One rule to ring them all!

Truths be told, I’m really not very good with money and never have been. I have a certain distaste for mere commerce whilst hypocritically knowing that it is commerce business and trade that makes the world we live in function the way we’d like it to. That money is what enables our daily lives.

One Saturday afternoon mother and I drove down to Portobello Road to have a mooch around and see what we might find. Jewellery, a small item of furniture. Maybe even a small painting or print. After we’d browsed up as far as the bend in the road at the south end of Portobello, just past Arthur Negus’s shop, we headed back down to the mall where Rex had his stall.

Mother and Rex instantly got to talking about music: as usual. Bored, I noticed Rex had a large box of jumbled items standing on the bench behind him so I interupted to ask what the contents were. To be told they were his spoils from a dawn visit to Bermondsey Market where he’d scavenged the stalls and picked up a “lot” of mixed items; these were the box’s contents. Might I look through? Yes of course.

To digress a moment. I’ve always been a voracious reader and a stupidly comprehensive retainer of obscure facts. Michael Caine’s “Not a lot of people know that!” might have been my catch-phrase. I soaked up obscure stuff and somehow managed to reel it out in an apposite manner whenever it was appropriate.

Amongst the subjects I read and inhaled were ancient history and archeology. Back in the 1950s and ‘60s the publisher Thames & Hudson used to regularly produce very lavish large-format colour picture books about particular civilisations and the artefacts from various digs: Crete, Mesopotamia, Rome, and of course Greece. The start of the era of the coffee-table book. Both parents happily bought them for me as birthday or winter solstice festival gifts and, after only a couple of reads through I’d have most of the pictures fixed in my mind.

The volume on Greece was one I rather liked.

So to Rex’s box of objects; tatty cheap necklaces, broken wrist watches, a couple of loose cups by Doulton and Wedgewood, and finally at the bottom of the box a large battered and rather old fashioned morocco leather gold-clasped box of the type commonly used for finger and ear-rings. Inside it, about four or five paste dress rings which today would probably be very collectible, and a very very dirty gold men’s signet ring which I took out of the box intrigued by the large but totally obscured stone set into its crown.

After a bit of rubbing at the crown with my thumb some of the dirt fell away to partly reveal a familiar form of incised intaglio. Or at least: it was familiar to me.

The T&H volume on Greece contained an entire section on Temple Seals; dozens of good quality pictures of different designs and the many different shapes of these seals. Each different temple had its own unique designs appropriate to the Gods venerated there. I was pretty certain that the one I now held in my hand was an intaglio-carved carnelian Temple Seal from Olympus.

Like an idiot, instead of asking Rex if I could buy the ring, I opened my mouth, blabbed what I thought it was, and asked if I could take it away with me to have it verified.

Why yes, I could take it, but I must bring it back as soon as possible.

I’ve kicked myself over that idiocy for more than 60 years now.

After cleaning the British Museum authenticated the seal for me as 3rd century BCE and gave me a letter to confirm its provenance. Greek Temple Seals aren’t particularly uncommon so usually their value isn’t great: of the order of a few tens of pounds back in the day. Today probably a couple of hundred or so. However in this case their assessment was that this seal was a rather more rare design in a particularly good piece of very translucent carnelian. Although nobody at the Museum would give me an official valuation I was told informally that it might be worth up to about £1000 on the open market.

Two days later I took it back to Rex, who took it and the Museum’s letter with profuse thanks and that was the end of it. About a year later he sold it on via an auction in Rome; £2,500 - in 1969 or so. That’s the best part of £51,000 in today’s money.

My only profit from this? To see behind the scenes at the British Museum when the currator of Greek Antiquities took me back-stairs to his conservation lab bench to clean and inspect the ring very thoroughly. I’ve had a fascination with antiquities and conservation processes all my life. But these days one can’t just rock up at the museum, or any museum, and just ask to speak to the currator of a field; one has to make an appointment and wait: and you’ll only get that apointment if you can give a very good reason for the meeting.

Like I said, I’m really not at all good with money. But then, money isn’t aways everything, is it?