Simon Tait

The Sitwells, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, were the young literary lions of the 1920s, challenging the Bloomsbury Set’s artistic hegemony and the fashionable Georgian poets, and championing the likes of Wilfred Owen and the composer William Walton. Their elegant style, wit and brilliance made them society darlings and gossip column frequenters throughout the Long Weekend.

But a Royal Jubilee exhibition opening at the Sitwell country seat today – May 12 being the 75th anniversary of the coronation of George VI – reveals a long association with the royal family, and in particular an intimate friendship between Osbert Sitwell and the present queen’s parents.

At the coronation just three commoners were given places of honour in the Royal Box in Westminster Abbey: a former governess of Queen Elizabeth, the royal chaplain and Osbert Sitwell. “It was the apogee for the Sitwells,” said Adrian Woodhouse, curator of the exhibition at Renishaw Hall, the family’s castellated 17th century pile near Chesterfield in Derbyshire now owned by Osbert’s great-niece Alexandra Sitwell and her family. “He was there not as a courtier, as some of his ancestors had been, but as a close friend.”

By going through family archives and memorabilia at Renishaw – the blackened and barely legible baronetcy patent was found in a an old biscuit tin – Woodhouse has pieced together a remarkable tale for one of very few Jubilee exhibitions among Britain’s great houses, and the only one with such intimate detail of royal friendship.

Oswald, Sir Oswald when he inherited the baronetcy in 1943, was drawn into royal circles when he stood best man for a brother officer in the Grenadier Guards in 1917. The bride was his cousin Irene and the groom was Prince Alexander of Battenburg, Queen Victoria’s grandson. Most of the royal family were present from George V and Queen Mary down, and Osbert, six feet tall and with impeccable social skills, made a good impression. In 1923 shortly after their marriage, he met the Duke and Duchess of York at a dinner and charmed the young duchess in particular. He bccame a frequent guest and an intimate correspondence grew – after she was queen she wrote to invite Osbert to Sadler’s Wells, adding that if he had “an important” prior engagement she quite understood. The Sitwells introduced Walton, the designer Rex Whistler, the painter John Piper and the photographer Cecil Beaton to the royals.

What drew Osbert even closer to the royal heart was a satire on the abdication crisis of 1936 in which he lampooned the fair weather friends of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson as they deserted them, entitling the poem “Rat Week”.

That nameless, faceless raucous gang
Who graced Balmoral’s Coburg towers,
Danced to the gramophone, and sang
Within the battlemented bowers

Yet he did name them, and the libellous poem could not be published but was widely circulated in society. The Yorks showed it to Queen Mary, who was comforted by it and came to value his talent as a raconteur and it was she who invited him to the coronation. She was due to pay the first royal visit to Renishaw for more than a century on September 10th, 1939, but war was declared in September 3rd and she had to cancel.

Osbert became a literary advisor to the king and queen, and organised a public poetry reading at the Aeolian Hall at which the two princesses, Elizabeth and Magaret Rose, had front seats. In 1948 when the Poet Laureate, John Masefield, turned 70, King George even made it clear that Osbert was his personal choice as Masefield’s eventual successor. It was never to happen. Although Osbert outlived Masefield by two years, dying in 1969, the laureateship passed to Cecil Day-Lewis.

The exhibition records more than 400 years of royal connections at Renishaw, an estate once owned by Elizabeth I where the Sitwells, iron magnates at first, have lived since the 1630s. They did not finally buy it from the Crown until 1840, but in the meantime had earned royal favour – at the racetrack.

In the early 19th century Sitwell Sitwell had become a breeder of race horses and the Prince of Wales and his brother – later George IV and William IV – were keen racegoers whom, after a meeting at York Races, Sitwell not only entertained at Renishaw but, family legend has it, built a wing where the royal brothers could have their rout. Sitwell Sitwell subsequently became a baronet and boon royal companion who attended the prince’s coronation in 1821.

Connections continued through the 19th century, leading to an exclusive report of the Russian Tsar’s coronation appearing in the Scarborough Post in 1883. Osbert’s father, Sir George, in his Yorkshire Militia uniform, persuaded his way into the ceremony for Alexander III in Moscow, and brought back souvenirs including a teaspoon filched form the imperial banquet. He had recently become proprietor of the Scarborough newspaper, and duly filed his first hand report.

He passed his literary skills on to his three children, with Edith becoming the leading poet of her time. But it was Osbert that had earned royal admiration, and he had written an ode to celebrate the 1937 coronation –
“… what trumpets sound
Through timeless vistas as both are crowned”.
A handwritten copy was found in the king’s private papers after his death 1952.

