Collecting Hangarobilia

A talk by Rodney Dale delivered to the Cambridge Local History Society on Saturday 4 November 2000, concerning collecting, the philosophy of collecting,and some specific collections.

I will start by saying that there is an anomaly in the title of my talk, in that I am not going to talk about ‘Collecting Hangarobilia’, but first about ‘Collecting’, after which I will say something about ‘Hangarobilia’.

 I should also warn you that, as far as I can guess from your fixture card, my talk will be dissimilar from others this season, for I shall be rambling round in my head, rather than in my village, and sharing my ideas and diversions with you. A sub-title might be ‘Confessions of a Hoarder’.

 Just as modern jazz is of interest chiefly to those who play it — at least, so I assume for, if not them, to whom? — so is a collection of chief interest to the collector and his or her fellow collectors. Generally, the more esoteric the collection, the narrower its appeal — and the shorter the time before the less fanatic switch off.

 If I were to speak at great length on collecting cornflakes, say, it might well have a soporific effect — although talks at this time on a Saturday afternoon aren’t the easiest of things to handle. So if I drop off in the middle, please give me a shout. In any cross-section of people — even those selected for their interest in collecting — there will only be a certain number interested in cornflake collecting. I’m not therefore going to talk at length about any one collection, but about collecting in general — the theory of collecting, perhaps — and then talk about some specific collections I have known, including the infamous Hangarobilia.

 There are many reasons for collecting, and the urge to collect must surely be one of the basic instincts of living things, following closely behind the need for food, shelter and perpetuating the species, not necessarily in that order. We all know that some animals collect bright things — jackdaws for example — and a local cat called Gussie used to steal objects and hide them up a tree — a £1 coin, a watch, several children’s toys, rabbits and on one occasion a hen. Ruscus, one of our present cats, specialises in collecting paper, particularly crisps bags and other exciting wrappers, whose triumphant accession he announces with a special cry. And the collecting urge has long been strong in humans, for one has only to look at mortuary paraphernalia through the ages to see a range of forms of personal adornment . . . and to make, for example, a necklace of discrete elements requires that there be a collection of such elements upon which to draw — stones, teeth, or whatever.

 I don’t think I need develop that further other than to say that the urge to collect items of personal adornment is as strong today as at any time in the past, although the values — both sentimental and financial — have now usually been transferred from the dead to the living, and we tend not to fill people’s coffins with valuable artefacts — nor the obolus under the tongue — before despatching them, for the dead are not now generally believed to be rowed across the Styx by Charon.

 Having said that, it seems to me that mankind, now known as humankind — or, in the silliest excesses of political correctness hupersonkind — divides into collectors (a polite word for hoarders) and throwers-away. A collector of course can also be a thrower-away, but I doubt if the reverse is possible. Were it not for the collectors, the world would be a poorer place — think of Armstrong, Bodley, Cole, Keiller, Pitt-Rivers, Powell-Cotton and Soane — not to mention names closer to us such as Delanoy.

 Most of the greatest collections are in museums, for several reasons. They have a collecting policy. They have — notionally at least — the space and conditions for storing, maintaining and displaying the collections. They may even be centres of excellence for certain categories of object, with experts on those categories on the staff. They are seen as worthy recipients of gifts and bequests. And it goes without saying that the longer they have been in existence, the richer should be their collections. The growing collection is well understood by The British Library with an inexorable growth of some 5 miles of shelving per year (that’s about 72 feet per day, or one yard per hour round the clock).

 A collection, like litter in the street, encourages people to add to it. As soon as it became known that my father had acquired three or four cats from various sources, people started knocking on the door offering strays. If he said ‘no’ (which, thank heavens, was a word he soon learned) some people turned quite nasty — a peculiarity well known to museum curators who are perfectly well aware that some offers are made by people who can’t bear to throw something away, and see the museum as should-be-grateful free storage. This type of person causes even bigger headaches when, having persuaded the museum to take in the object, turns up out of the blue and asks for it back. No wonder there are now elaborate and comprehensive forms to sign when the museum accepts your donation, and what a good thing there’s no cooling-off period.

 Once you have the collection, what do you do with it?

