‘Finding treasures becomes instinctive’
Unearthing jewels is all in a day’s work for BBC antiques expert Geoffrey Munn, hears Catherine Pepinster
Don’t get Geoffrey Munn started on The Crown. The Antiques Roadshow star, who is one of the world’s leading jewellery experts, is irked when I ask him what he thinks of the Netflix series producers’ take on the Crown Jewels.
“It’s all very well if you are fond of fiction,” he says, adding pointedly: “They should not be called Crown Jewels at all, they’re regalia. They are absolutely different from jewellery. They are used in the coronation and there’s a sanctity about them.”
The 66-year-old should know; he has spent 50 years developing his expertise on the most exquisite jewellery in the world, studying works by Fabergé, Castellani and Giuliano, and for the past 30 years has been sharing this knowledge on the BBC programme, which returns to our screens this Sunday for its 43rd series. He is the man behind one of the show’s highest valuations, when he was presented with a gold, diamond and jade flower made by Fabergé, that he declared was worth £1 million.
It is a career that he owes entirely to chance – and to the Telegraph. After failing to get into university, he felt “lost”, and chanced upon a job advertisement that changed his life. He says: “I saw in the newspaper’s personal column a small advert for an assistant required to join an antique jewellery shop and it turned out to be Wartski.” It was a glorious opportunity. Wartski is one of the UK’S most exclusive jewellers. Founded in North Wales in 1865 by Morris Wartski, a Polish-jewish refugee, it had shops in Bangor and Llandudno.
It thrived under the patronage of Edward VII and opened a London store in 1911. Clients have included Bing Crosby, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the Royal family: it made wedding rings from Welsh gold – a royal family tradition – for both the Duchess of Cornwall and the Duchess of Cambridge. “I don’t know why they chose me. I had a beard and long hair and bell-bottomed trousers,” Munn says, “and what I really wanted was to work with pictures, but I was so wrong about jewellery not being great art.”
The bell-bottomed 19-year-old became transformed over the years into a connoisseur of jewellery as high art, eventually rising to managing director, a post he held for 37 years.
The history of Wartski reveals that members of the Royal family developed a passionate interest in jewellery, and particularly in Fabergé, given their connections with the Russian royal family. Among them was Queen Mary.
“Queen Mary got very exercised about the dispersal of royal treasures and so she came to Wartski to purchase them,” explains Munn.
For royalty, jewellery has a vital role which goes beyond decoration.
“It began as a way of showing who you are. When the sovereign appeared, he or she had to be seen to be the sovereign, and jewels enable you to prove it. It continues today. There is a huge appetite to see that luxury and that is why the Queen wears such huge diamonds at occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament.”
The Queen’s Diplomatic Reception is another extravagant event in the royal calendar, and observers note the dazzling tiaras on display, such as the Cambridge Lover’s Knot Tiara, first made for Queen Mary and later much loved by Princess Diana, worn by the Duchess of Cambridge, and the Vladimir Kokoshnik, a Romanov tiara that was reportedly requested by the Duchess of Sussex for her wedding, worn by the Queen. According to Munn, a tiara is a powerful signifier.
“It’s the most flattering of all jewels and it scintillates shamelessly with hugely valuable precious stones, but it’s also about rank,” he says. “It’s the highest form of dress.”
That’s a view shared by couture fashion designers. Munn recalls in his early Wartski days standing with a tray full of tiaras in the dressing rooms as models stripped off to get ready for catwalk shows for the Japanese designer Yuki, while his friend Vivienne Westwood has a favourite that she found at Wartski. “She zips around on her bicycle wearing it. Absolutely marvellous,” he says.
While Munn has spent a lifetime working with jewels with a known, lengthy provenance, nothing excites him more than spotting something that has been lost. On Antiques Roadshow his quiet, modest demeanour combined with sudden bursts of excitement has won him many fans.
Finding treasures on the show takes great patience: the experts spend hours looking at hundreds of items brought in by the public, with many worth very little. But occasionally something startling is revealed.
In the new series, Munn discovers a gold ring with moving parts that can be used for prayer, like a rosary, designed by John Hardman Powell and worth £10,000, and a 1900s middle-european brooch of rubies, diamonds and emeralds of the Egyptian revival style, probably sold in Egypt as a souvenir. Both had been in the owners’ families for generations.
“It becomes instinctive. It’s as if you have a hunter-gatherer’s aptitude for recognition, for spotting what is most singular. And then your heart goes like that,” he says, beating his chest fast. Does he think there are plenty more items of interest hidden in people’s attics? “Oh yes, people don’t listen and then they never remember what granny told them about something.”
Munn’s hunter-gathering instincts are constantly on alert, from mudlarking around the Thames near his London apartment – a very contemporary space for a man of the antiques trade, with a stunning view of the river – to seeking out items that have been lost. He has been on the trail of a watch from 1862, designed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, depicting the painter and his wife Elizabeth Siddal as the sun and the moon.
‘Wearing jewellery began as a way of showing who you are. That continues today’
He is also looking for a gold cross embellished with hawthorn that was commissioned by Victorian author and critic John Ruskin in memory of Rose La Touche, a young girl with whom he was infatuated. Munn tracked it down through the personal columns of this paper and it has since been loaned to the British Museum. “Sometimes I think there’s a moment when things do emerge again, as if some works have a life of their own.”
Retirement after 40 years at Wartski is giving Munn time to write his memoirs and indulge in other passions. He is a one-man campaign to have the drinking fountains of London restored as a way to combat plastic waste. Top of his list is the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, commonly known as Eros, in Piccadilly Circus. When it was first erected in 1892 as a memorial to the philanthropist, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, water flowed from and around it and little drinking cups were provided but quickly stolen.
“It is one of the symbols of London and it is not complete if it is not used as a fountain,” Munn complains.
He looks out across the city from his eyrie, as lights come on across the capital. “When I first was in London, I was very aware of the rich and the poor, working at Wartski and then being near Soho. It disturbed me.”
Watching Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans, on television, made him determined to help. “I thought Wartski could be a fundraising machine.” He went on to help raise large sums for the Samaritans through jewellery exhibitions, auctions and marathons.
Watch this space for news on the discovery of that Rossetti treasure; if Geoffrey Munn is determined, it happens.
Antiques Roadshow is on BBC One next Sunday at 8pm