Royalty & Renishaw is at Renishaw Hall until September 30th. http://www.renishaw-hall.co.uk/

Chosen by Simon Tait

Michael Kenny: Spirit And Matter
Quest Gallery, Bath

On Michael Kenny’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery is the title of a sculpture of his which stands in Gutenberg. It’s called More Loved Than Known, and to date the legend has been prophetic. Although he has a passionate following among the thousands of students he taught, who include Antony Gormley, Gerry Judah and Damien Hirst, and though his work is in the Tate, the British Museum and the V&A with his sculpture in public spaces around the world, since Kenny died in 1999 there has never been an exhibition of his work.

This discreet retrospective at the Quest Gallery in Bath – there are none of his monolithic geometrical stone pieces – is a reminder of how influential Kenny was before his death at 58. It is an exposition largely of his last decade’s work, mostly through 60 large drawings.

They are a sculptor’s drawings with lines almost carved from the paper, but he believed in drawing as an indispensable start to a process in which he was examining form, human and geometric. “Drawing is a means of searching for order out of chaos through images” he used to tell his students, and while some of these pieces translate easily into the great rough-hewn triangles, circles, semi-circles and columns of his standing pieces, many are drawings for their own sake. The large works on paper with human forms made with acutely accurate and often heavy lines also betray Kenny’s fascination with solitude, and how form and symbolism can be made to work together to create a narrative.

In the 90s, while not diverted by the troubles of the Royal Academy of which he was treasurer and would almost certainly have been president had his last illness not intervened, he was more prolific than ever. He was preoccupied by spiritual subjects – the search for love, the fear of abandonment, loss – and though he always described himself as a lapsed Catholic (he left home to evade his Liverpool Irish mother’s ambition for him to become a Jesuit priest), he is concerned here with human responses to spirituality exploring, for instance, Dante, the childhood of Neptune in Roman mythology or of King David. Yet each piece, no matter how large, is encapsulated by a hard border as if the action however painful is a performance within a proscenium, being played out on a base, a stage, which is often the only coloured element.

The desolate figure staggering on all fours in The whip of pride, Dante Purgatorio, Canto X of 1996 – his titles, he said, were “provocations” rather than descriptions – is assailed not by a whip but a flapping, shapeless black anonymity, and by the unremitting parallel vertical lines the figure is moving towards.
There are equally powerful formal pieces, such as his large Cathedral of 1990, but the exhibition is a timely reminder of a once powerful and vigorous voice in art that has been silent for too long,
Michael Kenny RA ‘Spirit and Matter’ is at the Quest Gallery, Margaret’s Buildings, Bath BA1 2LP until June 16.

Simon Tait

The curiosity of an archaeologist about some suspect Roman urns in the collection of the National Museum of Archaeology in Madrid has led to a unique glimpse into the minds of 18th century Grand Tourists.

The urns turned out to be 18th century pastiches, and the doubts of José Maria Luzón Nogué in 1999 led to 12 years of research by scholars across three countries, and the main exhibition of the year at The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, The English Prize, which opens on May 27.

Luzón Nogué looked to the archives in Spain’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts which led him via a labyrinthine route to the treasures sent home by several men on the Grand Tour, which never arrived. The director of the Mellon Centre in London, Brian Allen, became aware of the project and he alerted the Yale Center for British Art in the United States.

“It gives us an extraordinary insight into a moment in time, particularly into the 1700s Grand Tour,” said Dr Catherine Whistler, the Ashmolean’s senior curator for European art. “But it’s not just what aristocrats were doing – Francis Bassett was a Cornish tin mining heir but he probably had more money than any of them. It tells us about fashion, what was interesting to them, and about interior design with drawings and objects that might eventually be turned into somebody’s Pompeii drawing room.”

There were also objects being sent back by Rome-based agents, such as Thomas Jenkins and James Byers, who were key in guiding the tourists as to where to buy and commission. In the 1770s, too, a number of British artists were working in Europe, and the tourists were encouraged to buy their work.

“British tourists in Italy in the 1770s were time-travellers,” said Dr Whistler, “imagining themselves in the classical past amidst the landscapes and ruins they encountered on their journeys. The maps, books and antiquities that they purchased and works of art they commissioned were imbued with meaning and memories.”

On January 7th 1779 the merchant ship Westmoreland, bound for London from Livorno, was captured off the eastern coast of Spain by two French warships and declared a “prize of war”. Its cargo was olive oil, barrels of anchovies, silk, medicinal drugs, Genoa paper, Parmesan cheeses, and objects collected on the Grand Tour that had been sent back to England. The value of the whole cargo was estimated to be £100,000, worth £6m today.

Working with scholars at Madrid’s Royal Fine Arts Academy – where many of the Westmoreland’s treasures ended up – the Mellon Centre in London and the Spanish archaeological museum, Scott Wilcox, chief curator of art at the Yale Center, has pieced together the full story of the lost treasures.

