Episode 9 Priceless Antiques Roadshow

Here's a spooky idea.

What if an antique could be haunted?

Some people who've visited the Roadshow reckon theirs are.

Just one of the stories coming up, as we delve deep into the archives

for another Priceless Antiques Roadshow.

We've trawled through over 500 editions of the Antiques Roadshow

to put this series together, right back to its earliest days

when the cameras first arrived at Hereford Town Hall in 1979.

From the day of that first recording it was clear nearly every object has a story.

And it's our experts who uncover them. For this episode

we've unearthed some of the oldest pieces ever to hit the screen.

It's 2,000 years BC, so this object is 4,000 years old.

And then coming right up to date, 20th century specialist

Mark Hill has a hot tip on contemporary collecting.

People are really taking an interest in the market and its designs

which are quite fantastic.

We will also dig into Henry Sandon's past to find out what makes him tick.

When she came back from hospital there was the first body laid out,

together with his pots that he'd been buried with.

That got me interested in pots, really.

I always know when something special has come to light at a Roadshow.

I can see a gathering of experts huddled in a corner,

intently examining an object.

Nothing's guaranteed to whet their appetites more than pieces

that are of a great age,

and these are some of the earliest finds that have come our way.

This is, I suppose, by far

the oldest thing we've ever had on the Antiques Roadshow.

I think it was Tavistock that I saw the oldest piece I have ever seen.

It was absolutely wonderfully exciting to hold one of these things

that had been going for, I suppose, 3,000 year's BC.

It's a stele, meant to go with the grave,

and it actually depicts the dead person

- that's him on the right -

being led into the Gods by all the leading Gods.

I suppose the most famous one, the Jackal-headed Anubis,

but they're all there. And then this wonderful hieroglyphs

as a description of what has actually happened

and what has been put into the tomb.

'All the world opens up to you, Egypt back in those times.'

It's mind boggling because of the great age of the thing

and the history that it's gone through -

the people that have known it or knew it when it was first made.

You picture the past.

Egyptian things survive by being buried in tombs.

Perhaps more modern things which were made for use don't survive.

They get damaged or thrown away or badly treated.

But old pots can survive quite incredibly well.

'It's in incredible condition. Considering its age, the colours

'are, I suppose, almost as great as when they were first painted there.'

In value terms, age doesn't necessarily count.

In value terms, things that are made today

can be worth more than something made thousands of years ago.

The last one of any reputable quality and date, equal to this

sort of thing, went for something like about £2,000 - £2,500.

Which may not seem desperately much considering the great age of it,

but they're not terribly uncommon objects.

One tends to think it's going to be one of its kind, but they do exist.

Each one is individual,

but they do exist in large numbers.

Age doesn't count. I mean, look at me!

I don't count for anything, and I'm quite old!

Certainly one of the oldest things I've ever found was

a Bronze Age fibula, a brooch.

It came from a very remote time when society was tiny

and somehow it was all the more magical for that.

It belongs to a friend of ours.

He has a fad for metal detecting and he found this

in a field somewhere outside Portumna, which is in County Galway.

I could almost see the woman wearing it on a dun-coloured shawl,

and the fact that she lived in a very tiny community

and that her life expectancy was probably no greater than about 28

and yet she may have been my ancestor or anybody's ancestor.

This is a souvenir of a very remote past, and very exciting.

It's 2,000 years BC, so this object is 4,000 years old.

This is really the beginning of Irish history.

Have you got a metal detector?

No, I haven't, but I'll buy one now, most definitely.

-I know, I think I am!

-Put on my wellingtons and out I go!

It was a very enviable thing. I would love to have found it.

I don't necessarily want to buy it but to find such a thing

would be the most magical experience of one's life.

I am now touching, to my knowledge,

the oldest piece of furniture we've ever had on the roadshow.

This has to be 1400s. They were made to take vestments

and, of course, the church plate and tithes and money.

Hence all these locks,

and of course all the church wardens had a lock each.

The owner actually wasn't the owner, it was a curator.

