Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (28 page)

Wedderburne could not help but be pleased and flattered by such attention, and after a long conversation he was lured into
making an admission. He had been chief clerk and adviser to Wedgwood's London warehouse when it was shut down. Losing impetus after the death of its founder, Josiah, trade with Europe had slowed towards the end of the eighteenth century and the breaking up of the London premises had become inevitable. Wedderburne, who had spent so many years developing the business, had watched in dismay as pieces from the company's most successful and productive years were cast aside and sometimes smashed; great packages going to auction to be sold at bargain prices. And so, in a moment of sentimental folly, he had stepped in himself to buy up a vast quantity of the best and oldest examples, rescuing some of Wedgwood's most special objects, so that they could be safely stored and protected for the future. But the cost of his intervention had almost ruined him. He had not been a wealthy man, he explained, and his expenditure had made him considerably and uncomfortably poorer. His savings had dwindled, he was stretched by household expenses, and all he had to show was an attic packed full of old and unfashionable Wedgwood china.

Mayer became convinced that he had stumbled on to an undiscovered treasure trove. He asked Wedderburne to bring him a few specimens, to prove his story. He was not disappointed. ‘When I saw them my heart beat as I asked him if he had any more, and how much he would want for them,' Mayer admitted. ‘He suggested that I should visit him next day and see the remainder.'
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And so, a day later, Mayer made his way through the quiet residential streets to see the rest of the china for himself. Soon he was surrounded by a vast and distinctive collection of Wedgwood – by plaques and vases, by jasper ware and basalt and pottery, representing every period and style of the company's history, as well as trial pieces from the factory, held back from normal sale, unique pieces, imperfect and blistered and misfired. Mayer bought everything. The terms of the sale were agreed
there and then, the two men sitting in the dust of the garret, the sun filtering pale through the sky-light. The pieces were packed up and put on a train for Liverpool. Mayer's collection of Wedgwood had begun in earnest.

Mayer's meeting with Wedderburne had been a rewarding stroke of luck, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of which myth is made. But better was yet to come. Within a short time, another fortunate encounter was to bolster Mayer's holdings yet further. He had, through Wedderburne, bought up the wealth of Wedgwood's past; now he was to discover the key to its history. It was a wet afternoon in Birmingham in 1848, three years after Mayer had done the deal with Wedderburne. He was in the Midlands on business, and found himself in Birmingham's back streets as a sudden thunderstorm broke over the low roofs of the workshops in the jewellery quarter. As the rain pummelled the pavements and the sky darkened, there was nothing for it but to take shelter and Mayer scrambled into the nearest shop. In his haste, he did not have time to notice anything about the place in which he was taking cover; he just pushed open the door and flung himself out of the rain.

The shop turned out to be a scrap dealer's, piled high with waste iron and copper and brass, broken furniture, pipes and cogs and wheels. It was dusty and slightly oily, and the floors were littered with slips of wood and paper, screws and bolts, oddments of cloth, bits of string and a good helping of grit. Everything was grimy. There should have been nothing at all to interest him. But he had to wait for the rain to stop. Looking out through a small window, he could see it still, battering hard on the street outside and throwing gobbets of mud against the close-packed brick buildings. He paced up and down, idling and looking around in the dim light. And in the midst of everything, what caught his eye were a number of heavy old ledgers, piled up at the end of the
counter, leather-bound, scruffy, and instantly alluring to Mayer. They were not, he could be sure, scrap. He realized that they had to be a set, more or less complete, and, with the thunder still creaking overhead, he had nothing better to do than to sit down and take a look at them.

