Letters From London Read online

  So London is the natural home for an exhibition on this subject. “Fake? The Art of Deception” at the British Museum is a most enticing show, and various to the point of being higgledy-piggledy: it takes in painting and sculpture, books and manuscripts, furniture, jewelry, pottery, stamps, coins, newspapers, cutlery, and torture instruments; it covers every civilization whose artifacts have attracted collectors and, therefore, fakers. It also serves as a wry example of curatorial economy, or how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For where does this disgraced Dürer drawing, this dubious vellum miniature of Columbus landing in America, this dud “seventeenth-century” Turkish carpet come from? Why, from the British Museum, the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum. What was shamefully consigned to the deepest vaults is now back on display, and the conned experts of yesteryear blush—or perhaps chuckle—from their graves.

  As you wander round this Aladdin’s cave of bogus objects, you also encounter a wide spread of the baser human motives: the lust to deceive, to make money unlawfully, to swindle the faithful (as with the Turin Shroud), to destabilize the enemy’s currency, to undermine the democratic process (the “Zinoviev Letter” of 1924, which stirred up the classic Red Scare in Britain), to foment anti-Semitism (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). But overall the show leaves one uplifted rather than depressed—exhilarated by human inventiveness, charmed by these guerrilla attacks on the authority of the cognoscenti, amused, and even reassured, by the gullibility of our species. Who could resist, for instance, the case of the little-known Canadian furbearing trout? Belief in this exceptional fish seems to have first arisen in the seventeenth century, when a Scotsman wrote home about the abundance of “furried animals and fish” in Canada, was asked to provide a specimen, and duly did so. Fakes, in order to last more than a summer, must insert themselves into an appropriate crevice of probability and want: the Abominable Snowman, whose impressive tracks were almost certainly fabricated by a disgruntled British mountaineer, hits an exact nerve of phantasmagoric need in us. So did the bewhiskered trout: we imagine the deep and icy Canadian waters, and it suddenly seems plausible to us that survival is reserved only for those specimens which adapt—for instance, by sprouting fur. This fishy canard has tenaciously endured, been kept alive in recent years by an Ontario entrepreneur. About twenty years ago, an inquirer brought one of his products—white rabbit fur neatly attached to a brown trout—to the Royal Scottish Museum. The museum recognized the hoax and so didn’t retain the object. But news of the “find” got out, and public demand was such that the museum was obliged to re-create the furbearing trout. And this hallucinatory hybrid—a rare double fake, in fact, being a fake of a fake—now takes its rightful place in the British Museum show alongside a easeful of other questionable items of zoology: a unicorn’s horn, a griffin’s claw, a couple of mermen (dried monkey atop a fishtail), and the famous “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.”

  There are various sinister examples of “hostile fakes.” During the Second World War, for example, the Germans produced an excellent set of standard British postage stamps with two minute and subversive emendations: the crown above King George VI’s head was topped off by a Star of David, and the D of the pence sign was constructed from a hammer and sickle. (It seems from this distance an improbable insult to claim that the impeccably British monarch consorted with both Jews and Communists, but totalitarian abuse delights in the portmanteau mode: Shostakovich in his memoirs recalls Zhdanov’s berating of the poet Akhmatova as “both a slut and a nun.”) In the main, however, there is frequently a kind of tender complicity between faker and victim: I want you to believe that such-and-such is the case, says the faker; you want to believe it, too, and in order to cement that belief you, for your part, will give me a great deal of money, and I, for my part, will laugh behind your back. The deal is done. And public opinion, which likes to see the humiliation of the expert, usually gets over its first shudder of moral disapproval and ends up gleefully on the side of the faker. The best-known British art forger of postwar years, for instance, was a man named Tom Keating. Born in 1917, he had hopes of a regular career as an artist—or, at least, as an art teacher—but when thwarted began to diversify, first into art “restoration” at the shadier end of the market and then into straight forgery. He claimed to have produced a couple of thousand “Sexton Blakes”—as he referred, in Cockney rhyming slang, to his fakes—over a period of twenty years, specializing in the work of Samuel Palmer. He was finally unmasked in 1976 by the art-market correspondent of The Times. Keating then made a general confession at a press conference, claiming (with some justification) that he had begun forging as a protest against the exploitation of artists by dealers, and adding that he had in any case frequently given away his sly simulacra. He was arrested the following year, but the case never came to court: all charges were dropped because of Keating’s poor health. Thereafter, his popularity rose no end: his “Sextons” changed hands at respectable prices, he gave a series of television lectures on the painting techniques of the great masters, and after his death, in 1984, a sale of his work fetched £274,000—seven times the auctioneers’ estimate.

