An amazing story from A Blast From the Past:
It was only a small shop in an
unfashionable part of London, but it had a most peculiar clientele. From
Mondays to Fridays the place stayed locked, and its only visitors were
schoolboys who came to gaze through the windows at the marvels crammed
inside. But on Saturday afternoons the shop was opened by its owner—a
“genial frog” of a man, as one acquaintance called him, small, pouched,
wheezy, permanently smiling and with the habit of puffing out his cheeks
when he talked. Settling himself behind the counter, the shopkeeper
would light a cheap cigar and then wait patiently for laborers to bring
him treasure. He waited at the counter many years—from roughly 1895
until his death in 1939—and in that time accumulated such a hoard of
valuables that he supplied the museums of London with more than 15,000
ancient artifacts and still had plenty left to stock his premises at 7
West Hill, Wandsworth.
“It is,” the journalist H.V. Morton assured his readers in 1928,
perhaps
the strangest shop in London. The shop sign over the door is a
weather-worn Ka-figure from an Egyptian tomb, now split and worn by the
winds of nearly forty winters. The windows are full of an astonishing
jumble of objects. Every historic period rubs shoulders in them. Ancient
Egyptian bowls lie next to Japanese sword guards and Elizabethan pots
contain Saxon brooches, flint arrowheads or Roman coins… There are
lengths of mummy cloth, blue mummy beads, a perfectly preserved Roman
leather sandal found twenty feet beneath a London pavement, and a
shrunken black object like a bird’s claw that is a mummified hand… [and]
all the objects are genuine and priced at a few shillings each.
This
higgledy-piggledy collection was the property of George Fabian
Lawrence, an antiquary born in the Barbican area of London in
1861—though to say that Lawrence owned it is to stretch a point, for
much of his stock was acquired by shadowy means, and on more than one
occasion an embarrassed museum had to surrender an item it had bought
from him. For the better part of half a century, however, august
institutions from the British Museum down winked at his hazy provenances
and his suspect business methods, for the shop on West Hill supplied
items that could not be found elsewhere.
Among the major museum
pieces that Lawrence obtained and sold were the head of an ancient ocean
god, which remains a cornerstone of the Roman collection at the Museum of London; a spectacular curse tablet
in the British Museum; and the magnificent Cheapside Hoard: a priceless
500-piece collection of gemstones, broaches and rings excavated from a
cellar shortly before the First World War. It was the chief triumph of
Lawrence’s career that he could salvage the Hoard, which still comprises
the greatest trove of Elizabethan and Stuart-era jewelery ever
unearthed. Lawrence’s operating method was simple but ingenious. For
several decades, he would haunt London’s building sites each weekday
lunch hour, sidling up to the laborers who worked there, buying them
drinks and letting them know that he was more than happy to purchase any
curios—from ancient coins to fragments of pottery—that they and their
mates uncovered in the course of their excavations.
According to
Morton, who first visited the West Hill shop as a wide-eyed young man
around 1912, and soon began to spend most of his Saturday afternoons
there, Lawrence was so well known to London’s navvies that he was
universally referred to as “Stoney Jack.” A number, Morton added, had
been offered “rudimentary archaeological training” by the antiquary, so
they knew what to look for.
Lawrence made many of his purchases
on the spot; he kept his pockets full of half-crowns (each worth two
shillings and sixpence, or around $18.50 today) with which to reward
contacts, and he could often be spotted making furtive deals behind
sidewalk billboards and in barrooms. His greatest finds, though, were
the ones that wended their way to Wandsworth on the weekends, brought
there wrapped in handkerchiefs or sacks by navvies spruced up in their
Sunday best, for it was only then that laborers could spirit their
larger discoveries away from the construction sites and out from under
the noses of their foremen and any landlords’ representatives. They took
such risks because they liked and trusted Lawrence—and also, as JoAnn
Spears explains it, because he “understood networking long before it
became a buzzword, and leveraged connections like a latter-day Fagin.”
Two
more touches of genius ensured that Stoney Jack remained the navvies’
favorite. The first was that he was renowned for his honesty. If ever a
find sold for more than he had estimated it was worth, he would track
down the discoverer and make certain he received a share of the
profits....