It had come out of a church.

Hadn't been opened in his memory.

We do wonder,

if it's opened up, we may find a skeleton, something like that.

-Has it not been opened?

-Not to my knowledge, no.

-For how long?

-Never.

-Good heavens!

-No.

Well, if anybody should ever question whether this programme

is totally unrehearsed, we're now going to find out!

Anyway, we opened it.

Slid the great bar across.

HE IMITATES CREAKING HINGE.

What's the date of the newspaper?

-Ah! September 1963?!

-THEY LAUGH

I think it was a sort of nervous laughter because he was

quite convinced there was going to be something horrific in there.

I was looking for a pile of white fivers, but still...

Sometimes on the Roadshow we even get to TASTE a bit of history.

Well, I've always been very interested in wine,

not just drinking it, but also in the history of wine.

And so you can imagine my excitement

when we were in the Kilmainham hospital in Dublin

and someone came in with a bottle of wine dating from 1750.

-1750? Over 200 years old?

-Absolutely.

-And the cork has just gone in?

-Just now.

Now the extraordinary thing about this wine was that it had remained

corked - the cork was in the top - for more than 200 years

and on that very day, whether it was...

I don't know if it was the heat of our hands

or the heat of the television lights, the cork went into the bottle.

What do you think's inside it?

Well, they're usually

filled with Madeira wine.

We just, it so happens, have a glass handy.

So after more than 200 years...

..there seems to be

a bit of sludge.

What does it smell like?

But it wasn't altogether successful.

THEY LAUGH

It tasted, to be honest with you,

not that I've ever tasted paraffin, but I imagine that if I had done,

it would have tasted something like this wine.

Well, that... That kills it forever!

THEY LAUGH

The myth about old wine in old bottles - it's unspeakable!

There are some occasions though, where old does mean valuable.

My aunt had it on her mantelpiece all her life.

She lived in the same house from the 1920s until she died

at the age of 94, about four years ago.

So it's been sitting on the mantelpiece and has now come down to you?

-That's right, yes.

-Soon as I saw the piece, I knew it was special.

But I was trying my hardest not to give anything away.

We've got a material called Delft. To look like Chinese porcelain,

they took a pottery clay and covered it with a thick, white glaze.

And it looks like a nice, white, china body.

But it's soft, it chips easily

and when it chips you get this coarse, clay colour inside.

The owner clearly had very little idea.

They figured it must be old but had little idea of its real age

and certainly not of the rarity.

Lots of things are telling me this is London, 1660.

As I held the piece it was speaking to me as being

something very special indeed.

Anything from that age, you're talking quite a rare piece indeed.

Really? Even though it's so battered?

-Well, I like to see battering on these.

-Oh, right.

That is telling me more that it's got some age.

Cautiously one is thinking, £50,000?

Really? Oh!

-And it could...some have made over £100,000...

-Oh dear.

..for pieces of such importance.

Right! Well, it isn't insured, I don't think.

It needs to be insured.

It needs to be looked after. it needs to be researched.

-It's a major discovery.

-Is it really?

-It's so exciting,

I'm shaking holding it here but I'll put it down carefully.

Because it is a wonderful thing, wonderful condition.

What a piece!

Of course age isn't the only prerequisite to collecting objects.

Some of the latest passions are for pieces made in recent years,

and they can prove a good investment, too.

20th century glass specialist Mark Hill has this tip to beat the credit crunch.

I think the wise pounds this year will be

spent buying postwar Czechoslovakian glass.

I see this as a great investment for the future.

After the Second World War, three major countries, apart from England,

revolutionised 20th Century glass design.

You have Scandinavia, and of course Italy with their island of Murano,

and Czechoslovakia.

The third, Czechoslovakia, has been completely ignored up till now.

Because of the Iron Curtain and the Communist regime in control of

the country at the time, you tended to find there was no research done.

It's just beginning to change and people are really taking

an interest in the market and its designs,

which are quite fantastic.

I've chosen this particular piece which I feel to be really good.