  Keating’s case offers a paradigm, and the fact that his forgeries often aren’t much good increases his lovability: not only is the art market fooled, but it’s fooled even by bad stuff Similarly, we admire the chutzpah of the two potters who produced “Bernard Leach” pots (with convincing seals) good enough to fool the major auction houses, and we admire them the more for doing so from the obscurity of the pottery class at Fetherstone Prison, Wolverhampton. We applaud the medieval fakes of Billy and Charley, a pair of Victorian mud larks who perceived that instead of combing the Thames foreshore in search of antiquities it was quicker to invent their own. (At their trial, in the early 1860s, the scholar Charles Roach Smith argued for the authenticity of the “finds” on the ground that no forger would have produced anything so preposterous.) Even when we ourselves are the potential victims, we cannot always find it in us to get un-alloyedly furious. That bogus Lacoste shirt, the bottle of “Johnnie Hawker” Scotch whiskey, the repro Vuitton luggage, the imitation Lego kits: of course we are being cheated (and so is the original manufacturer), but there is also something that makes us ask, Why do I value the maker’s name so much? Is not my need for authenticity a bit absurd? If Johnnie Hawker makes me just as drunk as Johnnie Walker, why should I feel myself hard done by?

  The British Museum show concludes with a handy section on the detection of fakes. Here there is, happily, still room for the scholar’s intuition—the young Kenneth Clark first rumbled a “Botticelli” Madonna by pointing out that she had the face of a twenties screen goddess—but increasingly it is a matter of science: microscopy, ultraviolet and X-radiography, dendrochronology, thermoluminescence. And here again one often ends up more than a little on the forger’s side. He (and it is always “he,” for the profession is not as yet an equal-opportunity employer) has done his best, and the world has been fooled—indeed, the world has come to love and venerate his artifact—when along comes a white-coated spoilsport who blows the gaff. A particularly appealing case is that of the Agincourt spur, which for many years lived a quietly respectable life in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s arms-and-armor collection. It consists of a genuine fifteenth-century spur round and through which the gnarled root of a tree has grown; a gilt-copper plaque set into the wood asserts that the item was picked up on the battlefield of Agincourt. And how evocative it seems to be: one imagines the loose spur falling from a knight’s charger as Henry V’s archers put the French to flight; it lies there disregarded until a sapling grows through it and lifts it back into human view, whereupon, centuries after the battle, a passing military-souvenir hunter… But none of this, alas, is likely. Dendrologists have gone to work and established that the wooden element in this resonant knickknack is almost certainly spruce. And one of the things about spruce is that it happens not to grow in the Pas de Calais. Another ingenious bodger (the more ingenious
, since he used a spur that was genuinely fifteenth century) has finally received his comeuppance.

