Bruce felt able to contribute litde. Too many directors crowded the boardroom and there was a joke: “standing room only”. Also, the feeling that a meeting had already taken place. “He felt utterly betrayed,” says Elizabeth. “I remember a lot of rage.” The powerlessness of Bruce’s new position was driven home when one of the elite, Graham Llewellyn, queried Bruce’s expenses.
Had Bruce been appointed a full director, Elizabeth believed he might have remained at Sotheby’s. “It was typical of PCW. He thought he was going to get away with it. But he had come up against someone as strong-willed as he.”
Elizabeth’s observation to her mother after two months described the tempo that prevailed all her married life. “I’ve discovered there’s no point in planning on anything as Bruce’s schedule is always changing. You have to leave everything open always.” In November, they stayed in Birr Castle with Elizabeth’s friends Brendan and Alison Oxmantown. The United Nations had posted Brendan to West Africa and his mother was throwing a farewell party. “Lady Rosse is amazing and calls everything dear, darling beloved, including butlers and the Queen . . . The Press rang up one night while we were there and she did a marvellous imitation of an old Irishwoman till they hung up.” Conversation that weekend concentrated on the Oxmantowns’ destination, Dahomey. Once the capital of the slave trade, the country would be the setting for Bruce’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah.
A plan to spend Christmas in the Sudan was cancelled, but in early December the Chatwins travelled with Hewett and Felicity Nicholson to Leningrad. Bruce explained to Gertrude: “John Hewett and I have always wanted to see the archaeological stuff in the Hermitage and so we’ve cooked up an expedition.”
Immediately after Christmas, Gertrude received another letter from Bruce, this time from Paris. “We are sitting in an Italian restaurant and the woman next to me is a blonde with a khaki face. E. and I are speculating how it got that way because she is not a negress. E. has eaten an enormous pizza, half a chicken, and is now proposing to embark on an elaborate sweet. Nobody would say she doesn’t eat! But what really irks me is that she doesn’t appear to get any fatter while I blow out like a balloon.”
Bruce had definite ideas about how his wife should dress. From Sotheby’s he had bought her a big-sleeved Victorian dress in brown and grey taffeta. He also insisted that she wear a pair of real tortoise-shell glasses.
He was in Paris with Elizabeth to catalogue Helena Rubinstein’s collection of African and Oceanic sculptures. “Helena Rubinstein wore a lot of people out during her long life, and she retains that capacity in the grave. We work from 9 till 8 in the evening and we still get nowhere . . . I’m going to insist that E. gets paid a fortune.”
The Rubinstein sale took place on 21 April 1966, fetching £516,320. Bruce at the gavel maintained an open phone link with New York. More than 40 dealers squeezed into the boardroom and a Brancusi bronze called Bird in Space sold for £50,000 in 75 seconds. It was Bruce’s last major sale.
After several false starts the Chatwins found a house.
Bruce had been advised by Hewett, who lived in Kent “practically underneath a mound”, that you never wanted a home with a view. “He was so much in thrall to Hewett, that this is what we were after,” says Elizabeth, who would have preferred the open spaces of Wiltshire. One day she drove down the Ozleworth valley, in Gloucestershire. “I thought: this is great, it doesn’t have a view.”
Holwell Farm was a pink, seventeenth-century house set in 47 acres near the town of Wotton-under-Edge. It was perched on a steep slope and almost derelict. There was no central heating, limited electricity, and the kitchen was permeated with the stink of untrained tomcats. It required a new roof, new beams, complete redecoration.
The house was beautiful. “All the bluebells and primroses and cowslips are out so it is very pretty, rain or not,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “We like it better every time we see it.” She was able to foresee a country house in the image of her favourite book.
In April, Gertrude advanced £17,000 to buy Holwell Farm. They planned to move in on 9 May. The builders would have finished their work by the autumn. “The main thing is for you to own the house and not the house own you,” warned Elizabeth’s cousin, O’Donnell Iselin. They little suspected that the house was like a Hobbit hole, sunless for three months of the year.
