remain for many more to enjoy forever.

Well, these look like pieces of jewellery, but of course they've got

absolutely every element of a piece of Gothic architecture, haven't they?

And it's your job, I think, to look after them, isn't it?

It is, yes. I'm one of the vergers here at the Cathedral.

It's not my specific responsibility to look after silver, but I look after the vestments

and the linens of the Cathedral,

and these two pieces we refer to as "the Bishop's bling".

Well!

They're wonderful things, they're the morses or clasps

which are used to hold together the front

of the Bishop's and the Dean's copes for festal occasions.

They're fantastically sculptural, and I think that this one

was made for a very special occasion indeed, wasn't it?

It was, yes, it was designed by Sir Ninian Comper for the coronation

of King Edward VII in 1902

and worn with the cope and the mitre by Bishop Sheepshanks.

And the thing about the coronation, or, more specifically the

-anointing, is that very few people know that that's actually a sacrament, isn't it?

-Yes.

And so this was a piece of jewellery of monumental scale

to mark a moment of monumental sanctity, really, isn't it?

-And I think in the back there's a certain amount of evidence for that.

-There is, yes.

Behind the panel in the very centre is a relic of chrism oil

used to anoint the head

of the King at the coronation, and there's an inscription around there marking that.

It's a sacrament because the King or the Queen is seen as a priestly office

and chrism is the oil used to anoint priests at their ordination.

Well, that really is the centre of this piece of jewellery,

but I think the visual centre's jolly hard to find,

because it's a hugely decorated and colourful piece of metalwork of the highest possible calibre, isn't it?

And Ninian Comper is a church furnisher and a designer.

His work goes well into the 20th century, working around and about East Anglia, and I suppose,

really, it's always been my point of view that jewellery represented

a sort of microcosm, a distillation of everything that's going on in the fine and decorative arts.

-This is a distillation, but my goodness, it's a powerful brew!

-Yes.

And what an awesome responsibility for you to have to look after it.

-Well, it is, yes.

-And I think the use of the stones are rather

interesting, too. Any green stone is a sort of emblem of hope, but, more specifically, we can see that

amethysts have been used in profusion here, and they're pretty important, aren't they, in church lore.

-Do you know their significance?

-I don't, no.

They're an emblem of devotion, and amongst them there are sapphires

and rubies and garnets,

and the garnet too may be a sort of tiny, covert reference to the Communion.

But anyway, they're almost hypnotic and I think that's a word one really can use for them.

Well, this was only part of the extraordinary spectacle

at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902,

in which jewellery had a huge part,

and it was worn by the peeresses - they wore tiaras in their hair and their coronets behind.

But, in a way, the rank and the status of people

was endorsed throughout, and here are the Spiritual Lords making it

absolutely plain that they were very, very important people indeed.

And very, very important people indeed wear enormous jewels,

and the scale of this one hanging below is quite astonishing.

I think at the time that it was made it was described as a topaz. People really believed it was.

Actually, now we know a little bit more about gemology and know that

this is actually a rock crystal, a cairngorm.

Goodness, I honestly don't think that at the end of a day at Norwich

one could have hoped to have seen a visual spectacle of this kind of proportion.

We've seen utterly marvellous things throughout the day,

but these have really taken us to a new height of splendour,

and I think the mere idea of trying to value them

-really is a complete vulgarity, and I think we'll just leave that alone.

-Well, they're priceless to us.

And irreplaceable. Simply close the box and let them go back again.

Thank you so much. Brilliant.

I know that inside a case that looks like this

is usually a case that looks something like that,

and, indeed, there is, and a particularly nice one, at that. Can you tell me something about this?

I can only tell you that I found it in a sewing box,

but I was particularly interested because it had the picture of Norwich Cathedral on it.

-That's a pretty rare feature.

-Yes.

And this is of course a visiting-card case. Let's just get rid of that.

Beautifully engraved there, and all the rest of this is engine-turned.

