Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  Ward died in 1912, but his studio thrived until the 1960s, when attitudes toward ecology shifted and orders such as the 365 tigers for His Highness the Maharajah of Cooch Behar dwindled, as did requests for "His" and "Her" elephant heads. When Kenya banned trophy hunting in 1976, the firm was doomed—and so was taxidermy.

  By the time Astley arrived at Ward's, the firm—which once mounted lions by painstakingly removing and then implanting each whisker and eyelash individually, by hand—was sending out repair jobs with the glue still wet. Commercial taxidermy is never easy, but at Ward's it was becoming unbearable: low pay, long hours, sagging morale. "I got the sack for refusing to sweep the floor," Astley says, shaking his head. And so in 1983, Ward's shut down for good.

  Today it's hard to find a former Ward's employee. Most of the people who worked for the firm are gone. They left no written records of their lives as taxidermists because, as Pat Morris suggests, they didn't think what they had to say about their profession was important. But here is Astley, and opportunity is opportunity, so I ask him to describe Ward's, and he's happy to oblige.

  He lifts his head up from his pint, raises an eyebrow, nods, and begins to list several departments as if he's walking through them in his mind: elephant footstools, game heads, finishing work. Then he turns grave. I figure he's trying to retrieve the details; Ward's was, after all, England's most illustrious taxidermy firm. I glance down at my notebook to make sure I have plenty of blank pages. Then Astley starts to roll. He is bright-eyed and animated, a lively storyteller with a deadpan disposition. He speaks quickly, with increasing momentum. I'm not quite following what he's saying, but I write it all down anyhow, thinking it will make sense later, once I've had the chance to research Ward's myself back in the States. Astley launches into a long, discursive story about how the foreman of the big-head section threatened to murder him, as well as something he calls the passenger pigeon caper. (My notes are unintelligible and say only "fifty-pound ransom.") Astley talks and talks, and I scribble and scribble, hoping to uncover something substantial, until I realize that I've been writing for an hour or so about a deaf girl who worked near the Irish floor sweeper because she was immune to his drunken songs and who got too fat for the birdman and ended up dating the foreman of the big-head department, a liar and a petty thief, who soon left—as did Astley—for World of Nature.

  As I walk back to my dorm room that night, I feel like a freshman who was just hazed. In the morning, someone pounding on my door jolts me out of a deep sleep. I climb out of bed, dizzy and disheveled, and crack open the door. It's the Chairbitch in her pajamas, a towel slung over her shoulder, heading for a shower with her colleagues. She tosses me my denim jacket (I forgot it at the bar), scrutinizes me, and growls, "Ugh! You look like something from out of a movie." Then she lets out a deep laugh that still haunts me today.

  For all its frivolity, the guild show ends on a serious note: a lecture by Pat Morris, the leading authority on British taxidermy and, as it happens, a hedgehog expert.

  Morris is tall, with thinning gray-blond hair. He looks stern, but he comes alive when he talks about taxidermy. He knows everything about the subject, and anyone who has ever seriously investigated the topic (doctoral students, curators, artists, historians, conservators) inevitably finds him, because his personal archive contains things that no one else in the world has—at least not all in one place. Sometimes he'll photocopy a deceased taxidermist's sketchbook for a library so that he won't have the only copy in existence. That doesn't mean he's exceptionally generous; he has a reputation as a shrewd barterer, using information as leverage to acquire mounts for his collection.

  The guild is honored to have Morris as a member, and the other members sit in somber silence watching slides he has culled from his archive. What he shows us is essentially a history of neglect. For the first time in days, the guild members are silent—not a single wisecrack. Even Fishwick is quiet.

  Mayer removes her sunglasses and watches as Morris shows mounts destroyed by natural causes (moths, beetles, sun); mounts ruined by accidents and fires; mounts dismantled because of "politically correct" museum policy; mounts bombed during World War II. He shows anthropomorphic foxes from the Great Exhibition of 1851, now sadly estranged from their historic context; distorted whales stored too close to hot boilers; and taxidermy collections quietly given away out of embarrassment, languishing in museum storerooms, or simply vanished. This is a taxidermy death knell.