I keep six honest serving men

(They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

Kipling’s little verse (appended to the Just-So Story The Elephant’s Child) is often of use in analysis, and we can apply it to the arrangement of collections. The collecting policy — and indeed the name of the establishment (The Museum of Childhood, for example) — tells you ‘what’ to collect, but not necessarily ‘why’. When objects are arranged, there is almost always a ‘when’ in the arrangement. The earliest ones are on the left and the latest on the right. Case 1 contains the Eolithic specimens; case 37 the 20th-century ones. Within this classification, there is probably a ‘where’ — the European Case, the African Case, the Indian Case and so on — and that takes care of the ‘who’ as well. Materials and their handling also are often an important classifier, embracing ‘what’ and ‘how’. The whole adds up to the ‘why’ — because people just love to see and compare things from the past, beautiful things, things fit for their purpose, things that touch them in some way, however old they might be — the objects, that is.

 Look at pots — they’re that shape because they were for that purpose, and you can see the marks of the fingers of the Neolithic potter as he bent the clay to his will (((2))) and added decorative features. If we ourselves have had hands-on clay experience, we will be able to identify that much more with that potter, and this will probably lead us to wonder about the similarities and differences between us and him. Collections make us think.

 Move on to the Roman pots, (((3))) and they help us to conjure up our mental picture of how the Romans lived. If this encourages us to take things a step further, we may try to embark on some re-enactment, the difficulty — the impossibility — being to shed all the knowledge we have that separates us from the Romans, knowledge that must get in the way of our trying to enter the Roman mind. It’s the same sort of knowledge that leads to revisionist history — we know so much more than our forebears; we are so much more enlightened; we would never have persecuted witches, allowed Mozart to starve, or bombed Dresden.

 Having tried to extirpate the knowledge of hindsight, we then of course have the equally impossible task of acquiring the knowledge that the Romans had that we lack. And all of this without pausing to wonder what period of Roman history we are considering anyway, between the legendary foundation by Romulus and Remus in -753, right through the establishment of the Roman Empire by Augustus in -27, and its decline and ultimate fall in 475 — a span of more than a millennium.

 For is not the Ancient Rome we all carry in our minds some generalised scene with people clad in togas wandering about in a sun-kissed forum, saluting one another with arm across chest, and declaiming messages from scrolls in a stilted form of English, the whole presided over by a degenerate Emperor somewhat resembling a combination of Charles Laughton, Robert Morley and Peter Ustinov, being served pendulous swags of grapes and copious draughts of wine by callipygous handmaidens, while applauding the exploits of gladiators or hominivorous lions?

 My digression is not entirely irrelevant, I hope. It is framed to show what endeavours may be inspired by collections, and how our knowledge may turn to understanding through a study of the objects from the past we’re trying to re-create. But it warns us also of the possible pitfalls of ill-defined re-creations, which should perhaps carry some sort of health warning. Remember — Billy Elliot is little more ‘about’ ballet than Lady Chatterly’s Lover is ‘about’ gamekeeping.

 The way we lived then is always fascinating, as is the way we lived yesterday. You don’t have to spend long eavesdropping at any collection of ‘bygones’ to hear people saying: ‘We used to have one of those — in fact my mother still uses hers every day’, leading on to: ‘I wonder if they’d be interested in my old dodger-me-trot — they don’t seem to have one.’ The bygones collection touches nostalgia (those wonderful past times we think we remember, forgetting the typhoid epidemic, and the earth closet down the garden on a freezing night), or proud familiarity (I used to work one of those). It’s amazing how many people seem to have lived in the sort of quaint environmment museums often seek to re-create.

 The word ‘Bygones’, by the way, is an example of one believing, erroneously, that something or other was invented at about the time when one first came across it. I thought it dated from the sixties, but OED’s first citation is from the Burlington Magazine of 1935, and it must have been current before then. I should say also that I collect words and phrases, and found ‘Dodger-me-trot’ for ‘thigummybob’ in Wright’s Dialect Dictionary.

 So — a collection really is a thing of comparatives — allowing comparisons between one object and another, revealing evolution, influences, causes, effects; styles and fads and fancies. It is because we can ‘make sense’ of a collection in one way or another that we can identify gaps in it and, if we are particularly fanatical, go to enormous lengths to fill those gaps. Who, owning nine objects of a set of ten is not going to move heaven and earth to acquire the tenth?

On the other hand, there are stories — myths, perhaps — of collectors who think they have a unique and priceless object and who, on finding out that there is another, go to criminal lengths to acquire it, and then destroy it. No true collector of course could go as far as the destruction, but the evil character in such a story is generally clad in a heavily-frogged silk smoking jacket with cap to match, and is pushed about in a Bath chair by an ursine and totally loyal manservant who lost his power of speech in the Boer War — you can envisage the sort of story to which I refer.