And it crosses the masterpiece and mass-produced.

It was designed by a great Czechoslovakian glass master called Pavel Hlava.

He's a name that certainly isn't recognised or generally known,

but is known by a very select number of good collectors.

You can find examples of postwar Czechoslovakian glass

literally from everywhere from a car boot sale to a local auction house

or even a good quality junk shop.

A piece like this you can find for anything from £20 to £100

depending on the size and colour.

I think this is a surefire bet to rise in price in future.

Joining the Antiques Roadshow has allowed me to catch up with

some of the legends that go back to the earliest days of the show.

One of my favourites is a story of Oxford Street being brought to a standstill

when our well-known pot collector, Henry Sandon,

was spotted getting onto a number 73 bus.

Turned out the driver was one of his biggest fans

and abandoned the cab to give Henry a kiss.

Henry was delighted, the lady driver was in seventh heaven

and the passengers were just plain confused.

It's that kind of adulation that's followed Henry around for years.

But what makes him tick?

I was born in London.

I'm a cockney, bred and born, and very proud of it.

I came to Worcester in the 1950s. 1953 - Coronation year,

to sing in the cathedral choir

and teach music at the grammar school and conduct.

And that's how I met my wife who was a Worcester-born girl,

and Barbara was the young soprano in it, and we fell in love.

We were married in 1956 in the cathedral and from there onwards

I've been firmly established in Worcester.

I wasn't interested in antiques till I married Barbara.

Don't mention that!

But I got interested in antiques through an excavation in my garden

which was right by the side of Worcester Cathedral.

And when Barbara went into hospital to have our first child,

I didn't want to attend the birth.

Well, you weren't allowed to attend the births in those days.

And I stayed at home and excavated the garden

and went down through all the levels, medieval levels,

down into the Roman levels and found Romans with their pots.

When she came back from hospital there was the first body laid out

together with his pots that he'd been buried with.

That got me interested in pots really

and I immersed myself in the history of Worcester porcelain.

Then when the position at the Worcester Porcelain Museum turned up,

I applied for it and got it.

As curator, I did a number of jobs.

I had to organise the factory tours

and also then I dealt with the museum collections, but mainly it was to act

as liaison between the history of the place and the workers on the factory.

'The clay goes to one of the oldest machines in the world,

'the potter's wheel.'

I loved and admired the people on the factory.

They were wonderful craftsmen

and, very kindly, they let me in on all their secrets so I'd learn

how they did their paintings, how they did their engravings.

They were terribly kind to me as a non-knowledgeable person

in this field and told me everything they could.

'Plate decoration calls for a good deal of skill as a juggler.'

'Hand painting is reserved, of course,

'for the most expensive services.'

Henry was friends with all the painters

and every plate holds a memory for him.

I had this painted by David Peplow for me.

I provided him with the dish and asked him to do blue scale,

like in the 18th century work, with fabulous birds and exotic insects

and incredibly marvellous gilding. Of course, the gilding is often

much more lengthy and difficult than the painting.

I wanted to know how long such a piece would take to actually do.

He did the whole work, right the way through

and he told me that it had taken him

400 hours of craftsmanship time in the whole thing.

When I showed it to the art director at the factory,

he said they would have to charge £10,000 for a piece like this.

He inscribed it on the back,

"To my good friend Henry Sandon, from David Peplow, January 1978."

A long time ago. But I love that very much.

'Flowers, birds, people, animals.

'A colourful tribute to the craftsmanship and skill

'which has been passed on through the years.'

I was curator for 17 years.

When I retired, they all contributed to a retirement book.

Looking through this, it brings back such wonderful memories

of these great people that I've known.

There's Pat Rigby painting butterflies on a leaf.

Brian Cox with his birds.

And this is Francis Clarke, painting the portrait of Dr John Wall,

which is a very important person of course, here at Worcester,

the founder of this factory way back in 1751.

Henry's time as curator had a profound effect

on the artists who worked at Worcester.

