Episode 10 Priceless Antiques Roadshow

We see some special things on the Antiques Roadshow.

But when it comes to provenance, nothing is better

than having a royal seal of approval.

In this episode we dust down the treasures

that were once touched by royalty.

Yes, there are some fabulous Roadshow finds with

impressive royal provenance coming up in this edition.

We get an intimate insight into the royal family.

Well, my grandfather was a gamekeeper on the royal estate

at Sandringham but he also had the special responsibility

of living at the kennels and looking after the dogs of the royal family.

Also, the king of glass, Andy McConnell

relives his Roadshow debut.

I like that. So where did you find that then?

I mean, I was so nervous. Some people complain about having

butterflies when they first appear on theatrical things or whatever.

I had, you know, butterflies in the tummy, I had two brontosaurus mating.

And pictures specialist Philip Mould unmasks the hidden stories

behind magnificent portraits.

It became clear that there were other suggestions

that the artist might have first thought about

but then decided to paint out.

Little ghostly ideas began to show through.

And we immediately embarked,

therefore, upon an X-ray to see what lay beneath.

If the Roadshow's archives were catalogued like a museum's contents,

I reckon this first section would be entitled

"From the cabinet of curiosities."

That's a polite way of saying the bizarre or just the downright weird.

That doesn't mean they are any the less interesting,

quite the opposite, in fact.

We've given some of our specialists special access to the vault

to unearth some of their favourite freakish finds.

I've never seen anything like it.

What a wonderful piece of modern sculpture.

Oh, my word!

Probably one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen

was a couple of years ago, back in Bishop Auckland,

when a gentleman came in with a massive cabinet.

I've seen some extraordinary collections on the Antiques Roadshow

but I think this one almost pips the post because it's a collection of...

false eyes.

-It is indeed, yes.

-And what makes you want to collect those?

He told me the story about how his father had been an optician

and used these as models in order to create false eyes.

This was one of his great passions, he made artificial eyes for people.

He used these collections,

not to put into people's eyes, but in fact for colour matching.

He had a very faithful group of clients who he used to love.

And hugely important, cosmetically.

'If you did lose your eye, you wanted something

'that matched so nobody could tell.' Each one was different.

And there was, I can't remember now,

two-and-a-half, 3000 different examples?

All different colours, all different shapes, all different sizes.

-Some are more bloodshot than others.

-They are, like some of ours indeed!

So, in many ways, they are rather like paperweights you sometimes see.

I mean, they are extraordinary. Each individual tray could be worth

up to £1,000.

So, just in this cabinet alone, let alone what you've got at home,

you're talking about 25 or £30,000.

Yes, well, that's quite an amazing amount

and, as I say, I love them as part of my family heritage but I'd never

really put a value to them at all, so that's extremely interesting.

Who'd want to buy glass eyes?

But the market's out there and they're extraordinarily rare.

So an amazing collection. Very rare and worth a huge amount of money.

An item that was once ordinary can now do seem bizarre to us.

Back now to the early days of the Roadshow,

a little embarrassment from a young David Battie.

I wonder if you can tell me what this is?

I think I know.

I think it's a lady's chamber pot.

You're absolutely right. I'm glad you said it rather than me.

I wonder if you know that it had a particular name?

No, I don't.

It's called a bourdaloue. It's bizarre in the sense that, compared

to the way we live today,

its function would seem to be really odd.

And of course, one finds sideboards during the 18th century

with a little cupboard at the back in which there was a pewter chamber pot,

for use, curiously enough, at the dining table.

Because, after the ladies had left, the gentleman sat round with their

port and their cheese and their nuts and the chamber was passed around

the dining table. It's a curious reflection on the times.

I suppose, in a way, going back 30 years or so,

in those days

a young man talking to an elderly lady about, sort of...

leakage, you didn't do it.

So I was pushing the boundaries quite a lot, I think.

And I think I was probably embarrassing myself the further

I dug down with the story!

Our next weird item provoked a strong reaction from Hilary Kay.