  It's also a fitting prelude to yet another loss, the auctioning off of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities, an astounding collection of Victorian taxidermy. The auction is being held in two days, and the guild members are horrified to lose this "little bit of taxidermy history." No one is more aware of what the auction means than Morris. Victorian taxidermy is his area of expertise. In fact, he would have taught a course on the subject if interdisciplinary departments had been common early in his career, and if some of his colleagues didn't equate his passion for taxidermy with cruelty to animals. His love of taxidermy is actually an outgrowth of his deep appreciation for natural history, and he believes you cannot study the history of one without the other.

  Morris has spent more than thirty years searching for old museum mounts. He asks how a museum could lose six upright polar bears or groups of fighting tigers. Where are these things? He's on the prowl for them. Sometimes he is bewildered by what he discovers. In the mid-1980s, for instance, he visited the Smithsonian Institution and found Hornaday's white setter on the scent of quail, called Coming to the Point, in the attic, on its side, dusty and forgotten. Unlike Hornaday's landmark baby elephant, at least it had surfaced, and Morris didn't have to wonder how a museum could misplace an elephant, of all things.

  If given permission, Morris will go to extremes to authenticate a specimen. Once, in 1981, the dean of Westminster Abbey allowed him to x-ray the duchess of Richmond's three-hundred-year-old stuffed African grey parrot. He took the images in the crypt that contains the wax effigy of Lord Nelson, confirming that the parrot was indeed mounted using methods abandoned by the 1800s and therefore "one of the oldest surviving stuffed birds in existence."

  Sometimes Morris's efforts are misunderstood, and he is called eccentric. However, not long after the guild show, the director of the Natural History Museum invited him to lunch, perhaps to placate him after the museum destroyed three Rowland Ward dioramas, works Morris considered the best they had in Britain.

  And now he stands before Emily Mayer and the guild and says, "We're about to see another case of loss. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week will be the auctioning off of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities. The rumor is that quite a bit of this will go to America. This is a permanent loss to Britain, but so far no one has come forward to buy it because it's taxidermy."

  6. MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES

  THE TRAIN FROM EXETER to Bodmin follows the English Channel past fishing hamlets and manor houses with seemingly endless hedgerows. On a sunny day, the jagged cliffs above the harbors live up to the region's nickname: the Cornish Riviera. But now rain and fog shrouded everything except the most colorful skiffs, and that was fine with me, because the weather seemed to come directly from the book I was reading, Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn. The 1936 gothic romance, inspired by Treasure Island, compared to Jane Eyre, and adapted into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock (as were du Maurier's The Birds and Rebecca), seems to have defined Cornwall. Indeed, the Cornish still refer to the region as "Du Maurier Country," and looking out the train window at the dark sky moving in over the blustery moors, I could see why.

  In writing the novel, du Maurier drew from Cornwall's history of wreckers and smugglers. She centered the book on Mary Yellan, a twenty-three-year-old "orphan" who moves to the Jamaica Inn, a gloomy old coach house, to live with her aunt Patience and uncle Joss. Joss, Mary soon learns, is the leader of a band of evil wreckers, who lure ships onto the rocky coast, kill the fleeing crew, and steal the cargo. One night she is forced to go on a run with t
hem. The wreckers in the novel are sinister and cutthroat. The solitary inn is based on a real smugglers' tavern from the mid-1700s, which is now a resort that contains not only the tavern but other attractions, including Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities, my destination.

  The Jamaica Inn is located on a barren moor, halfway down the Cornish peninsula, a promontory shaped like the bent, knobby finger of a witch. More than thirty thousand people visited the inn annually, a remarkable number given its isolation. They didn't all come to see taxidermy; most came to relive Cornwall's tangle with the wreckers, something the inn flaunts. On this day, however, dealers and collectors from all over the world were descending on the place for a two-day auction of what was billed as one of the most fascinating collections ever to come under the hammer. Nothing like Potter's would ever be available again: which is to say all kinds of sensational creatures preserved in glass domes and specimen jars, and great glass display cases, as well as the over-the-top anthropomorphic scenes for which Potter was famous.