In April 1966, after a protracted and complex procedure, Bruce officially became one of eight second-tier partners. He may have felt insulted about his directorship a year before, but at the time he had not judged it an issue on which to leave. He was viewed as Wilson’s heir. “None of us had any doubt but that he would be at the head of Sotheby’s in due course,” says Brian Sewell. Then, in the early summer of 1966, he resigned.
The fuse had been lit in the Sudan. Bruce, walking down Bond Street with Wilson, had surprised his chairman by spitting onto the pavement like a Bedouin. “He realised then that I’d changed.” The desert had restored his eyesight. “I was never at all able to focus on Sotheby’s again.”
He maintained that the decision to resign came to him after a revelatory “flash” in the boardroom. “I decided I didn’t want to spend not only the rest of my life with these people, but another week and I resigned . . . Just like that.”
He presented several reasons. He was piqued at his status; he was bored by his work in the Impressionist department, where there was no longer much movement of first-rate paintings to explore or exploit; he had grown sick of the auctioneering process. “Two days in the auction room brought back a flood of gruesome memories,” he wrote to James Ivory in 1972. “The nervous anxiety of the bidder’s face as he or she waits to see if she can afford to take some desirable thing home to play with. Like old men in nightclubs deciding whether they can really afford to pay that much for a whore. But things are so much better. You can sell them, touch ’em up at any time of the day, and they don’t answer back.”
But there may be an additional explanation for his resignation. Near the end of his life Bruce became fixated on one particular drama, little known at the time, which was being played out in the back-room between his two mentors, Wilson and Hewett.
Bruce always told friends he could have written a devastating biography of Wilson. “If he had lived into his eighties, he might have turned the saga of PCW into a Viceroy of Ouidah,” says the Islamic art dealer David Sulzberger, in whose London and Paris homes he would write that book. “He said he had the goods on PCW. He didn’t say it threateningly, but the goods existed and he had the low-down and thereby lay a tale.” Sewell suspected that Wilson was directly behind Bruce’s decision to leave. “I believe that relationship came to an end over a piece of outright dishonesty by Wilson in which the collaboration of Bruce was necessary.”
In the late 1970s, Bruce went for a walk with James Fox to Downton Castle in Shropshire and revealed how he had more or less hijacked its contents for Sotheby’s. “I was a very fierce salesman in those days.” To Jane Abdy, he boasted how he once saw a François II cabinet coming up for sale. “Bruce removed the pillars, bought it at the sale, and put the pillars back on afterwards.” His capacity for subterfuge is hinted at in a letter written in 1960 to his former master at Old Hall, Edward Peregrine. The subject was a Fra Angelico panel, one of two owned by Peregrine. Bruce had sold the first successfully through Sotheby’s, but he conducted the sale of the second panel privately, finding the dealer and charging commission. He wrote, “Sotheby’s name must on no account be used in connection with St Anthony Abbot and it must appear that the decision to sell only one stems entirely from you.” He made a further request. “Please would you not do anything without my being in the picture as it would not make things easy for me here. Enclosed is a photograph for you to have, but it is essential not to show it to anyone yet.”
The letter is rare because, amazingly, no archives for Sotheby’s exist prior to 1972. This is surprising in an institution whose activities play so central a role in late twentieth-century cultural histor
y. It makes the task of establishing what went on difficult. A number of people have tried, among them Frank Herrmann in the official history of the firm. Four other attempts to write the story of Sotheby’s were abandoned, one, by a friend of Wilson, the American art journalist Leo Lerman, in unsatisfactory circumstances. In 1964, Lerman arrived in London at Wilson’s request and had use of a temporary office. “Once he began to stir the surface,” says his partner, Grey Foy, “there were so many dicey aspects. He didn’t want to know where the horse was buried. He withdrew.” Lerman told Elizabeth that what he had learned was too litigious. “He could not write the true story because Wilson would not accept it.” That may be why, when Lerman heard of Bruce’s resignation, he wrote a letter of congratulation. “You must tell Bruce that I admire him enormously – his brave departure from the firm & his marvellous determination. Do, please, tell me in minute detail all about Bruce’s departure, the Beast’s reaction – everything . . . Tell me, tell me.”