One of the most remarkable and interesting objects that came in

was at Wisley when somebody

delivered to me a bound foot, a model of a bound foot

in a tiny shoe from China, round about 1880, I guess.

What I'm looking at here with you is an embroidered Chinese shoe

which was made for Chinese ladies - this is not a child's shoe -

who had their feet bandaged.

In fact, the interesting thing about this shoe is it's the first time

I've ever seen one with a model of a bandaged foot.

Oh, really?

And this is what the Chinese did to their ladies.

I found this object actually quite shocking.

I'd seen the shoes before, but I'd never realised exactly what

was done to the foot in order to get it into those shoes.

The bones were restricted, really,

from childhood onwards, in tight, tight bindings.

So this is what adult ladies like you and me would have.

Their feet ended in this extraordinary club

with the toes tied round underneath.

Castle Mey was a bizarre experience in every sense.

The weather was so awful,

the setting was so wonderful, everything was in conflict.

And we really had a horrible day in weather terms.

But I was confronted by a man carrying a sort of black,

ill-defined object with various wooden plugs in it.

I have no idea what I'm holding. You tell me.

Well, some people find it hard to take as an object of beauty,

but that is a very useful item if you were fishing.

And that actually was once a dog and is now a dogskin buoy.

So this is a dead dog?

And how is it made waterproof?

Well, this black or dark brown shiny substance is actually archangel tar

and that was used for an waterproofing before rubber,

before tarmacadam, etc.

They were common objects only 150 years ago.

This is a remarkable survival.

He then revealed a story about how

dead dogs or dogs' bodies, with all the apertures sealed,

worked very well as fishing floats. I thought, is it April 1st?

So they're all bobbing about on the tide.

Absolutely.

And there would have been a whole sort of herd of them?

This was good news. It meant that there were

good catches there and they would say, "Oh, the dogs are dancing."

'I've never seen another dead dog.'

I did ask if they were common. He said he knew of three or four.

And I will imagine that I will go to my grave

not seeing another floating dead dog.

"The dogs are dancing," means you're in luck.

Yes and they're bobbing up and down.

It's a funny phrase but it was also a joyful time for the fishermen.

I think it was a good time not to be a dog.

But, you know, there we are. Then, of course, valuation.

What is the value of a dead dog?

There is no way on the Roadshow I'm going to value a dead dog.

No, it's just totally unique.

If you think you've got an object that can outdo that lot

in the oddity stakes, bring it along to a Roadshow.

We'd love to give it the once over.

So far this series, we've seen some confessions from familiar experts

about how nervous they were the first time they found

themselves in front of the cameras.

They seems so calm and confident, don't they?

Take our glass man, Andy McConnell,

perhaps the most extrovert of all our team, yet

even he tries to forget the first time he got the director's cue.

My first record, it was great, you know, a young guy had been to a boot

fair and he'd picked up this Keith Murray vase,

it was a green torpedo, quite a nice piece of English thirties glass.

And he'd bought it for two quid at a boot fair or something.

So my opening line, in that one doesn't get training for this,

my opening line to him was "And so, sir, where did you steal this from?"

And of course, "Cut, stop!"

So where did you find that then?

I got it at a car-boot sale.

Car boot?

And how much did you... how much were you extorted for this item?

-I paid £3.

-Three quid?

There never had been a glass specialist on the Antiques Roadshow.

There had been 420 ceramics experts,

7,255 paintings people,

9,415 furniture people, but never one glass expert.

Signed, Keith Murray, New Zealand architect.

Couldn't find any work after the Wall Street crash and turned to

designing porcelain,

pottery for Wedgwood and glass for Stevens and Williams, Royal Brierley.

I mean, I was so nervous. Some people complain about having

butterflies when they first appear in theatrical things or whatever.

You know, butterflies in the tummy?

I had two brontosaurus mating in my tummy for my first show at Rochdale.

If you wanted to replace it, £300 or £400.

-That's a big profit.

-Not bad for three quid.

I'll give you four for it, show you a profit.

I don't think so.

The only reason that I do quick records is that actually,

it's for as long as I can hold my breath.