Opening it up, we see the hallmark.

It was made in Birmingham in 1852...

-Oh, right.

-..by Nathaniel Mills, who's the most famous maker

of snuff boxes, vinaigrettes, card cases.

-Oh, really?

-And this, of course, is a lady's card case,

because this is the size of a lady's visiting card...

and this is the size of a gentleman's visiting card.

Rather more insignificant - I don't quite know why, but that's how it used to be.

Yes.

-Well, it was really quite a lucky find.

-Really?

-Mm.

-I nearly didn't bring it.

Well, I'm glad you did.

These card cases are very collectable, and the more unusual

the subject the more desirable and valuable, dare I say...

-Yes, yes.

-..the card case is.

In this case, if you manage to get two collectors competing to buy this,

-I think it could fetch anything up to £2,000.

-Really?

Well, my idea is to sell it

and give the money to the cathedral campaign.

I think that would be a very good idea.

I think I might let the cathedral try and sell it.

-That's definitely secured your place in Heaven.

-Oh, good.

Two rather badly damaged pieces of porcelain.

I'm going to start off with a valuation.

I know that's not the usual way.

The valuation is that they are practically worthless.

-I'm not surprised.

-But that's not why we're looking at them.

-No.

-You tell me.

-Well, my father picked them up during the war, when he was in Hiroshima.

They went to pick survivors and prisoners of war up.

He went into Hiroshima and picked these pots up

just outside Hiroshima, about six miles out of the centre.

-What was your father doing there?

-He was in the medical corps,

-and that was his job in the Army.

-Did he talk about what he saw?

Not at all.

-It must have affected him.

-I think it did, yes. It did affect him.

He hardly went out of Norfolk once he got home, so that did affect him,

but he didn't ever talk about what he saw.

He used to have these pots and show them to people, but...

-And when he showed them to people, did he explain, did he say anything?

-Not really, no.

-Very little.

-He may not have said anything about these pieces, but he clearly treasured them.

-Oh, yes. Yes.

And they were obviously regarded as deeply significant objects.

Yes, I think.

For me, looking at something like this

sums up the whole business of why we make the show we make.

Because objects in themselves are not necessarily valuable or of interest,

but it's the stories that they can tell, and your father may not have spoken about Hiroshima,

but these bowls do.

-And you say that he picked them up six miles outside the centre.

-Six miles outside.

I as a ceramic historian know a bit about the technology of ceramics,

and I know that to fire a glaze onto a piece of porcelain

you have to take the kiln temperature up to 1,300 centigrade or more.

This little bowl, which was a very modest piece of Japanese

porcelain, made probably in the 1930s and decorated with its usual swing and flair,

was glazed at around that temperature, 1,300 degrees,

and then, of course, a few years later, when the bomb was exploded over Hiroshima,

this went through a second firing.

That's how hot it got.

-Mmm.

-The temperature, even six miles outside Hiroshima,

went up to 1,300 degrees centigrade and over,

and that's why you have these globules of glaze as the thing began to run for the second time.

And that's very eloquent.

That's far more eloquent than somebody telling you this is what happens when an atomic bomb goes off.

We're looking at a little piece of fossilised history,

which, when you begin to look into it, tells you just how horrific

a nuclear bomb going off is.

If we look at this sooted glaze, again, the same thing has happened.

You can just make out a faded rose in the design there.

This is fairly typical of a modest piece of Staffordshire pottery

that had been in this Japanese cupboard in the 1930s.

Well, that is quite amazing.

So, when you bring two ordinary, destroyed,

frankly ugly little broken pots, they are worth nothing.

But when we look into them,

we can give you another valuation, which is that they are priceless.

It's amazing they survived - a boat trip for Australia and then back.

Well, there's no doubt we managed to uncover

some really remarkable objects and hear some extraordinary stories on our visits to East Anglia.

So special thanks to everyone who joined us.

And now, from the cathedral in Norwich, goodbye.