The exhibition will have 140 objects including paintings, drawings, sculptures, books and maps, giving the most precise picture yet of what was acquired by Grand Tourists like the Cornish tin heir Francis Bassett and George Legge, Viscount Lewisham.

Legge, then 22. and Bassett, 20, left Europe in 1775 and 1777 respectively, and though in Rome they both had their portraits painted by the society artist Pompeo Batoni, their paths probably never crossed, but both their collections happened to consigned to the Westmoreland. They were back in England in 1779 to hear the news of the loss of their treasures, which they were never to see again despite many attempts.

Malaga was a safe port where the French could sell their cargoes, and the Westmoreland’s arrival on January 8, and the following day a naval trial declared the ship a “Bonne Prise”.

The “soft” cargo quickly disappeared, but the works of art were claimed by King Carlos III of Spain. There were 23 crates of marble in statues, 35 pieces of marble statues and 22 crates of prints, portraits and books.

The researchers found 12 different inventories, each made at different times and for different purposes, so that there were many discrepancies and omissions. They also had to decipher the marks that identified the owners of the architectural drawings, fans, paintings – including engravings, gouaches, watercolours and copies after old master in various media – sculptures, tabletops, chimney pieces, candelabras, books, maps, musical scores, mineralogical samples, and ancient lamps.

The most important work of art was probably a Mengs painting, The Liberation of Andromeda by Perseus, which the French consul quickly made a present of to the French navy minister. Much of the rest was either kept by the king, given by him as gifts or left with the Royal Academy.

Bassett’s collection is headed by the full-length Batoni commission, watercolours by by the English painter John Robert Cozens, two portrait busts by the Irish sculptor Hewetson, and 14 volumes of engravings by Piranesi (one of which Piranesi dedicated to Bassett). His books covered history, geography and antiquities, and there was a copy of Laurence Stern’s comic masterpiece, Tristram Shandy.

Legge’s crates had guidebooks as well as books on art, literature, theatre and history, and there were engravings by Volpato and Salvator Rosa.

The marks on the crates have been deciphered as initials indicating the owners – Bassett’s were “F.Bt”, “F.B.” or “Fs.B.” and Legge, whose father was the Earl of Dartmouth, “E.D.” or “E.L.D.”– and some objects were also marked “PY” which has now been interpreted as “Presa Ynglesa”, or coming from the English prize.

“The range and variety of Westmorland objects, especially the richly informative array of books,” Scott writes in the exhibition catalogue, “provide a density and particularity of detail that have already reshaped previous thinking about the subject and offer the prospect, as we continue to study the Westmorland cargo and ponder its meanings, of a more complex and deeply nuanced understanding of the Grand Tour.”

George Osborne’s apparent mistake over how the new tax relief cap – under which anyone claiming more than £50,000 of tax relief in one year would be subject to a cap at 25% of their income, due to come into effect in a year’s time – would affect philanthropic giving is all the more inexplicable when you know that he was on the board of Arts & Business for the four years before he became Chancellor, and by all accounts was an assiduous attender of meetings. It was A&B that first saw the potential of philanthropy for arts funding, and he would have watched the figures for individual giving steadily rise until it was hit by the 2008 credit crunch. In 2011 individual giving appeared to be on he way back up again, according to A&B calculations.

The row over how charities would suffer from the new tax relief cap has been a slow burn since the Chancellor announced his plan to get the wealthy tax shirkers who abuse the charity channel, but it was A&B that had seen the danger straight away.

The day after the budget, A&B’s new director, Philip Spedding, said the new cap was “a matter of some concern” for three reasons: it could put off potential donors, it was sending out a message that the government does not value large donations, and it breaks the unwritten rule that you don’t tax money that has been given for the greater good. “This is a central philosophy to how the tax treatment should treat philanthropy and breaking it is a matter of grave concern to all,” he said.

It was another two weeks before Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, and Arts Council chairman Dame Liz Forgan put some flesh on the fears. Hytner announced that a donor who had promised £250,000 for the NT’s development was likely to withdraw, and that £40m pledged to the cheme was at risk.

Even John Whittingale, the former shadow culture secretary and now chair of the culture select committee, stepped forward to say that the cap “just seems to me to send a very contrary signal to all the messages that the government has been putting out up to now”.

Forgan and the Arts Council reckoned that £80m might be lost to the arts directly because of the new cap. They arrived at the figure by taking a mean of the income from charitable giving of some of our largest arts organisations over three financial years.

It was devastating, not least because it came with no warning – Forgan was never consulted. “The whole of the arts sector has been putting its back into increasing the amount that’s raised from private giving alongside public subsidy, and this seems to have stopped it in its tracks”, she said on the BBC’s World at One.