Henry made quite a contribution to the painter's' skills by letting us

go along to the museum and experience the museum,

not just look behind a glass case, but actually handling

the china, studying the painters, discussing the painters.

One day, I went in, asking where is his new acquisition,

which was a small jug which was one of the first pieces known

of Royal Worcester to be made. It was a tiny jug

with "Wigornia" written on the bottom. He said "Here you are"

and handed me this little jug,

which was a bit of a shock cos he'd just paid £22,000 for it.

I think I'd paid £12,000 for a house.

Throughout Henry's time, he would encourage us to experiment

with our work, to push ourselves forward,

to try to achieve as good as the previous century.

Henry encouraged the painters at Worcester for decades,

but now the days of creating pots there are coming to a close.

I've loved the Worcester factory most of my life

and it's sad to see it now in administration.

They have suffered enormous losses.

Hardly any of the great people are still here.

But it is sad to meet some of the old craftsmen

from the factory around the town who have lost their jobs.

And some of them have tears in their eyes when they talk about it.

But the museum, of course, is here still

and will continue in perpetuity. We are here for ever more.

Our Henry on home turf.

Quite a few of our experts are very adept

at bringing an object back to life by reconstructing its past.

Who owned it, moments it might have witnessed, that kind of thing.

But some of our objects seem to have a spooky life of their own

which have given our experts a bit of a chill.

I was confronted by this man who was utterly white.

And he was so astonishing to look at, I thought,

we must ignore it and just treat him as an ordinary member of the public.

I am dressed as the ghost of a highway robber, Adam Lyle, deceased.

I work as a ghost tour guide and my costume is to dress up in the same costume I wore.

I was quite often greeted with people wondering if

I was the item myself, being something that was 200 years old.

-I've brought a rather macabre object in today.

-It doesn't look macabre.

It might not do, but it's a business card holder actually made from

the skin of an executed criminal, a man, William Burke,

who along with his partner, William Hare,

used to engage in body snatching.

Although he was actually there to show me this wallet made of

human skin, that somehow became less of the focus then this

bizarre conversation that we were having which we both played straight.

In a twist of irony, when William Burke was caught,

they took his own body to the Medical School, had him disected

and decided to use some of his body to make a few souvenirs.

The major memory I have of it was just so many people

being really quite freaked out by the fact that it was human skin.

As soon as we told people, you could see them noticeably recoil

as if somehow it would jump up and bite them.

I did fondle this wallet.

It was just like a rather delicate, silky feel to it,

but it was human skin all right.

It's giving me collywobbles to think about it.

-She is so ugly.

-She is, yes.

When I used to go and visit my great aunt and uncle's house,

they'd put a tea-towel over the top of it or turn her face to the wall

because I was so frightened of looking at her face.

I've got to the point that I can take something in my hand

and really feel an energy coming out of them.

And when I saw the pedlar doll at Uppingham,

I really, really didn't want to film it.

As far as I was concerned, it not only looked horrid,

but actually, being around it made me feel horrid,

and even thinking about it is making me feel quite wobbly in my tummy.

Well, I think, if you look at her carefully,

perhaps the explanation is that originally her face would have been

made of a composition, made with papier mache or something like that.

With a gauze or material over it.

And of course, over a period of time, this has broken down.

I thought, actually, I'm not sure

that children aren't going to be a bit scared by this doll.

This is really horrible.

We honed in on her lovely basket of all the knick-knacks

and toasting forks and things like that and a little roll of music.

And it had this one black, glass eye

that, wherever you were filming it from, you could feel

this beady eye following you round.

We came out of it perfectly all right but I can remember,

to this minute, exactly how I felt

when I saw it and I really didn't want to record it.

Portraits are very evocative things.

They are, after all, a memorial to an individual's life, often long gone.

And they can carry that spirit with them.

I remember one particular piece in Arundel Castle

in which a couple came to me with a picture that was haunted.

Well, historically, there's evidence that it is haunted,

but I do believe myself that it is.

And we have had evidence ourselves that it is haunted.