  PICTURESQUE FAKERY, of course, doesn’t stop at the museum’s exit or the art collector’s back door: it is embedded in many aspects of British life, just as that stub of spruce is wound into the Agincourt spur. The British are good at tradition; they’re also good at the invention of tradition (from plowman’s lunch to the clan tartan). And like any other nation, they aren’t too keen on having those invented traditions exposed as bogus: they react like the boggling Harry of When Harry Met Sally in the face of a faked public orgasm. If we can’t believe that, what can we believe? And since individual identity depends in part upon national identity, what happens when those symbolic props to national identity turn out to be no more authentic or probable than a furbearing trout? What happens if the Queen turns out to be a foreigner (which to some extent she is, the royal House of Windsor having been the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until a diplomatic name change in 1917), or if we can’t rely upon the British Christmas (which to some extent we can’t, it being largely a Victorian invention)? Even the British Crown jewels are not above suspicion: a forthcoming report commissioned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office reveals, for instance, that the Black Prince’s Ruby, which tourists admire at the Tower of London, had little connection with the Black Prince and is, in any case, a spinel of inferior quality. This need for authenticity, this lust for integrity, applies equally to the commercial world—or, rather, to how the commercial world is perceived by those outside it. When I was a child in the early fifties, I was much attached to my local Woolworth’s. I liked its variety of goods, its cheapness, its user-friendly shelves (which facilitated a few illegal additions to my stamp collection); most of all, I liked its reliable fascia, “F. W. WOOLWORTH & Co.” Wherever in England you went, there in the High Street would be that gilt lettering on a burgundy background—F. W. Woolworth & Co., part of the very fabric of England. One day, when I was ten or so, I was informed that Woolworth’s was an American business. Of course, I declined to believe it. I would have had to redefine Englishness (beyond my childish capacity) if I had believed that.

  This sense of puzzlement and vague betrayal has been more widely felt during one of the longest and most Byzantine commercial sagas of recent times: the sale of the most famous shop in England, Harrods. For as long as Mrs. Thatcher has been in power, there has been a continuing and less than dignified scuffle for ownership of this Knightsbridge store. In fact, Harrods was only one of more than a hundred shops owned by the parent group and purchasee, the House of Fraser, but such was and is its enduring power as a British symbol that for prospective owners and the gawping public alike the battle has been about “who owns Harrods.” The British middle classes may be able to afford to shop there only during the biannual sale (when some of the goods are bought in, and are therefore not authentically Harrodian), but this increases rather than diminishes the mystique. Even those who have never stepped inside its doors proudly quote the supposed reply of the Harrods assistant faced with a fantastical inquiry: “The impossible takes a little longer, sir.” And this extra symbolic glitter naturally makes the institution alluring to outside plunderers. In the old imperial days, the British looted the treasure houses of their dominions (sometimes in the nicest possible way, of course, but sometimes not); now that the British are less dominant, their own prizes are up for grabs. It’s perhaps no surprise that the two main aspirants to ownership of Harrods over the last ten years have been what the City of London considers underprivileged outsiders; that’s to say, foreigners who have made, rather than inherited, their wealth.

  The first of them is Roland “Tiny” Rowland, the German-born chief executive of the international trading company Lonrho, whose many possessions include the Observer Sunday newspaper, edited by Donald “Tiny” Trelford. (The rather British difference between the two Tinys should be explained: Tiny Rowland is called Tiny because he is very tall, Tiny Trelford because he is—well, tiny.) Rowland has attempted on three occasions to buy the House of Fraser group, his most publicized failure coming in 1981, when the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, a government regulatory agency, turned down his bid on the ground that Lonrho ownership would cause “at least a very real and substantial risk that the efficiency of Fraser would deteriorate seriously.” This rejection did not come completely out of the blue, for Rowland was already a member of the extremely select clique of major capitalists who have managed to offend against even the constitutionally lax rules of capitalism and been publicly rebuked for it. In 1973, in the House of Commons, the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath described Rowland’s business practices as “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism,” a tag that has stuck ever since, and merited the unepigrammatic former Prime Minister his sole entry in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The only other tycoon of similar standing to have been so stigmatized in Britain over the last quarter of a century was the newspaper magnate (and publisher of Ceauşescu, Zhivkov, Husák, and Kádár) Robert Maxwell, who was described in 1971 by a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry as being “not in our opinion a person who can be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.” Needless to say, Mr. Maxwell has continued to run an increasing number of publicly quoted companies, while Mr. Rowland’s face, unacceptable as it may have been to liberal Conservatism, has grown plumper with the ingestion of more and more enterprises.