She is worried that the Catalyst scheme, a fund set up with DCMS and HLF to create a £55m pot of money (£30m of it coming from the Arts Council) to lever matching philanthropic donations, was “up in the air” now, just as the first results of the scheme were about to be announced. “It’s very difficult for arts organisations to raise private money, it’s hard work, and seeing a concession from the tax man really does help, it’s a critical ingredient in the package,” she said. “So I’m afraid that unless something changes this will make a big difference.”

So will anything change? Not soon, it seems, because the Prime Minister has entered the row and said there will be consultations with the charities over the summer, effectively an attempt to kick the matter into the long grass. The signs are, though, that donors will not wait before deciding to assign their money elsewhere, possibly to overseas development.

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who has built his entire arts funding policy around the potential of philanthropy to offset the 30% cuts he has imposed on the Arts Council, has been resoundingly silent on Osbourne’s move so far. He would be expected to maintain cabinet collective responsibility binding him not come out and criticise the Treasury’s decision, but nor has he spoken up for it, and although he is said to be negotiating behind the scenes, inferences are already being drawn: that culture is simply not important enough to deflect the government’s thrust against the wealthy tax avoiders.

But culture is not that lightweight, according Coutts’ latest annual survey of £1m charitable donors, an dit shows that the money arts organisations do get is used gto keep them operating. It shows that in 2011 more than £60m was given to arts organisations in 2011 in packages of £1m or more – the cap, remember, will operate from tax relief claims of only £50,000.

More interestingly, it shows that almost 10% of this money was used for operational purposes – running theatres, concert halls, museums and galleries and the arts going on in them – rather going into endowments or development schemes, more than any other sector apart from higher education and international development.

The Coutts report says that arts and cultural causes saw a drop in donations, but predicts that his could change “as a result of the government’s £55 million matched funding scheme to build endowments in the cultural sector” – the Catalyst Fund that Liz Forgan believes is in danger of collapsing because of the new cap.

The V&A’s most popular object, the Great Bed of Ware, has been on almost permanent display since it arrived there 81 years ago, but for the first time it is to leave the museum to return home to the Hertfordshire town where it was created and where it will be on loan to the Ware Museum for a year.

The enormous bed had a peripatetic youth, however, roaming from pub to pub where space could be found for it to entertain tourists.

It was made over 500 years ago as an attraction for the pilgrims travelling to the shine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Ware being a day’s ride from London. At three yards wide it was built to sleep 12, but in 1689 it is said that, for a bet, 26 butchers and their wives slept in the bed.

The Great Bed is more an iconic trophy from English domestic history than a triumphant feat of craftsmanship and decorative art. Part of its legend is that it was made by a local carpenter, Jonas Fosbrooke. “That is a complete fabrication,” says Kate Hay, curator of the British Galleries in the V&A where the bed resides. “There was no such person, and it might well have been made by German craftsmen working in the East End of London, and the fantasy landscapes in the decoration would be typical. We even found the date ‘1463’ scrawled on the back of the bed head, which is equally spurious. We know it was made in the 1590s, some time before 1596”. The marquetry panels were made in the style of a Dutch artist popular in the 16th century, Hans Vredeman de Vries.

Made of English oak, its huge bedposts have been carved with the initials and dates of its occupants – one from 1729 has a tradesman’s mark and the initials DL and WC. Others left wax seals with the imprints of their signet rings. In dismantling it, the V&A’s specialists have fond more, pencilled signatures mostly dating from the mid-19th century.

The bed’s pub crawl seems to have started at The White Hart where it was in 1610, then at The George in 1698. By 1706 it was at The Crown but by 1765 it had moved on to The Bull and by 1824 the bed had arrived at its final hostelry, The Saracen’s Head, where it stayed until 1869 when it was acquired by William Teale to show it at Rye House at nearby Hoddesdon. The V&A, as the South Kensington mueum as it then was, had the chance to acquire it then but turned it down as no more than “a course assemblage”. It was eventually bought it in 1931 as a resonance of English folklore, so famous had it become, rather than as an example of decorative art.

The Great Bed has been a celebrity throughout its nomadic career. It appears in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, written in about 1601, in which Sir Toby Belch describes a sheet of paper as “…big enough for the Bed of Ware!”. Ben Jonson’s 1609 play Epicoene, refers to “the Great Bed at Ware”, and in 1706 George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer mentions a bed “bigger by half than the Great Bed of Ware”. In Don Juan Byron refers to making a “nuptial couch a bed of Ware”. The bed crops up in Djuna Barnes’s controversial nofvel of the 1930s, Nightwood, and in Loretta Chase’s 2010 novel Last Night’s Scandal. When the V&A’s British Galleries, the bed’s domain, were opened in 2001 the then Poet Laureate Andrew Motion mentioned it in his celebratory poem.