Six months before he died, on 27 August 1988, Bruce focused his rage against Wilson and Hewett. He claimed to have resigned from Sotheby’s because he was being forced by them to sell the Pitt-Rivers collection “fraudulently” to America.
This was the tale he might have written, in Cary Welch’s words “a nasty novel to undo the wretched crook of the ‘ahtworld’”.
The deal involving the Pitt-Rivers museum in Farnham is labyrinthine and mired in secrecy. The truth of its dispersal stays out of reach, spread around the world with the contents of a miraculous collection. The story involves the museum, the tight circle of gentlemanly rogues of which Bruce had become a part, and the descendants of a Victorian nutter, Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers.
Pitt-Rivers is respected as the father of modern archaeology. He established a methodology, insisted on accurate records and brought to his find-spots the same scientific analysis as when examining the 477 men and officers of the 2nd Royal Surrey Militia: “all the men were measured naked, except the officers”. A cold man, prone to violence, he once slashed his daughter’s face with a riding crop. Unmoved when she was killed by lightning on her honeymoon, he reserved his emotions for Egyptian boomerangs, Benin bronzes and the scale models of his digs. He spent his fortune on two ethnographic collections. The most famous he endowed to the University of Oxford as a teaching museum. From 1881, he housed some of his most treasured pieces in a private museum near his Dorset home. Bruce had been on his way to this museum with Digby-Jones when he suffered his nervous collapse.
The Farnham collection, housed in a converted farmhouse school for gypsies, was varied and remarkable. Intended for pottery, locks and keys, it grew to embrace ethnographic works from West Africa and the Pacific. Outstanding were the contents of Room Nine: 240 works of art from Benin retrieved as bounty by British troops during an expedition in February 1897.
The bronze plaques, heads and figures ranged from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The rituals behind them would find an outlet in The Viceroy of Ouidah. For the present, these Benin bronzes, the largest collection in private hands, were the nub of Bruce’s quarrel with Sotheby’s.
By the time he came to know the museum, ownership of the collection had passed to the General’s grandson, an ethnologist of Fascist sensibilities who had worked in the South Seas. Captain George Pitt-Rivers possessed the best command of invective of anyone Bruce had met and was, of all the collectors he dealt with, the oddest. Interned in Brixton in 1940 for his political beliefs, Captain George was a convinced Mosleyite who disciplined his son Julian – “because I’d fought on the wrong side in the war, i.e. against Hitler.” He is said to have cut out arrows in his cornfields to guide Goering’s Luftwaffe and everything in his house at Hinton St Mary was German, including his car and his dog. His sexual habits were mysterious, but a nurse with whom he ran off to Genoa reported them as “rather terrifying”. He was, on the other hand, passionately anti-homosexual. When his eldest son Michael was imprisoned for the offence in 1952, he disowned him, explaining to everyone it was the doing of that Jew Churchill. Of Maidstone prison, Michael says: “I had an extraordinary prison life because I was used to lunatic associations. It was just like going home.”
In 1959, seeking an expert to reorganise the Farnham museum, Captain George had approached Hewett, Bruce’s overlord in Antiquities. “I knew a lot about Benin,” said Hewett. “I went down, took stuff out of cases and correctly labelled it.” Hewett and his partner Sandy Martin sometimes visited once a week. Often they took Bruce. What began in innocence, removing valuable Benin masks and heads from damp cases and making an inventory, by degrees became something else.
In 1927, Captain George had reached an important agreement with the Inland Revenue: death duties would be exempted so long as the Farnham museum remained intact. By the 1960s, the museum was in a terrible mess and no longer open to the public (although accessible by appointment until 1966). The total takings, claimed Captain George, barely covered the cost of the heating. Defeated, he offered the museum to the nation. “They wanted a capital endowment of £600,000, and for him to have nothing to do with it,” says his third son, Anthony. “The one time he tried to do something good, he was rebuffed.”
“Then George got a little more cranky,” said Hewett. “His income was £70,000 a year and he spent £75,000. He started to get keen to sell and he turned to me, a dealer in Bond Street.”