 The need to complete the set is not confined to great rarities — indeed, items of more modest value are just as susceptible to controlled avarice. Marketeers have known this for a long time; what better to inspire brand loyalty, for example, than cigarette cards? My grandfather, to whom I owe much of my early esoteric knowledge — for example, that the Latin name of the duck-billed platypus or mullingong is Ornithorhynchus anatinus — was my partner in cigarette card collecting — indeed, I could scarcely have done without him as I was only four or five years old at the time. So I learned about the Mammals of Great Britain (as we used to call our country, and why not?), Film Stars (although I wasn’t sure what film stars were, I knew that Charles Bowyer, Myna Loy, Olivia de Havilland, and the rest were members of that class), British aircraft (which made the de Havilland bit somewhat confusing), and the Royal Navy — all educational series that John Player produced in the late thirties, culminating with that instructive series of the times Air Raid Precautions.

 Grandpa also gave me my first grown-up books — Wood’s Natural History (whence Ornithorhynchus anatinus), Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century, Canot’s Natural Philosophy, and Part 5 of the Complete Works of Hogarth. You can imagine how fascinated I was by Hogarth’s ‘False Perspective’ — there’s a lot going on there! These books were the first in my grown-up library, and have remained great friends and sources of information for some of my own books. Not so long ago I acquired the complete set of the Hogarth, so my now-spare Part 5 is available for a grandson — although his parents might well deem it unsuitable.

A quarter of a century earlier, by the way, Grandpa had been a collector of first editions, but his first wife got rid of them when she got it into her head that he wasn’t going to return from the First World War. But he did return, unscathed, and was livid when he found his books had gone. I’ve still got his bookcase, however, as well as the rest of his library, and my parents’ library, and our own library — some of which, I’m sorry to say, is still awaiting unpacking from its last move. It’s odd how parts of one’s life seem to be in limbo when one’s knowledge is sealed in boxes.

 The need to complete the set as a marketing tool aimed particularly at children was early recognised by those who introduced Sunday School stickers. I was never into those myself, but I remember friends showing me their brightly-coloured collections of sanitised middle-eastern scenes. Further must-haves include tea cards and cereal gifts and, moving on to collections requiring some investment (and solving the Christmas- and birthday-present problem) Barbie Dolls, Action Man, Matchbox Toys, Star Wars, Ninja Turtles, Polly Pocket, Warhammer, Pokémon, Bob the Builder, and many others past, present and future. Some are even labelled ‘Collectible’ in case you miss the point.

 In the mainly adult world, the success of partworks, dealing with such topics as cookery, gardening, or British Birds (Number One with an inevitable owl on the front cover) must depend on the principle of completing the set, hence the introductory offers — buy one, get one free, known in the trade as BOGOF — free binders and other come-ons to get the punters hooked. The same principle has been exploited by Guinness Superlatives Ltd, who unwittingly stumbled on a diamond mine in 1955 and some 40 years later set up the Guinness Gold Club for those with more than 30 editions of the book. Those of us who do have a more or less complete set are driven to keep adding to it annually, but have to point to the decline and fall — first, the relatively crude content and layout of the earlier editions, then the graduation to a really informative and worthwhile reference source, then the encroachment of sillier records and less-relevant information and, in more recent years, I’m sorry to say, the real dumbing down of what was once a fine product.

 Now I’d like to turn to some of the collections with which I have been involved since my earliest days, for I come — as you may have already guessed — from a family of hoarders. I’ve spoken of my grandfather’s part in introducting me to collecting, but no less important was my father, also a collector. In our pre-war house in Grosvenor Gardens N10 was what was known as ‘the Secret Room’ where my father kept his collection of locks and keys. Here he would demonstrate the construction of his latest acquisition from the Caledonian Market; here I met and absorbed the principles of the box of wards and the tumbler, Barron’s lock of 1778, Brahmah’s lock of 1784 (six years after his water-closet patent), Chubb’s of 1818, Hobbs, Newall, Marr and many others. First, Father would take a lock to pieces, and then ask me to reassemble it. Then I moved on to both disassembly and reassembly, while he watched proudly. The inside of a lever lock (even the inside of the despised pressed-steel modern versions) takes me back to the Secret Room at Grosvenor Gardens. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but Father was a noted collector of locks and keys, and most of his collection made its way to the Science Museum some time in the 40s. Some items I still have — his ‘bible’, George Price On Locks and Keys and a robust tumbler lock with a bridge ward, probably mid-18th century — visibly using the techniques of the blacksmith. The key is somewhat crude, but it serves its purpose; I myself made it for a Christmas present one year.