That the huge object has never before left the V&A is not so much that the museum jealously guards its most prized treasure as because of the expense of moving it. The operation is costing more than a quarter of a million pounds, and has only been made possible by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund of £229,000. Other contributions have come from Ware Town Council and the trustees of Ware Museum itself. Last week (March 5-10) it took six specialists five days to dismantle the bed and reduce it to 140 pieces, and the team will then travel to Ware to reassemble and dress it there, taking nine days. It will go on show on April 6.

The loan is in line with the policy of national museums to lend important objects to location they can be identified to help raise the profile of local museums.

“The Great Bed of Ware is woven into the DNA of the town, and through exhibiting it here we are able to get the heritage, history and the social history of the town to local people” said Kenneth Weeks, chair of the Ware Museum Trust. “This project is already making a difference to the community through the activities that are currently taking place at Ware Museum. We want to involve all local residents, both old and new, in exploring the history of the town.”

Martin Roth, director of the V&A, added: “We hope that the people of Ware will enjoy visiting this historic bed and that it will bring their local history alive.”

In this Dickens year, Alan Grieve is a 21st century Dickensian. He was the bright young solicitor who earned the trust of a self-exiled millionaire called John Jerwood, and with the fortune left on Jerwood’s death he created his own empire. Even the names have a Dickensian chime.

In 20 years Grieve has given £90m to the arts, building theatres, dance houses, libraries and creative facilities, and helping the careers of countless young artists, performers and craftspeople.

At Hastings among the fishing boats and net sheds on the Stade, a working beach where the Peggottys of David Copperfield might easily live still, Grieve has built the latest and perhaps his last in a line of capital arts projects. For a while there was a vociferous protest against the plan – an effigy of a gallery was even burned on the beach long before any designs had been drawn up – because it would be seen to clash with historic Hastings, but the campaign ran out of steam when the understated architecture emerged as being rather complimentary, and attention was diverted when the pier was almost completely destroyed ion October 2010.

Another seaside gallery, costing a modest £4m in an £8.5m development partnership with the local authority, it joins the south east coast “string of pearls” of Margate’s Turner Contemporary (£17m), Eastbourne’s refurbished Towner (£8.5m) and Bexhill’s De La Warr (£8m). The Jerwood Gallery opens on Saturday, devoted to 20th century British art.

He is the last of the Victorian “entrepreneur philanthropists” – his own phrase – in the mould of Andrew Carnegie, Lord Shaftesbury and John Passmore Edwards. He is autocratic, single-minded and the only recipient of a National Lottery grant to give it back.

When searching for talent to help him he is inclined to look no further than his own family: his art historian daughter Lara Wardle is the new director of the Jerwood Foundation, and his son Tom is the new gallery’s architect. The eldest of his five children is “fashion’s first lady”, Amanda Harlech of Chanel.

He has personally assembled the art the gallery has been built for, filling a hole in the national offer, he believes. Latterly this has been done with advice from Lara, the former associate director of 20th century British art at Christie’s, and of the new director of the gallery, Liz Gilmore, brought from the Arts Council where she had been head of visual art. “It is a private enterprise for the public benefit, and that’s true philanthropy,” he says.

Grieve was 30 when the senior partner of his Gray’s Inn law firm, Taylor & Humbert (now Taylor Wessing), asked him to look after a “tricky client”, tricky because he was based in Tokyo with his pearl business. Grieve travelled the world for Jerwood as his business lawyer, becoming his friend and confidant. In the mid-70s he was given power of attorney to create a charitable foundation, the chief interest of which initially was Jerwood’s old school, Oakham, to which he gave close to £8m. “He had no children but he had money and he liked education and the arts,” Grieve says. “He did what he wanted to do.”

When Jerwood died in 1991 Grieve took control of an organisation with huge assets but no order. It took him two years just to find out their extent. He acquired property, principally the handsome Fitzroy Square townhouse that was the Jerwood headquarters until the autumn, and invested shrewdly enough to treble the assets. His CBE came in 2003.

Grieve has a Micawber-like respect for good financial management – “It isn’t my money after all” – and an extreme aversion to paying what he considers over the odds. He made a handsome profit for Jerwood when he sold Fitzroy, moving the Foundation into a converted Notting Hill mews block.