When it hung in our cottage in Yorkshire,

my husband and I were downstairs and had recently had our daughter,

who was three months old, asleep in her cot.

Everything was very quiet and then, all of a sudden,

we heard Brahms' Lullaby being sung over the monitor.

I was really quite frightened.

-I bet you were.

-I sent my husband immediately up the stairs.

I couldn't go up myself.

And I said, "I'll just stay down here and continue to listen."

I tiptoed and got to the very top stair, opposite the bedroom,

and just as my foot touched the top landing,

the music stopped immediately.

-That's spooky.

-It was spooky.

I recall that they had a few newspaper articles

of when it used to hang in a pub

and they handed me a glazed, framed copy of one of the articles

and the glass cracked in my hand.

I realise it sounds like a great excuse,

but at the time, both they and I were happy to attribute it to the ghost.

It doesn't surprise me at all that this has got a haunted past

or a haunted association. It's an unusually characterful work

by a primitive painter who hasn't any of the constraints

that society portrait painters normally suffer from.

There were a good fun couple, energetic, plausible people.

But whenever anybody tells you a ghost story,

you're inclined to look at them rather sceptically.

However, in this case, I sort of...

..was a good half way there to believing it, actually.

Not too sure I'd like that portrait in my house.

Our team of experts are generally a well-mannered bunch but they all get

very excited when an intriguing piece arrives at a Roadshow.

This sometimes triggers a bit of healthy rivalry

behind the scenes as to who gets to talk about the object on camera.

This latest confession comes from Henry Sandon's son, John,

who's often in competition with his father.

It's great to appear on the Antiques Roadshow with my dad

and we share so many interests, as well as friendly rivalry.

-What is inside?

-Assorted biscuits.

-Assorted biscuits?

-Yes.

Dad and I have made all sorts of great discoveries of

pottery on the Roadshow.

We almost take it in turns to find a rare and valuable piece.

We joke with each other as to who is going to turn up

with the next best piece on the show.

I really did feel very envious when a lady came along to him,

she produced some plates out of a biscuit tin.

And she apologised for them being chipped and cracked,

but, of course, what wonderful plates they were!

Well, all I know is that they're Merrymen plates and Delft.

Merrymen plates and Delft?

-Yes.

-You're absolutely right. Good grief.

She didn't think they'd be

that special but Dad's excitement couldn't be hidden.

It can't be the full set?

There's six in the set.

-That's right, there are.

-And you've got the blessed six of them.

-How did you get these?

-I was left them by Auntie Dorothy.

-Auntie Dorothy?

-Yes.

-And where did she get them from?

Well, I'm not sure but I think it was her grandmother.

If only I'd been there,

and realised it was the whole set in there, the full Merrymen plates.

These are terribly unusual plates.

-Are they?

-Do you appreciate that?

-Oh yes.

-They're vaguely imitating the Dutch who had sets like this.

They would stand in a cabinet door,

on the mantelpiece or something like that.

Tom Byrne used to have his on the mantelpiece

and there they sat and looked at you.

He can't have had a biscuit tin?

No, he didn't have a biscuit tin.

But the shape of them is very, very typical of this date, which is 1727.

I'd have been just as excited as Dad and would have thought about

how envious he would have been if I'd spotted these.

-In the sale, nine years ago, it fetched...

-Yes.

..a set, a matching set like this, fetched £18,000.

No, keep going. I'll get the mortgage yet.

I think because of the escalation in Delftware, tin-glazed pottery,

I think probably you've got to think in terms of 20 to £25,000.

-Oh! I will get some of the mortgage paid off.

-You will.

That's just about it for this edition.

Next time, prepare to witness some of the most bizarre pieces ever to arrive at a Roadshow.

And that actually, was once a dog and is now a dog-skin buoy.

So this is a dead dog?

We do some detective work with art sleuth Philip Mould.

What's intriguing is that beneath here is a portrait that has,

for some reason, been abandoned.

And we've some outstanding items that have been touched by royalty.

It says Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King Charles I.

See you next time on Priceless Antiques Roadshow.

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