I go... And then I run out of breath

and that's the end of the record, because otherwise I go...

and then fall over backwards in a faint.

Sometimes, I look down the queue at people and their objects at a

Roadshow and I try to guess what going to catch our experts' eye.

The thing is though, they don't take an object at face value the way

you or I probably would.

They see hidden messages and secret signs.

Portrait specialist Philip Mould is a classic example.

He spends his days unmasking the great and good, getting to the truth

behind the earliest form of spin.

Philip has come to Hatfield House in Hertfordshire,

which was the childhood home of a historical figure

who fascinates him above all others.

She was one of the earliest practitioners of the art

of self-promotion.

There's a lovely quote from the historian Thomas Carlyle which talks

about portraiture being "like holding up a candle to history."

And I love that idea.

A face, in a way that it offers you a slice of the time and the period

in a way that you can identify with

and understand, because it is, after all, a person,

works so much better than 50,000 paragraphs written

by the greatest historians.

Elizabeth I must be, in many ways, the most glamorous and certainly

the most powerful, in terms of presence and place in history,

monarch in the history of our nation.

What is so interesting is

because she was a woman in a man's world, she understood that there were

certain things that needed to be done, that played to her strengths.

She widened the language and brought spin and art together

at a whole new level.

The Elizabeth we see represented here in the iconic

Rainbow portrait is a far cry from her modest beginnings.

She was 60 when this was painted and a women very much in control

of her image.

To me, this is the high-water mark of Elizabethan portraiture.

You can read it like a book. The gold robe itself is covered

with these dismembered eyes and ears.

The symbolic power of it is unequivocal.

They're not even decorative, it's just telling you something.

It's saying loud and clear, just how famous she is.

She's someone who's talked about in the taverns,

she's someone who's seen from afar.

She is the great goddess of the new age.

And then the pearls, the pearls

that suffuse the picture as well, the pearls of virginity, of course.

She's a virgin queen, she's not married. Don't forget it.

But the more I look into Elizabeth's life in relation to her portraiture,

so you see that these faces, these bodies, this jewellery,

this expression and symbolism varies so much.

And I came across, recently, a most interesting early example,

one of a small clutch of portraits that show you just how radically

she transformed, how she basically reinvented herself in paint.

Philip's most recent find is the young Elizabeth,

when she'd just ascended the throne.

I was thrilled to have an unknown portrait and not only was it

a very important early portrait,

but it was one of those done just at the moment

that she was surfacing as Queen.

Not a glamourous image, but more just

"Phew, my sister's dead, I'm Queen.

"Take a look at me."

We restored her. It became clear that there were other suggestions

that the artist might have first thought about

but then decided to paint out.

Little ghostly ideas began to show through.

And we immediately embarked,

therefore, upon an X-ray to see what lay beneath.

So, what have you found out?

Well, this is the image of the picture as it is,

hidden away underneath.

You've got changes in the composition.

The hand is in a very different shape.

You can see here, the book that we've got from the final version,

but underneath here, you've got this orb.

And then there's difference here, it seems,

in the style of the lace as well.

This is a much more puritanical, Protestant type of lacework,

as opposed to this more

elaborate, beaded...

So she's basically had a full makeover, really?

She's been changed from this opulent portrait to the...

From the secular to the religious?

Exactly that, yeah.

So this is an early example of spin-doctoring.

This is the Queen or her advisor or someone of that nature saying,

"It doesn't look good like that, Your Royal Highness."

Or perhaps Her Royal Highness herself is saying it.

"And instead,

"why don't you represent yourself

"as a pious head of the Church rather than a secular head of state?"

That would make sense.

The process of manipulation and re-presentation of her face

and body to the nation is beginning.

Elizabeth's reinvention didn't stop there.

Hanging on my back gallery wall, greeting me every morning, is such a

radically different picture,

a picture of Elizabeth I

five or six years into her reign.

And it just shows you how very different

art can make someone appear.

And the contrast from this almost hatching insect that you see

in the earlier portraits to this strutting pheasant of a queen

is a testament to just how firmly she understood and wanted to harness

the power of art when it came to presenting her to the world.