The art collection, he estimates, is worth around £6m but has cost £1.5m. He has never paid more than £100,000 for a work, yet has assembled a canon of British art which started with Brangwen and Bomberg, and has progressed through Sickert, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Winifred Nicholson, Lowry, Christopher Wood, Terry Frost and Keith Vaughan. He has added Jerwood Painting Prize winners like Craigie Aitchison, Maggie Hambling and Prunella Clough, and the gallery will show a large representation of the collection, plus temporary themed exhibitions (the opening show is devoted to Rose Wylie). “It’s still organic, we’ll continue to buy, but sometimes we fail at auction because we’re not prepared to pay prices we can’t afford,” he says. Most recently Lara failed to buy a Tristan Hillier when bidding went above the Jerwood ceiling.

It was the painting prize that started Jerwood’s serious arts sponsorship in 1994, at £25,000 the richest of its kind when it was phased out in 2004. Then came the first major capital commitment, the Jerwood Space in Southwark, as a much needed rehearsal facility for drama and dance. The rents are calibrated according to what the client can afford, and this is the project for which Grieve applied for lottery funding.

“I made an application like a lot of people in those euphoric days and it took quite a while, very bureaucratic, but eventually we got a grant. I only kept it a few weeks before I realised that the Arts Council would want to bear in on me, tell me I hadn’t done this or that. So I rang up Gerry Robinson (then chairman of Arts Council England) and asked to whom I should make the cheque out. I think you’d say he was taken aback.”

When the Royal Court was on the brink of being closed as unsafe in the mid-90s, it was Grieve who stepped in to offer £3m to help rebuild it. A news story suggested that he had insisted that the quid pro quo would be a renaming to “Jerwood Royal Court” but that Buckingham Palace had vetoed the idea. “Absolute nonsense,” Grieve says. “Look, the Royal Court was going bust, John Mortimer (the Court’s chairman then) and Stephen Daldry (artistic director) came to us to save it, and we were happy to do so with the biggest grant we had ever given.”

The Royal Court rebuild was by the architects Haworth Tompkins for whom Tom Grieve later worked, but his own practice, HAT Projects, was born after Jerwood’s Hastings scheme was already under way. Ten other places, including Birmingham, Milton Keynes and Gloucester Dock, had been looked at for possible gallery sites before, with the advice of a planning consultant, Hana Loftus.

Hastings was chosen, as much for the amenable attitude of the local authority as the site, and Loftus later joined HAT as Tom’s co-director. “When we were being considered I knew nepotism would come up, and I asked Hana’s advice,” Tom Grieve says. “She told me to look at the project and nothing else, and then make my decision if the offer came. As it was, my father pretty much left us to do our job.” Would he work with him again? “That was my piece of good fortune”, he says after a moment’s thought. “If there is a next time, it will be someone else’s turn.”

Alan Grieve himself it’s unfazed, referring to “enlightened nepotism”. He and his co-trustees chose a practice from a competition, he says, which had come in with a costing, at £4m, well below any other. “I think we got a bargain”.

To keep the assets legally separate from the Liechtenstein-registered charity, in 1999 Grieve created the Jerwood Charitable Foundation at arm’s length from the main three-man Jerwood Foundation. The JCF was endowed with £25m from the assets, and its chair is now Tim Eyles, of Grieve’s old law firm Taylor Wessing. Grieve doesn’t sit on the board but his presence is palpable. “I consult him on a regular basis, I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Eyles says. “I value his experience and nous, his artistic judgment. I’d say Alan has a basic influence on most things, and long may it continue. We will consult him on every major decision”. The gallery, however, is not the JSF’s but the parent foundation’s own.

There have been failures. Attempts to create open air sculpture courts in the Midlands have recently been abandoned after 12 years. And in 1999 David Goldesgeyme was brought from running arts sponsorship for Lloyds TSB and introduced two big new award schemes for film and fashion. “They weren’t right for us,” Grieve says bluntly. Goldesgeyme still refuses to talk about it, but there was a row and he left. Similarly, the former newspaper executive Andrew Knight was invited to be JCF chair in 2003 but two years later had gone, a misfit in what Grieve calls the Jerwood family. Eyles, his successor, is family.

His enlightened philanthropy, however, will never realise the dream of the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, of taking the burden of arts funding from public subsidy. “Politicians will always do that, whenever there are cuts they will try to come up with an alternative, but there isn’t one,” he says. Not in the short and medium term, he adds, and certainly not without the tax breaks American givers get, the difference between America and Europe. Philanthropy will continue to work alongside subsidy here, it won’t replace it.

“Philanthropists have always been key to the arts, particularly to the Victorians when there was no state subsidy and sponsors like Cadbury and Leverhulme were the nearest thing,” he says. Now rhey are Hamlyn, Wolfson, Weston – and Jerwood – but without the colossal pound power of a century ago.

The new Victorian philanthropists are businessmen who can see to the end of a project and make assessments accordingly, no ‘blind chucking money at something“ he says. “The thing about Jerwood is, there must be tangible identifiable results before we start. That’s absolutely characteristic of us”. And very characteristic of Alan Grieve.

