The long queue of people snaked all the way around Hillsborough Castle leading to presenter Fiona Bruce and her team of 26 BBC Antiques Roadshow experts. They were there to adjudicate on the value and provenance of books and paintings and guns and rings and clocks and jewellery and silver and gold and ceramics – plus sundry other items dealt with in the tent marked miscellaneous.
Recent visitor Queen Elizabeth will never have to flog the family silver but nonetheless she too has the antiques bug and on Wednesday morning was happy to have some of the castle's works of art evaluated by the Antiques Roadshow experts.
Before leaving Northern Ireland she was alerted to the de Courcy Martelli family who yesterday brought along the official proclamation scroll from 1952 announcing that, on the death of her father King George, Queen Elizabeth was acceding to the British throne.
That announcement was made by Capt Howard de Courcy Martelli in the Guild Hall in Derry in 1952, his granddaughter Sylvia Tate explained. The family way back is of Italian stock. “Yes, we are descended from the illegitimate son of a cardinal from Florence,” she said proudly.
Gassed and invalided
The success of
Antiques Roadshow
is as much about the stories told as the value of the items assessed.
Sylvia had a great story to tell about how Capt Martelli was at the Somme as a British army scout in the first World War, wrote a moving poem about life on the front, eventually was gassed and invalided home to Ireland where, when he was in civilian clothes, a woman on a train presented him with a white feather denoting cowardice. “It infuriates me still,” said Sylvia.
Capt Martelli eventually became aide-de camp to the Duke of Abercorn who was the first governor of Northern Ireland, between 1922 and 1945. The duke was also great grandfather of the late Princess Diana.
Old cuttings and photographs that Sylvia brought to be examined included pictures of her grandfather sitting in Hillsborough Castle alongside the future King George and the future queen mother, parents of Queen Elizabeth. No wonder she was interested.
A big operation, the BBC has 90 people working on the programme. People with interesting items are taken aside. Separately producers will decide if Fiona Bruce and one of the experts should do a television piece with them. If they get the green light, as did Sylvia, then it’s off to make-up before the cameras roll.
Also waiting to be filmed were Roy and Gladys Steed from Whiteabbey in Co Antrim. The experts were very interested in a heavy old lock, shaped like a Bible, that bore the inscription “verbum dei” – the “word of God” – and the date 1851. So, an old family heirloom? “No, I found it in a skip on the Crumlin Road in Belfast,” Roy said.
Horseshoe-shaped clock
John and Jean Watt from Kells in Ballymena, Co Antrim, were also waiting for the makeup people. They’d brought along a horseshoe-shaped clock given to his uncle in 1958 from the estate of Alison Cunninghame, widow of the 17th laird of Craigends in Scotland. “The laird died in 1917 and my uncle Charlie was her chauffeur, driving her around in her Daimler,” said John.
Carol Lax left Claremorris, Co Mayo, at 5am yesterday with just a book. It was a first Russian language edition of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak secretly printed by the CIA for Russian visitors to the 1958 Brussels World Fair to smuggle home in their luggage. It is a topical story considering it is the subject of a new book, The Zhivago Affair – the Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book.
“My sister bought it for me in a Russian bookshop in Munich about 30 years ago,” said Carol, a native of Munich.
The Antiques Roadshow people were refusing to say if they'd discovered anything verging on the priceless. People would have to wait until the autumn to view the two shows from Hillsborough that are due to be broadcast. "But we are expecting to find a few humdingers," said Fiona Bruce.