  One of England's oldest private museums, Potter's belonged to the era of the amateur nature lover, when museums were spirited jumbles, not the sober typologies they would become postDarwin. Potter's verged on the freakish: random, cluttered, crammed to the rafters with curios and oddities, weird accumulations, and creatures that were stuffed, pickled, dissected, and deformed. And I was arriving just in time to see a world that had vanished long ago. The next day, it would be dismantled, and if the taxidermists at the guild show were right, this distinctly British collection of ten thousand artifacts (six thousand of which were taxidermy pieces) might be dispersed to America and Japan.

  It was remarkable that Potter's had evaded the hammer this long. Nearly every museum of its kind—such as Charles Willson Peale's Repository for Natural Curiosities in Philadelphia, John Scudder's American Museum in New York, and Daniel Drake's Western Museum in Cincinnati (where John James Audubon briefly worked as a taxidermist)—had shut down years before. P. T. Barnum had bought Scudder's and Peale's museums in the 1840s and merged them into the Greatest Show on Earth. And Drake's Western Museum had morphed from a repository of stuffed birds, fish, and mammoth and sloth bones into a waxworks depicting Satan and other figures from hell. In England, William Bullock's London Museum of Stuffed Animals and the Lever Collection, both outgrowths of fabulous personal collections, had been auctioned off in the early 1800s. The Lever auction had drawn naturalists from every museum in Europe except the British Museum, which couldn't afford to buy the collection. The director of the British Museum wasn't going to make that mistake again; he was coming to the Potter's sale.

  As the train neared Bodmin Parkway station, I reread du Maurier's description of the inn with uneasy anticipation:

  It was a dark, rambling place, with long passages and unexpected rooms. There was a separate entrance to the bar, at the side of the house, and, though the room was empty now, there was something heavy in the atmosphere reminiscent of the last time it was full: a lingering taste of old tobacco, the sour smell of drink, and an impression of warm, unclean humanity packed one against each other on the dark stained benches.

  Then I exchanged du Maurier for the auction catalog. The cover featured a photo of a disfigured giraffe (circa early 1900s) with a gaping seam down its neck. State-of-the-art in its era, perhaps, the giraffe was oblong and distorted, as if someone had pulled its ears to stretch its face while it was drying. I discreetly slipped the catalog under my arm while I hailed a taxi, though I couldn't have been the only one with a copy of the catalog on the platform that day. According to Bonhams, the auction house in charge of the sale, more than a thousand catalogs had been sold.

  The driver, a pleasant man with a Cornish accent, raised an eyebrow at the words "Jamaica Inn," and I felt like Mary Yellan when the coach driver tells her that respectable folk don't go there anymore. You could barely see three feet of the narrow road ahead, much less the green hilly farms it cut through, but the driver was a self-appointed Cornish ambassador, eager to show the sights to an American. "It would be lovely if you could see Cornwall, because it really is quite pretty," he said, squinting through the rain-streaked windshield.

  That was an understatement. Cornwall's spectacular landscape draws thousands of people every year. They come to see ancient stone circles, the Godrevy Lighthouse (which inspired Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse), and the Eden Project biospheres (the world's largest greenhouses), or maybe just to sit on a wharf sipping tea. But I was here to see taxidermy, and the driver did not hide his disgust.

  "It was a Victorian thing," he said. "A bit gross, isn't it? A bit weird, don't you think? Those stuffed kittens in family scenes. Stuffed cats at the tea table."

  I nodded sheepishly. The seventeen kittens at the tea table were nothing compared to the four-legged duckling with two beaks, three eyes, and four wings. I flipped through the catalog, looking at the bizarre animals, each assigned a lot number. There was a pair of wandering albatrosses with ten-foot wing-spans (lot 308) and semihuman toads doing calisthenics (lot 167)—zoological wonders that would have delighted the Victorians—but I didn't bother to explain to the driver, thoughtful though he was, how crazy people were for this stuff back then, how the world was exploding with new discoveries and everyone wanted to live vicariously.