“This museum is extraordinary for so many reasons, and we were all but unanimous in our decision,” Lord Puttnam said as he presented the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for 2009. “The Wedgwood Museum brilliantly highlights the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce; a marriage that resonates more today than at possibly any time in the intervening years. In every respect it fully meets our criteria of what a 21st century museum should aspire to be”. It beat the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham and Ruthin Craft Centre in North Wales, to the prize.

From that high less than three years ago, the Wedgwood Museum is facing closure and its world renowned collections – including the extraordinary replica of the classical Portland Vase Josiah Wedgwood himself made – sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.

Disaster looms through no fault of the museum but because of a loophole in the pensions legislation that makes it responsible for the pension debts of what was once, and is no longer its parent company. The High Court has ruled that the collections, worth an estimated £18m, can be sold to help meet the £134m pension liability of Waterford Wedgwood Potteries which had collapsed a few months before the museum’s win.

“As things stand the museum assets are to be used, wrongly, to plug a pension shortfall which is not its liability,” said a member of family, Simon Wedgwood. “There is a body called the pension protection fund which would normally fill this gap, but they have noticed that due to this badly drafted legislation they may try to get another party to pay, even though it seems scarcely credible that a special 50 year old, bona fide, museum trust should be entrapped in this way.”

This week sees questions being laid in the House of Lords calling for the government to intervene, and last week Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, wrote to The Times: The government should not pesume that the public will come to the rescue and raise the money needed to save the collections. The Attorney General must surely appeal the court’s decision; common sense must prevail”. The decision has even been condemned by UNESCO which rated the museum one of Britain’s top 20 cultural assets.

The museum can trace its history back to 1784 and Josiah himself, the founder of the ceramics company and Charles Darwin’s grandfather, who wrote to a friend in 1784: “I have often wish’d I had saved a single specimen of all the new articles I have made, & would now give twenty times the original value for such a collection. For ten years past I have omitted doing this, because I did not begin it ten years sooner. I am now, from thinking, and talking a little more upon this subject … resolv’d to make a beginning”.

Examples were collected, but it was not until 1906 that a formal museum collection was put together and the museum remained open at the Wedgewood Etruria works until production moved to Barlaston and a special Long Gallery was opened in 1952. It was succeeded in 1975 by a visitor centre, which included museum galleries, and in the early 60s the museum trust was set up deliberately to separate the collections from the company.

In September 1999 Wedgwood decided to refurbish their visitor attraction, closing the historical galleries and the trust launching a fundraising campaign to build a new Wedgwood Museum with its extensive display area and major new research facilities. At an eventual cost of £10.5m, (with £5.86 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and significant contributions from Wedgwood and other donors) it opened in October 2008 after nine years of planning and development.

Designed by Hulme Upright Manning with interiors by Ivor Heal, the new museum presented an encyclopaedia of the development of fine English china. It includes manuscripts, documentation, correspondence, factory equipment – which had been on loan to Keele University 13 miles away because there as no space to house them with the collections until now – trials and original models as well as fine art and, of course, ceramics. There is no other collection with the diversity and depth this one has, nor one that is able to give a continuous historical narrative the Wedgwood can.

Pride of place goes to Josiah’s copy of the famous Roman cameo glass Portland vase in the British Museum. Made from black jasper with white reliefs, it took the first Wedgwood three years of experiment and trial before the first perfect copy was achieved in 1789, still considered one of the finest achievements of the potter’s art.

The Art Fund winnings were to go towards a new £2m exhibition gallery that would allow the museum’s director, Gaye Blake Roberts. and her team to mount much more extensive special exhibitions from their collections, as well as shows that would incorporate the work of non-Wedgewood artists such as Susie Cooper and Clarice Cliff, and to bring loan exhibitions to Stoke-on-Trent.

But calamity intervened. Even though ownership of the museum’s collections had been transferred to the independent trust, the pensions law was not as impermeable as had been thought, and the result could be calamitous for the museum and charity world.

Badly hit by the financial crisis of 2008, Waterford Wedgwood went into administration in 2009 and was immediately sold to a New York based private equity firm, KPS, which was able to avoid the liabilities of the former company, including the pension fund deficit.

There appeared to be nothing to connect the museum until it transpired that five members of its staff were among the 7,000 members of the company pension scheme, which implicated the collections as an asset and liable for the whole deficit, even though the company and the museum are legally separate. Consequently, the museum was put into administration in 2010, and in December the High Court ruled that the collections could be sold to help meet the debt.