 ‘When you’re twenty-one, my boy,’ Father said, ‘I will tell you the secret of the locks and the keys, that is only handed down from father to son.’ Prepared to wait, I forgot all about this until I was somewhat older than 21, and then reminded him — ‘Isn’t it time you told me the secret of the locks and the keys, that is only handed down from father to son?

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he asked.

I explained. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he said. ‘I must have said it as a joke!’

 Another of Father’s collections was of long-case clocks; of course, a normal house can only support a certain number of striking clocks before the occupants become edgy, but there were enough left at his death for me and my sister to be able to pass on one to each of his grandchildren. And so another part of my juvenile diet was the construction of the pendulum-regulated clock movement and its striking mechanism, for these also came in from time to time from the Caledonian Market, and had to be dismantled, cleaned and rebuilt.

 Father had been brought up by his uncle, who was a fanatical student of Samuel Pepys, Diarist and Saviour of the British Navy. After many years’ research, Uncle Edwin brought out Eight Generations of the Pepys Family, and edited The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys for the Navy Records Society. Uncle has been described as ‘the greatest Pepysian scholar of the early twentieth century’ — which gives me a warm glow, but makes me even sadder that I scarcely knew him, for I was four when he died on Pepys’s birth date in 1938 — faithful to the last — and his collection of Pepysiana went to the National Maritime Museum. I have one book from his Pepysian collection — The Longitude Found. This is of interest for two reasons: first, it is one of the many attempts to solve the longitude problem, about which everyone knows these days because of Dava Sobel and Longitude, her wonderful book about John Harrison and his chronometric solution; second, because the book carries the plate of Richard Towneley, one of my 512 8xgreat grandfathers, early Fellow of the Royal Society and suggester to Robert Boyle of the gas law that bears the latter’s name.

 Uncle Edwin had his own printing press on which he produced several books and many pamphlets; his day job was teaching maths at the Royal Naval College and his interest in maths led him to calculate a table of interpolation coefficients, and set it up and print it himself.

 Not quite collecting, but a task demanding the same degree of fanaticism — with which he was well endowed — and so, I think, worth mentioning — and anyway, it’s part of my collection of family books.

 When war broke out, we moved to Cambridge, as it was predicted that it would be safer than London. The locks and clocks came with us, of course, as did the all-pervasive atmosphere of Samuel Pepys, for Father had donned Uncle’s mantle of defender of the Pepysian Faith. Now, being five years old, I was of an age to start my own collections, and gradually built up a respectable part of a sheep’s skeleton from the butcher, via the kitchen — I’m appalled that you can’t buy a sheep’s head from the butcher nowadays; it’s another example, in its own way, of curtailing access to knowledge by dumbing down, along with an over-enthusiastically applied Health & Safety at Work Act. What untold damage has been done to our young by the decline of Meccano and the rise of the computer?

 Trainspotting never appealed to me, but bus watching did, with the added (and instructive) joy of drawing maps and studying and travelling the routes, and collecting tickets. Sticking stamps in albums wasn’t my thing either, but I have always hoarded stamps and hope that someone more methodical than I will appreciate my hoard when the time comes.

 As the war came to an end, Father discovered a new passion — motoring. It began when a 1928 4 1/2-litre Bentley chassis appeared in the showroom opposite our house in Chesterton Road, and the story of that, and our becoming post-war vintage motorists is all set down in my memoir Halcyon Days. Some years after Father died, someone found a mysterious copper crescent in the garden at Histon, which polished up handsomely. This was ‘identified’ by ‘experts’; I can’t remember how wrong they got it, but when my mother told me about it, I explained that it was actually from the helmet of a Japanese suit of armour that Father had bought before the war in the Caledonian Market; he had had it as a mascot on the radiator cap of the 4-1/2-litre Bentley until he reluctantly accepted that it was illegally spiky.