The scrap merchant thought Mayer was quite mad. They were just old papers, he explained, that he sold to butchers and greengrocers who used the broad thick sheets for wrapping bacon and butter. What on earth did Mayer want with them? But Mayer had begun to turn the close-written pages and was already absorbed. He could not be put off by the dealer. He was already experiencing the incomparable excitement of unearthing a find. What Mayer had discovered would have meant nothing to Birmingham's shopkeepers, had they even thought to look. The books were, in many ways, perfectly ordinary, even dull: they were filled with lists of names and calculations, business accounts and transactions, day-to-day dealings; they detailed workmen's wages. What made them special was that they had belonged to the two factories in Stoke-on-Trent, at Burslem and Etruria, that were the core of the Wedgwood operation. Pages that might have seemed tedious and commonplace to almost anyone else in Britain, books that would have been passed over without a second glance, had found their way to the notice of the one man who knew what he was looking at, and who could recognize them as valuable.

Mayer naturally asked about the history of the ledgers, and the dealer explained that he had bought them all, as a job lot, when Josiah Wedgwood's son had died five years earlier, in 1843, and the factories were being cleared out. He had got them for almost nothing, and had not thought much about them. There was, he guessed, a little profit to be made if he split them up and sold the paper. Now, however, seeing the gleam in Mayer's eye, he sensed the possibility of something greater than the small return he had envisaged. To Mayer's delight, he explained that there were more
packets of papers and piles of documents stored in the loft above the shop, all from the same source, and all available for Mayer to see, should he care to.

The thunder had moved off and the rain was easing, but neither Mayer nor the scrap dealer noticed the change in the weather. They were now both absorbed by the promise of a deal. In the dingy loft, there were, as the merchant had promised, reams and reams of papers, far too many for Mayer to read there and then, stuffed in boxes, tied, folded and sometimes torn. Mayer needed only a brief glance to tell him that everything related to the Wedgwood factories, as he had hoped, and, crouched in the low loft space, he offered a price that satisfied both men.

Mayer spent long months back in Liverpool poring over the Wedgwood archives, deciphering, arranging and cataloguing them. He laboured long and studiously. He may have been lucky to have discovered the papers in an obscure scrap merchant's, but he was more than willing to make the luck work for him; to reinforce good fortune with industry. In the bundles of papers, his collection of ceramics came alive. He could show how each piece slotted into the history of ceramics; he could trace the evolution of the art of English pottery. To those doubters who questioned his taste for Wedgwood, he could better justify his choices. With the documents in front of him, it became clear how the leading factories were making progress in technical and stylistic developments, and he could trace more openly the manufacturing links with the craftsmen of the past.

By the time Mayer had finished his work on the documents, the reputation of Wedgwood was beginning to change. It was spoken of with growing respect and prices were rising: it was becoming recognized as one of the most desirable names in English ceramics. In the 1830s and 1840s, few other people were interested in Wedgwood and hardly any collectors were making any kind of systematic attempt to acquire the factory's china. But by the
1850s and 1860s, collectors like Charlotte Schreiber were beginning to look in new directions, while at the same time changes in fashion were making the wares once again desirable. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the early Wedgwood pieces that Mayer had found in Wedderburne's attic were to become the most sought-after examples of the company's output, and, by the end of the century, the demand for Wedgwood was so widespread and intense that one commentator noted that ‘not only the shops but the private dwellings of France, Germany, Italy, Holland and Belgium have been ransacked by enthusiastic collectors'.
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As Wedgwood china began to catch the eye of fashionable society, Mayer's collection was able to boast some of the most interesting and superior pieces in private hands, as well as the most comprehensive archives, testament to both his good fortune and his astute opportunism. Thanks to two strokes of luck, he stood at the vanguard of the rediscovery, accidentally leading the followers of fashion, and winning himself a reputation as a collector of exceptional shrewdness and guile.