And it's all to do with this, this massive, thick, rich backdrop of

vegetables and fruits, all twinned and all with one message,

which is fertility, marriageability, come and get me.

About this time, she was meant to have suffered from smallpox.

They thought that she was about to die.

The House of Lords came to her and said "Please name an heir." She said,

almost as a riposte to them, "How dare you ask me to name an heir?

"I can produce my own.

"I'm a fertile woman."

The ripe fruits, the pomegranate that are bursting with fertility and pips.

Every piece of greenery

was her way of saying "I'm not barren and I can have a child. Leave off."

And so what at first glance knocks you back as a sort of

hugely ornate expression is in fact a rather primitive,

possibly even poignant one.

It's "I can find a husband, I can have children."

And why poignant? Because she never did.

She's always captured my imagination.

How could she not? She was the person who ruled over a

transformed England that then reached out across the world and

changed itself and indeed the world, in the process.

She's also a woman on a man's stage.

And to have pulled off what she did

and to have done it with such style as evidenced in her portraiture,

she is a great inspiration.

It's fascinating to think that we can still learn even more

about an iconic royal like Elizabeth I

just by looking carefully at her portraits.

We often see items that have royal connections on the Antiques Roadshow

and they offer a unique insight into the family behind the crown.

Nine times out of ten, such precious pieces end up

on the tables of our royal correspondents,

jewellery expert Geoffrey Munn and books buff Clive Farahar.

This is a splendid collection of royal ephemera,

relating to Queen Mary and I must say, it has

a very topical ring about it.

These are all notes to her chef, is that right?

That's right, yes.

Saying wonderful things like "Do not give celery again

"when the Princess Royal dines here."

And "The dish was not popular." And so on and so forth.

Another, "Please make a note that Princess Alice and Lord Athlone

"do not eat potatoes."

I think it's absolutely wonderful.

'Royal objects obviously create a frisson'

at the Roadshow as far as I'm concerned

because I love handling that sort of material.

Any letter that comes from a member

of the Royal Family tends to be, obviously, it's very personal.

And I love that sort of thing.

So the frisson is mine, all mine, and

I love to know where they come from and how they've got hold of them.

My father went to school with Mr Emilot's son

and when he died...

He was the chef?

He was the chef, Monsieur Emilot,

he was at Buckingham Palace and then went to

Marlborough House with Queen Mary.

-After the death of George V?

-Yes.

And these had been kept, obviously, by the chef.

He should have thrown them away or handed them into the archives

or whatever, but he kept them.

And it showed Queen Mary making quite

a bother about the meals and who liked what and who didn't like what.

You have this with some 40 or 50 notes in and you have

this lovely signed photograph which I assume came from the same place.

-Signed by Queen Mary in the war.

-Yes.

Wilton House provided Geoffrey Munn with an unexpected royal delight.

Well, it belonged to my mother-in-law.

She arrived one day with a little bowl and she called it a lucky dip.

And she asked me if I would like to choose a piece of

jewellery for both of my children.

Amazing. I think this is probably the more spectacular lucky dip

I've ever seen in my life.

And it does put an immediate context on to the objects that we find.

And it's a provenance and it's a very exciting one.

Well, it says Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King Charles I.

She was born in 1635 and she died in 1650.

So it's a remarkably short life, actually.

And, in a way, this may be some kind of memorial to that life and here is

-a very beautiful stone in a...

-Very sparkly.

Very sparkly. And it's doing it right now.

It seems to like the attention were giving it.

Anyway, so is it a Stuart relic or not?

I think it probably is, which is a very exciting thing for me to say.

I think a link with royalty can add enormously to

the commercial value of an object.

And how on earth one's to value this, I haven't the slightest idea.

Maybe 7, 8, £9,000 for it without any reference to provenance whatsoever.

Put the provenance on and the sky's the limit, perhaps.

Maybe £15,000 isn't wrong.

I think the nicest things one sees on Roadshows that come from royalty are

letters of a very personal nature.

-This is from Windsor Castle. "Dear Mrs Way," - Is that Way?