 Father had three principles which affected our motoring — 1, If you’re going to get something, get a big one; 2, If you’ve got something that might break down, get another for use in case it does; 3, Whatever you’ve got, get another for spares. Thus it was that he became a collector of motor cars. The Bentley was a big one. Then it had to be rewired, which seemed to take a long time in those days, so he got a Fiat 500 as a stopgap. That was a mistake as it was much too small, so in came the Armstrong Siddeley heavy 12. By this time, cars were a bit like cats, and people started to offer them — hence the even bigger 6 1/2-litre Bentley, and the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, and then another Ghost, and so on. At one time or another, we had most of the vintage Bentleys — 4 1/2 and 6 1/2 as I’ve said, and two 8 litres, as well as the rare 4-litre, but never a 3 or a Speed 6. In Rolls-Royce we had the Silver Ghosts, Phantoms 1, 2 and 3 and the Rolls 20s. And there were many lesser but rarer cars such as my own 1923 Rover 8, the Cluley, the Daimler, Lorraine-Dietrich, the Maybach, and the Siddeley Special, not to mention the Dennis fire-engine and so on. Being a teenager in that environment was very exciting, especially as I was of an age for Father to let me drive most of these wonderful vehicles.

 In parallel with Father’s car collection was my road fund licence collection. This was the earliest in my collection, and it came from a 1919 BSA motorcycle with edentate gearbox which we bought for £5 from Farmer Behagg of Fenstanton. What a good thing that the owner didn’t follow the instruction on the back, and that the Post Office hadn’t insisted on his doing so. Only recently did I discover that RFLs came in in January 1921. The design of the licence remained unchanged for many years, and this intact 1947 specimen shows why some of the information was repeated.

 One thing I haven’t touched on yet is what constitutes a collection. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one book doesn’t make a library. Everything has to start somewhere, and I suppose that I could take The Longitude Found as a starting point and decide that I’m going to collect Longitudiana. But until I had amassed, say, half-a-dozen pieces it might be thought presumptuous to call it a collection.

 Perhaps most collections start by accident. It was in the summer of 1985 that I bought a few cans of soft drink to refresh the staff at my company BLS (as it was then — now Flag Communication Ltd) — Idris ginger beer, Quatro, and Coke. Rather than dispose of all the old cans, I kept one of each, for it suddenly struck me that these were fine examples of contemporary design, and that they were ephemera par excellence. Before long, I had several, then dozens, then hundreds of different soft drink cans. In the last 15 years, we’ve seen significant changes — in ring pulls for example — and of course in the can design itself, since 15 years ago three-piece cans were the norm, deep drawing being in its infancy — it’s all a bit cornflakes, isn’t it? We’ve seen soft drink manufacturers come and go and others rationalising their ranges, as well as the rise of free gifts and competitions and of course — the original purpose of the collection — changes in design fashion. To hark back to what I was saying earlier, there are even now cans described as ‘Collector’s editions’.

 It puts me in mind of a trip to the Floread in Holland some years ago, when I accidentally discovered that Coca-Cola Europe had issued a set of 16 cans carrying pictures of cathedrals; by diligent observation of Coke drinkers, and digging in litter bins, I managed to secure 13 different cathedrals in one day with the help of a friend. Our wives, for some reason, felt unable to enter into the spirit of the thing. Other memorable cans include Coke from China — where, I understand, Co-ca-Co-la means ‘bite the dead tadpole’ — a Diet Pepsi found in a derelict petrol-pump in Tintagel, and my first sighting of the new Tango Passion Fruit in a Bristolean gutter. I’ve gone into cornflakes mode again.

 I have not yet, I fear, sorted the collection properly. It was destined for the packaging museum at Gloucester, carrying on, Richard Opie tells me, from another collection which fortuitously ended in 1985 — the year in which I began. But unfortunately the Packaging Museum closed in September 2001 when the lease fell in, and Robert Opie had a much more daunting task on his hands than I.

 Such collections take up space, but fortunately we have a barn to hand. Also in the barn is my collection of typewriters; collecting bulky things is not everyone’s cup of tea and I guess that those of us with storage space owe it to the world to use it to advantage. The typewriter collection began with a little Blickensderfer given to me by Mervyn Parry in the early fifties; not terribly rare, but interesting — especially when you realise that the modern Teletype printer uses the same mechanical principles for its print-head.

 The collection continued very slowly, for by 1966 I had perhaps half a dozen typewriters. Then there was a lull during which I acquired a few really antique machines from various sources, until first electric typewriters, and then word processors, began to oust an increasing avalanche of scrap manual machines. By this time, my typewriter collection had attained stray-cat status, and they continue to trickle in; don’t ask me how many I have. The collection also contains several adding and calculating machines — perhaps a keyboard is the common factor — and lately a computer or two; I don’t think the bulk of it is particularly rare at present, but given time somebody will be glad that I had the space and the foresight to gather it — I hope — because the Typewriter Museum in (I think) Brighton had to close down some years ago. A couple of years ago I was able to supply The British Library with an antique machine (Smith Premier) as part of their first exhibition in their new premises. Other classes of objects I hoard include sewing machines, telephones, cameras, wireless sets and the like. Perhaps the overall category is ‘electromechanical bygones’.