J
oseph Mayer presented all his friends with etchings of the Daniels portrait. In an age before the widespread use of photography, this was a standard way to prompt them to remember him. It was a means of keeping in touch and was not an uncommon thing to do: Augustus Franks gave his friends a specially made medallion struck with his name, degree and motto to help them remember him. This was made of gold, and was the mark of a gentleman, the forerunner of a bookplate which Franks later designed, giving his full title and dignities in Latin and displaying coats of arms that linked him to several ancient families. Mayer was not, yet, going this far. But the gift of the engravings seems to suggest that he was anxious not to lose ground to some of his wealthier and more well-connected colleagues; it was an indication of a certain vanity, and of his aspirations to be an important man.

Franks never had his portrait painted. It has been suggested that this was because it would have been in bad taste for a bachelor gentleman to ‘advertise' himself so blatantly. Mayer, lacking
Franks' upper-class sensitivities, had no such reservations. In 1851, at the age of forty-eight, in his prime and unmarried, he commissioned another portrait, a bolder image, with the dignity of age and professional success. This time, he did not want a furnished study or a clutter of objects to distract and he opted for a simple image of his head and body against a featureless background – nothing but himself; no references to anything but his essential respectability. It is perhaps no coincidence that this was the year of the Great Exhibition. Mayer had been invited by the organizers to draw on his connections in the silversmithing world to exhibit ‘works of ancient and medieval art'. Instead, he used the opportunity to show off his own work, displaying fifteen pieces of silver plate (then a new technique) and eighteen items of his jewellery. The display got him noticed, and several of his pieces were commended by the judges and rewarded with an ‘honourable mention'.
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It was in the light of this success that he commissioned another portrait to further consolidate his rising place in the world.

As an indication of this growing confidence, Mayer chose George Freizor (G.-A. Freezor), a London man of the art establishment. Freizor painted Mayer half turning to an imagined audience, and gave him weight across the chest, the decorum of middle age, the gravity of learning in his high forehead. In this second portrait, Mayer looks distinguished and active, a man pausing for a moment in the midst of important and pressing duties. It came at an apt moment. With the successful contribution to the Great Exhibition behind him and his collection growing, Mayer was embarking on his most ambitious project to date – his own museum.

It was on a visit to the British Museum that the idea came to him. Mayer was a frequent visitor to the huge dark galleries, packed with objects; he savoured the heavy scent of ancient lives, and the
way the precious treasures stretched out into the shadows as if forever. And in particular he enjoyed the newly opened Egyptian galleries, pausing among the tombs of the Pharaohs, standing alone and quiet, without the press of the present in his head. It was an inspiration. It prompted him to think about his own collecting, and ways in which he could give it shape and authority and consequence. He decided he would open a museum, somewhere with proper space for his best pieces, where they could be organized and catalogued and flaunted to the public. A museum of his own would be a brilliant triumph and, when the time came, the perfect memorial. It would allow him to share with the world the greatness of his collection.

Mayer had no doubt that the museum should be in Liverpool. He was proud of the town and his place within it and he wanted it to grow and prosper; he wanted its citizens to have all the advantages of those of the capital. Liverpool was thriving. It had everything to rival London: the magnificent stone buildings, the busy international port and packed docks, the shops and parks – as well as the slums and grime and starving poor. Moreover, it had a long tradition of successful private museums. As early as 1800, William Bullock, another jeweller and silversmith, had opened a popular museum of over 30,000 objects in Church Street, having tried out the idea for several years in his native Sheffield. The displays included works of art, armour, natural history specimens and ethnographic objects, many of which had been brought back from Captain Cook's expeditions abroad. The museum flourished, and by 1812 was such a success that it was deemed worthy of a London home and was transferred to its own ‘Egyptian Temple' (later the Egyptian Hall), purpose-built in Piccadilly. Then, in 1851, just as Mayer was shaping his own plans, the 14th Earl of Derby opened a natural history museum in Liverpool's Duke Street, preserving some of the unrivalled collection of birds and mammals that his father had kept and
bred in his zoo at Knowsley. Visitors flocked to see the stuffed, pinned and desiccated remains of colourful and bizarre animals, proof that the Liverpool public had an appetite for the attractions of museum visiting.