  In 1861, for instance, the year Walter Potter displayed his first taxidermy case to the public, the French American explorer Paul Du Chaillu brought the first gorilla skins back to England, confirming the species' suspected existence and igniting what amounted to a gorilla craze. This was good timing because the public obsession with ferns was waning and the mania for aquariums hadn't yet taken hold. The revelations that tadpoles turn into frogs and leopards don't change their spots still riveted people's attention. Indeed, in 1861 it was still possible, if you absolutely had to, to squeeze all the known species onto Noah's ark—and that was fantastic.

  We pulled into the Jamaica Inn. Rain streamed down the windshield and formed puddles in the gravel parking lot. A sign hung outside the entrance: "Come and absorb the atmosphere of a museum in Victorian times. Featuring the famous tableaux of Walter Potter, plus a murderous truncheon, a two-headed lamb, mummified creatures, the largest shoe in the world, a bird-eating spider, spittoons and opium pipes, a piece of the old London Bridge, a Victorian toy collection and LOTS, LOTS more." The driver shrugged and said, "It doesn't appeal to me whatever!" He pointed down the road toward Dozemary Pool, the spot where Sir Bedevere allegedly threw King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, to the Lady of the Lake. But at that moment, I was barely listening. I had stepped out of the taxi, my mind on Mr. Potter and his stuffed kittens.

  Inside the Jamaica Inn, the Smugglers Bar, a dark slanty room that smelled like beer, was swarming with traders who knew one another from the antiques shops of London's Portobello Road. "We could have hired a coach," someone shouted. "There's a lot of money sitting here," another trader yelled, though you never would have guessed it from the scruffy people at the bar. But that was all camouflage, a strategy to downplay the seriousness with which some of the dealers went after their lots.

  The collection, unusual as it was, wasn't nearly as eccentric as the people who knew every encyclopedic detail about it. People who knew, for instance, the complete history of Duplicate, the world-champion egg-laying Moray hen (she allegedly laid 462 eggs in one year). Or that the world-record 763-pound tuna (its massive glazed head was lot 571) had been reeled in after a nearly six-hour fight in 1933. Their business cards said it all: Ripley's Believe It or Not!, the Museum of Witchcraft, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Obscura Antiques & Oddities, Crime Through Time, and the Victorian Taxidermy Company. They were arriving en masse, in a downpour, and they were casing the joint with a complex mix of loss and schadenfreude, muttering, "How often does a Victorian taxidermy museum come up for sale?"

  This was preview day. The next two days (September 23 and 24) were the actual auction. Yet television, newspaper, and radio reporters had already arrived in droves. Bonhams
employees raced in and out of the coat-check room, now a makeshift office. They were prepared to take bids online; by phone, fax, or mail; through appointed agents acting for clients; and, of course, in person. People stood in line at the door, registering.

  Not me. I knew that if I wanted to bid on, say, the scarlet ibis (I did!) or the bespectacled gentleman lobsters, I'd have to devise a clever strategy (a big distraction), and I wasn't about to go head-to-head with Ripley's Believe It or Not or Crime Through Time, not that they were after ibises or lobsters, per se, but someone in this room had to be. They hadn't come to this godforsaken place to leave empty-handed. Even so, in the commotion I heard, "That's all we do is sell stuff off. We don't value our own heritage."

  Head auctioneer Jon Baddeley, specialist of all things "wild and wacky" (T. rex skeletons, Elton John memorabilia) and a regular on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow, was engaged in exotic problem solving: How to remove a one-ton elephant head from the first floor? Where to find a hotel with a helipad in quaint Cornwall? Was the rhino horn authentic? ("Absolutely!") A veteran with thirty-two years behind the podium, Baddeley called Potter's "one of the most unusual and eccentric collections ever to have been offered for sale." Yet, he said, despite phenomenal interest, no one had offered to buy the entire collection (for the owners' minimum price, reportedly £500,000, or roughly $800,000). With all the hype, I figured prices would be stratospheric. Baddeley said, "I sold an Alfa Romeo last week for five hundred fifty thousand pounds in ninety seconds. I've got to work harder tomorrow."