“It is,” said two more of Josiah’s descendents, Alison and Tom Wedgwood, in an open letter to a local paper, “the worst possible outcome, a grave day for British history, a sad testimony of Britain’s resolve to neglect, and not cherish, its internationally significant cultural, scientific, social and industrial treasures”.

But all hope is not yet lost. Bob Young of the administrators Begbies Traynor have said they will try to raise funds to keep the collection, worth £18m, at the museum. “We have already held discussions with the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Victoria and Albert Museum, certain members of the Wedgwood family and other potential benefactors about raising funds,” he said. “We will spend the next few months in intensive discussions with potential benefactors and the museum trustees to try to come up with a proposal that is acceptable to creditors”.

It is understood that at least one Midlands millionaire has offered to help keep the collection together as a public resource, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has also entered discussions.

By Simon Tait
Independent on Sunday, 22/1/2012

Canterbury is looking forward to the return of a much loved member of the community. The Beaney Institute for the Education of the Working Man, better known with affection tinged with reverence as The Beaney, is the city’s museum and library which has been educating and entertaining its citizens for more than a century. It reopens later this year after a £14m makeover.
No doubt many Beaney fans pause to reflect on his generosity by the memorial in the cathedral to Dr James George Beaney, the surgeon, philanthropist and much-published pioneer in paediatrics.
The Beaney’s founding purpose was to help those, like its initiator, from humble roots who wanted to fulfill their potential in a society where education for the poor was scanty at best.
But few will know of Dr Beaney’s life on the other side of the world, where he was known as “Diamond Jim”. He believed champagne was the best medicine, cod liver oil was the best treatment for tuberculosis, and was even tried for murder. “There was something shady about him,” admits Janice McGuinness, Canterbury’s head of culture and enterprise, “something ‘back street’ about the good Dr Beaney”.
He was born in Canterbury in January 1828 the son of a labourer called George Beney – the doctor later added a more respectable “a” to his name. At 15 he was a shop boy for a chemist in Princes Street, studied pharmacy and was for a time apprenticed to a surgeon.
He went to Edinburgh to study medicine but contracted TB himself before completing his degree, and in 1852 migrated to Melbourne for his health, working for another chemist. A year later he was back in Edinburgh to finish his surgeon’s qualification, then joined the army and served as an assistant surgeon in the Crimea.
He went to Paris for a time to study venereal disease, and served on emigrant ships to America before returning to Melbourne in 1857.
There he worked as a locum to Dr John Maund, the founder of the Women’s Hospital there, who died in 1858 leaving his highly lucrative practice to Beaney. It was said to pay him £10,000 a year, the equivalent of about £130,000 today.
He quickly became established as a prominent member of Melbourne society and the medical circle and, as he is quoted in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as saying, “outlived many a calumny” along the way.
With the help of a curious system by which the medical staff were elected, often with the help of lavish bribes, Beaney became an honorary surgeon at Melbourne Hospital. Part of his duties was to give lectures, and students queued for Beaney’s because afterwards he would distribute champagne, and gold and silver medals to students getting top marks.
A smooth-talking self-publicist, he was described as a “’short, podgy man” with “pale blue, rather shifty eyes”, with his hair curiously swept up either side of his head “’like a pair of horns”. The students knew him as Diamond Jim because of the diamond and ruby rings, diamond tie-pins and the gem-encrusted watch and chain he always wore. He was also called Champagne Jimmy, not just for his own penchant for vintage claret and bubbly but for his habit of prescribing champagne as the best panacea.
His robust style of surgery was frowned on by the medical establishment, and in 1866 his reputation took a serious blow when he was charged with murder. A local barmaid, Mary Lewis, died after several visits from Beaney, and a post mortem showed that an illegal abortion had taken place. He was tried twice, with the jury failing to agree a verdict in the first hearing, and in the second Beaney’s counsel disdained to call any witnesses other than the surgeon himself, and he was acquitted. He effectively talked his way out of it.
He published on many subjects, including sexual disfunction, vaccination, anaesthetics and children’s illnesses, but in 1880 he was sued by his own publisher when it emerged that much of what he had written was actually the work of an assistant. In 1878-79 Beaney was back in Britain on a lecture tour, claiming to be representing the chief secretary of the state of Victoria and the medical profession. This claim was vehemently refuted by The Medical Society of Victoria which wrote to all the leading medical organisations here denying that he had any such commission.
While he was in Britain in 1879 his wife, Mary, whom he had married in 1870, died and they had no children. Beaney himself died in 1891 from aneurism complicated by hepatitis and gout, afflictions often associated with a fondness for strong drink.
He left £10,000 to build the Beaney in his birthplace, and it opened in Canterbury’s High Street in 1899. He would have been pleased to know that it stands on the site of an establishment he would have known as a young man, the George and Dragon.