 What else? I have long been a fan of cactus and succulent plants, and in the late 40s and early 50s earned useful amounts of pocket money by breeding and selling them, going to the lengths of extending the greenhouse to accommodate as many as possible (not to mention the rats that I bred for dissection at 1/6 a time). The collection was dispersed when I went off to do National Service in 1953, and when I returned we’d moved to Histon and I had other things on my mind. 45 years later, with our recently-added conservatory, cactus and succulent plants are returning to our environment. However, I’m thinking about building them their own greenhouse for two reasons — my wife dislikes being bitten, and we seem to have begun to collect orchids — so there’ll be no problem about filling the space released when the cactuses move out.

 And so to the Hangarobilia. Edwin Rutter — a tailor who traded as ‘Stuart’; in Trumpington Street and was in the news last year (1999) as the oldest craftsman still at work (shortly before he died) — had a ‘Black Museum’ at the rear of his shop. I know neither where it came from, nor what purpose it served, though I suspect that at one time people must have been encouraged to hand over sixpence to see the objects — or perhaps as an incentive it was free if you were measured for a suit.

 Father, being interested in mechanical security devices, had borrowed one or two pieces from the Museum even before our Histon days, and the connection had resulted in his buying the Museum lock, stock and barrel (so to speak). Thus he found himself in possession of a glass case containing skulls reputedly from Bosworth Field, mantraps, a scold’s bridle, cats o’nine tails, knuckledusters, truncheons, tongue clamps, bone crushers, handcuffs, &c, &c — and the gallows from the old Cambridge Prison (last used in 1913) along with other Hangarobilia. That’s my word, but you may use it freely as you wish. After a slightly uncomfortable time with many of these items displayed around the house, Father decided to weed out most of the collection and arranged a Black Museum sale at Hammonds Auction Rooms in Cambridge Place. The sale, in 1970, realised £1,300; about a third of the items were bought by a Mrs Morgan from Cornwall who had a mind to open what we would now call a theme restaurant — although I’m not sure what the theme was to have been, and how it could have been designed to attract family trade in fun cream teas.

 The sale attracted a great deal of press attention — not only local but national — with inevitable pictures of Father holding a hangman’s rope and surrounded by other objects from the collection. It was therefore a bit of an anticlimax when the gallows lot came up and, in the teeth of apathy, Father bought it in at £20. So the gallows came home again, and hung around — as you might say — for a year or two, until he swapped it for some ephemerablia with Syd Dernley, sub-postmaster and Assistant Public Hangman from Mansfield, Notts, who set it up in his cellar — for old times’ sake, presumably.

 Father retained certain pieces, which he kept in a large safe, feeling perhaps that it was ‘not quite right’ to sell them. There was the rope that failed to hang John Lee, the Babbacombe murderer, on 23 February 1883 (Uncle Edwin’s birthday and Pepys’s 250th) — they tried three times, and each time the trap failed to open, so Lee’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; he emigrated to America in 1917 and lived until 1933. There was another rope sold by Marwood, the well-known Victorian hangman, with his authenticating letter listing the names of the murderers it had despatched and explaining the reason for the ‘slight staining’ on the noose. There was the only known photograph of Marwood, and a ‘hangman’s glass’ of the sort hangmen offered for sale when they stayed over night in a local inn to be fresh for an early start. When I inherited these items, I too felt that it was ‘not quite right’ to sell them. And so there they were, cosy in their safe, until I met a policeman with a huge private forensic collection — among which is a letter offering incontrovertible evidence of the identity of Jack the Ripper — who agreed to buy the safe from which I failed to remove the contents. And so they’ve gone to a good home and my conscience remains intact.

 Which must bring me to the end of my ramble. I haven’t mentioned Louis Wain, the man who drew cats, and the Wainiana I’ve collected in my capacity as his biographer nor, on a lighter note, the collection of snails in our bathroom, and the chickens in the kitchen and our eldest son and his wife who play host to dozens of hedgehogs, and my sister and her husband who go in for owls. And there may be other collections I’ve wrapped up and forgotten about. But time has flown, so I’ll stop there, thank you for your kind attention, and wait for your observations and questions.