Collected works
BBC Antiques Roadshow expert, Ronnie Archer-Morgan is appearing at next month’s Swalefest. He talks to Phil Penfold about his life and how he got into collecting.
RONNIE Archer-Morgan remembers the moment he became interested in collecting things. He reckons that he’d have been about four or five years old and it was on the beach at Southport, at low tide. “And”, he says, “when the tide goes out at Southport, it goes out a very long way indeed!”
At the time, Ronnie was one of the residents of a children’s care home, and the kindly Phillips family had taken him for an outing to the seaside. “It was wonderful”, he recalls, “you could walk on the sand, and it wasn’t quite dry. Rather squishy, so that the imprint of your feet stayed a little while. And then I saw it, a sort of lump, sticking out of the surface. When I reached it, I scraped around it, and saw that it was a wooden… something. A little bit of digging, and I’d freed it, and found that it was a clog. Oddly enough, it was slightly sticky on the inside, something like Vaseline?
“Anyway, I remember getting quite excited, and I said to Mr. Phillips, ‘Look, a clog! It must have floated all the way from Holland!’ Even at that young age I knew the story of the little Dutch boy who had prevented a disaster by putting his finger in the wall of the dyke. And Mr Phillips smiled very nicely and said something like ‘I expect so’.”
Ronnie, one of the stalwarts of the longrunning BBC Antiques Road Show, then says: “Cut to the chase, and move on half a century and more. I was doing a book-signing down in Dorchester, in the West Country, and a lady came up to me, and asked if I remembered Mr Phillips. Of course I did. And she replied ‘Well, he was my grandfather, and when he died, he left me this… and she pulled that clog out of a bag, and she said, ‘He always wanted you to have it… he never forgot that day’.
“To say that I got all emotional is an understatement, it was such an incredible link to my past, and that incident, in Southport is very probably the moment when my interest in collecting, and finding all about objects, began. I have it at home in my London flat right now. But it isn’t from The Netherlands at all, it’s from the Breton region of France. It’s not worth a penny. But the joy of it for me is its tactility, and wondering about who made it, who wore it, who lost it, and how it made its way to a soggy grave in Southport.”
Ronnie, 73, has had a life that is full of incident; there have been good times, and some very bleak ones, and everything is laid out for inspection in his new book Would it Surprise
You to Know…? That phrase will be familiar to anyone who loves his appearances on Road Show, where he oversees the stall marked ‘Miscellaneous’.
And he’s delivered a few knockout surprises over the years. Or maybe ‘shocks’ is a better word. He was presenting at Scarborough on one programme, and a lady approached him holding a wooden club, with a domed head. “I was beside myself with excitement, and I really had to contain myself. She was the daughter of a local solicitor, it had belonged to her dad, and she had inherited it. She hadn’t got a clue, and I had to tell her that it came from Fiji, that it was a war club, and that it had been made for someone who had a lot of prestige. It’s called a Bulibuli, and this one was a rare beauty. And she was rather rocked when I had to put on the valuation, and said that, at auction, she’d be looking top end at around £35,000. She was a very excited lady after that.”
Yorkshire seems to be a very happy hunting ground for this genial – and very honest – expert, for it was at Castle Howard that he met another lady with a special object. But this time, the surprise was for Ronnie. “I have a vivid memory of being in the home on Merseyside and it was a day when we had a special visitor, none other than Harry Corbett, and he brought along two of his companions, Sooty and
Sweep, the glove puppets. Well, to me, a little lad who idolised them on the TV show, which all us kids used to watch, this was very nearly heaven itself. And Mr Corbett asked me if I’d care to play with Sooty, and make him come alive. It was magical, I was simply entranced. What a moment in a child’s life.
“So, when the puppets turned up on Road Show, and they said, ‘Will you do a piece to camera about these, Ronnie?’ I welled up with tears and had to ask for some time to myself. I remember going into the nearby trees, taking several deep breaths, and pulling myself together – which took some while, believe me. It turns out that the lady’s dad had been prop and puppet maker to Mr. Corbett, so the provenance was as clear as clear.”
Ronnie is always immaculately turned out, and generally wearing a stylish hat. He says he won’t ever give out a spontaneous on-the-spot valuation. “If I’m at a book-signing, or giving a talk, as I shall be at the Swaledale Festival this year, I do what I’ve been asked to do. That’s it. I mean, if David Beckham popped into your store, would you ask him to do a few up-kicks for your entertainment? Or if a Michelinstarred chef popped in, would you ask him to rustle up a spontaneous tasting menu for lunch? I think not.”
Ronnie pulls no punches in his book, and often it’s a harrowing read. He talks openly about his mother, and her mental health problems, about betrayal by friends (he and one colleague shared a safe deposit box, into which Ronnie had stashed several objects “which amounted to much of my life’s savings” and on the day when he went to the bank to open it, he discovered that it had been plundered by that ‘friend’), of racism, and of several robberies to his homes over the years, about wrongful arrest (and imprisonment) by the Metropolitan Police and the long time he spent in hospital after a horrifying road accident.
When he came out – on crutches – one of the first things he did was to go back to the location, and to cross and re-cross the road, just so that he could regain his confidence. Fifteen years later he was asked to audition for Antiques Road Show. Hang on. What happened in those 15 years? Ronnie laughs: “Lots and lots. But the publishers told me that the book was too long, and that it needed to have some cuts. There was quite a bit that was filleted out!”
A conversation with Ronnie is a joy. He covers so much ground – he’s incensed by the fact that there’s little recognition of the fact that black and Asian servicemen, who “fought for their Empire”. “As a lad, the white boys my age used to chant ‘We won the war, we won the war’, and they clearly knew nothing at all about what had happened in Burma, for example.”
As a man who owns thousands of books, and as many records, plus so many loved objects that have been part of his life, what would he pull from the flames, if (perish the thought) disaster happened at his home this afternoon. There are few things he considers for a moment or two. And then he says: “It’s got to be that clog, hasn’t it. That’s what started in all…”
Swaledale Festival, The Reeth Lecture, Would it Surprise you to Know...? Saturday June 1, Reeth Congregational Church. www.swalefest.org for details. Ronnie’s book of the same name is published by Century, £16.99.