The acts committed were not illegal since the museum was private – but under the terms of the 1927 agreement the collection had to be kept intact. Clear beyond doubt is that a lot of people made money from the break-up of the Pitt-Rivers collection.
What was sold, and to whom, is impossible to trace. One reason was the mysterious disappearance of the catalogue, a meticulous and encyclopaedic copy with watercolour drawings that listed all accessions made between I88I and 1900. Captain George, travelling across Paris or Vienna, inadvertently left it in a taxi. Thereafter it was impossible for the Inland Revenue to point a finger.
Captain George’s second son was Julian Pitt-Rivers, an anthropologist who worked in Iraq with Seton Lloyd. He was in no doubt that something fishy was going on. “When I was still on speaking terms with my father, I went to see what was in the museum, in particular a small white ivory Benin head which I had liked. At last, I discovered the head hung unnecessarily high up over a doorway so it could not be seen from close to. I understood at once it was a copy. I then realised Stella, my father’s common-law wife, was selling off bits of the museum.”
Stella Howson-Clive was the daughter of a Midlands industrialist. She was a large, striking figure with a wicked sense of humour and a streak of white through her dyed black hair. “She met my father in the Ritz, having tea,” says Anthony, “and they discovered both had been in prison during the war.” They never married. Stella changed her name by deed-poll to Pitt-Rivers. George being famously mean and Stella being on the contrary seriously extravagant, she frequently needed to replenish her funds. Directed by friends in the art world, she set her sights on the Farnham museum.
Captain George, through Hewett, discreetly sold several items. When he fell ill, Stella picked up the flame with a steadier passion. Needing money to subsidise “Stelladoux”, her house in France, and her French lover, a conman from Marseille called Raoul Maumen, she made of the museum at Farnham her milch-cow. By the mid-1960s rumour was rich. Locals talked of lorries arriving at the museum late at night. Duplicates of the objects sold were arranged through Hewett so that she could pretend the originals were still there. Hewett’s partner, Sandy Martin, confirms that Putzel Hunt (Hewett’s third partner, based in Ireland) had a Benin mask copied at this time.
Captain George died in June 1966. He had secretly agreed before his death to sell Stella the museum. No one in the family, not one of his three sons, knew about this arrangement. “I asked Lord Goodman to bring a law suit, to find out what had happened,” says Michael. “But it had been so cunningly done, it was practically impossible to f
ind out. Goodman said to me, ‘I don’t know how much you’ve got to spend on this case, but if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, it will cost you a million pounds, and you may not win’.” Michael decided not to pursue the case. By then, it was too late. Immediately after Captain George’s death, Stella left for France to join her lover, while at Farnham it was discovered that in effect a clearance sale had taken place. Apart from some potsherds and British antiquities, the major treasures had been scattered to dealers and private collectors in New York, Switzerland, France and Germany. “Naïve as my father was, he did not think Stella was a great white hope,” says Anthony, “but he cannot have imagined how quickly the snouts would be in the trough.”
Under the terms by which she was able to buy the museum, Stella had been required to find between £50,000–80,000. (The most modest estimate calculates the museum to have been worth five times this figure.) Kenelm Digby-Jones had known George from the 1950s, when he was at the Courtauld. He was also a friend of Stella. He became her adviser. Aware of Peter Wilson’s predilection for special terms from the days when he worked as his assistant, Digby-Jones contacted his former boss. Wilson was prepared to advance Stella a loan on the understanding that she would sell the collection at Sotheby’s when George died. The Sotheby’s chairman perceived the Pitt-Rivers collection as a honey pot that he could syphon into Sotheby’s to boost sales. He advised George to set up a trust with Stella as sole beneficiary.
One does not know what stories Bruce was told, or how far he was in cahoots with Wilson. But he must have known Wilson and Hewett were up to something. One weekend he drove down with Elizabeth. The museum was locked. They were let in by a Peruvian buder. Inside, Elizabeth remembers glass cases containing astonishing “lur” bronze horns and ivory leopards. Wilson and Hewett were there too. “They all said: ‘You haven’t seen this, you don’t know anything about it, you’re not to tell anyone.’ It would have cost Bruce his job if he’d said anything.”
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