-Yes.

"Thank you so very much for looking after,"

-and I think it's "Cling", is it?

-Cling, perhaps.

"..So beautifully. He seems to have quite recovered from his illness." Who is Cling?

Well, Cling must have been one of the dogs

that Elizabeth and Margaret left

for my grandmother and grandfather

to look after while they were away from Sandringham.

Was he a dog keeper to the royal family?

Well, my grandfather was a gamekeeper on the royal estate

at Sandringham but he also had the special responsibility

of living at the kennels and looking after the dogs of the Royal Family.

Queen Elizabeth, as she then was, also came to visit my grandmother

and on one occasion, we were playing cricket,

just with a tennis bat and a ball, and they took part in it.

And another occasion, they brought along the corgis and we and

my cousins were running around in our vest and knickers in the summer

and the corgis chased us upstairs.

And they think they enjoyed this human aspect, visiting us on that

basis, because they said in

the letters that they regarded my grandmother as one of their

friends, somebody to come and visit as soon as they got to Sandringham.

This one's signed by Albert. "Sandringham, Norfolk.

"With many thanks for looking after and training Scummy."

Scummy or Scrummy. That would have been one of the gun dogs, because

my grandfather, being a gamekeeper, would have known all about gun dogs

and the training of them.

And signed Albert, who is of course George VI.

This was a very private side of them,

and that was, I think, absolutely charming.

Now, I think one of the most exciting royal discoveries I made

was a memorial stickpin made to Queen Victoria's order

to commemorate the death of Prince Albert.

Probably been in my possession for about 10 to 15 years.

I might have only paid about a tenner for it.

A tenner? Isn't that wonderful?

It's the most exciting jewel, this, because it's a memorial to one of

the most famous love affairs that has ever taken place on this planet.

It's a memorial pin for Prince Albert.

It got his cipher on the front,

an A under a royal crown, but more importantly, on the back, it says

"In remembrance of the beloved Prince,

"December 14th, 1861, from VR," from Victoria Regina.

I think the love affair between Prince Albert and Victoria

was a very public one. It was a very intense one.

Queen Victoria wrote that she only

had to look into his dear, sunny face to make her adore him.

And I think she really did adore him.

And when it opens here,

we can see a contemporary photograph of the Prince Consort within it.

Have you ever had it professionally valued?

Well, only up to about £200, actually.

£200 for a piece of jewellery of national importance, really?

My goodness. I don't think it's enough.

I think it's worth £3,000 of anybody's money.

£3,000!

£3,000, indeed.

It's a thrilling thing.

It's just as much an emblem of her grief as the Albert Memorial.

The Albert Memorial is a vast architectural monument to Prince Albert

and this is a tiny stickpin, but she wrote to King Leopold of the

Belgians the day after Albert's death and said,

"My life as a happy one is ended.

"The world is gone from me."

And this tiny jewel says it all about the most important person

living in the world at that time.

Clive Farahar and Geoffrey Munn with some of their most

memorable royal finds.

Which just about brings us to the close of this episode of Priceless Antiques Roadshow.

Next time we revisit the archives to hear stories

of unsung heroes from wartime.

And this gentleman was so quiet, unassuming, and a real hero.

I felt very privileged to be there that day.

Ceramics specialist John Sandon tries his hand at a

time-honoured tradition.

Sandons have a reputation for being the worst potters imaginable.

I don't think this is going to be a masterpiece on a future Antiques Roadshow.

And we delve in to the story of domestic technology with more fascinating finds.

It's an amazing object, isn't it?

It shrieks, literally, sixties at you. These incredible colours.

It's so dynamic and vibrant.

Before we go, another classic Roadshow outtake.

Pictures expert Mark Poltimore usually has

a fabulous eye for detail but we all have our off days! Goodbye.

Here we have a 17th century subject but, in fact, it's probably painted

in the 20th century, in the early part of the 20th century.

Probably about 1900, 1905, something like that.

Well, the date's on there.

You're absolutely right. Can we start again?

1891.

You made me rush.

Shall we start again now? I was out by 10 years, come on!

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