  The second claimant for the liver-spotted hand of Harrods was Mohamed Al-Fayed, an Egyptian businessman about whom not much was known when he first emerged except that he appeared to have large amounts of cash and his checks never bounced. He began, in the mid-1950s, as a protégé of the distinguished arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, to whose sister he was married, and he prospered as a middleman. With his brothers, Ali and Salah, he developed interests in banking, construction, oil, and property. He bought the Paris Ritz, took a second, Finnish wife, and lived the normal life of the superrich: homes in Paris and London, an estate in Surrey, a castle in Scotland, a villa in Gstaad, yachts in the South of France, armor-plated Mercedeses, bodyguards, and so on. But it was a fairly private life compared with that of Khashoggi, and was even marked by occasional benefactions. He gave financial support to the ultra-British film Chariots of Fire, and at the invitation of the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, undertook the refurbishment of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s house in the Bois de Boulogne. (Some said that, failing to understand the Windsors’ renegade status, he hoped the job would ingratiate him with the Royal Family.)

  By the end of 1984, Rowland was still hanging around the church like a much-rebuffed bridegroom, hoping that a ban imposed by the Department of Trade and Industry on Lonrho’s making a bid for Harrods would be lifted. But he had retained 29.9 percent of the House of Fraser’s shares and now agreed to sell them to Mohamed Al-Fayed (who had himself served on the board of Lonrho back in the seventies). Rowland offered the stock at three hundred pence a share, or fifty pence above the market price, on condition that he was paid in cash within forty-eight hours. Al-Fayed replied that Rowland could have the money within twenty-four hours. It must have seemed a sound enough deal to Rowland: first, he turned a decent profit, and, second, everyone knew that Al-Fayed did not have nearly enough money to mount a full-scale bid for the House of Fraser. If the DTI subsequently rescinded its ban on Lonrho, Rowland could always buy back the 29.9 percent. It was at this point, however, that someone shuffled the script. Rowland sold to Al-Fayed on November 2, 1984. On March 4, 1985, to everyone’s surprise and to Rowland’s fury, Al-Fayed bid for all the remaining shares of the House of Fraser, and the company’s board, eager to escape the Unacceptable Face of Capitalism, swiftly accepted.

  Two immediate questions were raised. Where on earth did the extra money—£450 million in cash, at a low estimate—come from? And would Al-Fayed be allowed to get away with the purchase without scrutiny from the Monopolies and Mergers Commission? Whereupon the story broadens politica
lly and brings in the richest man in the world: the Sultan of Brunei. The Sultan had come to the attention of the British government and public a year and a half earlier: in August 1983, he had withdrawn the Brunei Reserve Fund, worth $5.7 billion, from the Crown Agents in Britain, to the noticeable detriment of sterling. In 1985, the following events occurred, some or all of which may be connected. In January, the Sultan of Brunei bought London’s Dorchester Hotel—a deal fronted by Mohamed Al-Fayed, using a power of attorney to draw funds on the Sultan’s behalf On March 4, Mohamed Al-Fayed and his brothers were suddenly revealed to be much richer than anyone thought they had a right to be. On March 14, the Minister for Trade and Industry, Norman Tebbit, announced that he would not be referring the Al-Fayed bid for Harrods to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission; he also released Lonrho from the ban on its making a bid—by which time, of course, it was mockingly too late, as the Al-Fayeds had already acquired the 51 percent of the company’s shares they needed. Later in the year, as the sterling crisis deepened, with the pound falling to $1.04 and a continuing miners’ strike threatening to make things even worse, the Sultan of Brunei transferred £5 billion pounds into sterling to help prop up the British currency. Whereupon the pound sat up in bed and took a little soup, staggering back to $1.08.