ANTIQUES ROADSHOW 2023/12/14
I’ve been watching the British version of Antiques Roadshow 1, season #42 on Britbox 2. In the program, the producers find a stately home or a museum to host it, and then you see the lines of people queuing up to have an expert tell them what they have, and of course, the people who are featured, mostly ordinary folks who have something interesting to show, maybe sell, and sometimes what they have is worth a lot of money but mostly they have unique and amazing pieces of history.
There was one guy who had a plug in his possession, a heavy plug of metal, a little rusty, somewhat pitted. Turns out his grandfather was a shipwright who helped build the Titanic 3. Apparently, when the Titanic was being built, before it was launched, there was a fire in the engine room. To get to the fire, a small hole was drilled for the hose, hence the plug. I got chills up and down my body listening to the story. All because of a small piece of iron, which, when I first saw that unremarkable piece of metal on the stand, I wondered what on earth could be valuable about that!
I know about these kinds of plugs, as, sitting in my front yard is a piece of sculpture created by my daughter, Zoe, where she used them to create a bowl 24 inches across, made with plugs from ships from two wars, the ones from the first world war being thicker and heavier than those from WW 2, all of which she found at a scrap yard in Macon, Georgia.
But most of my reactions, the chills, my body reacting came from items from both world wars. One such item, shown in the episode at Dover Castle 4, was a couple of pieces of paper, a flimsy 5 that came from the War Office and was sent to the Admiralty, saying that England, as of September 3, 1939, was at war with Germany. Such an extraordinary piece of history; small pieces of paper, browning, fragile, holding simple words.
Another such was also on a couple of flimsies, this time being shown by an officer who was part of the team helping to clear out Hitler’s bunker after he suicided. He had two flimsies, one from Hitler telling Rommel 6 he was being promoted. The other was from Rommel thanking Hitler.
I looked at it, had to stop the program running for a moment, to gather my thoughts, get settled. I was feeling so over-run by emotions, I realized I had to take a break. This was history—as it happened! It reminded me of the time when I owned a building on Selby Avenue in Saint Paul, where the door to the building was being replaced. I was watching the worker put in the new door when it shattered, and being safety glass, it broke into a million pieces. That image will always be there in my mind. Same with these flimsies. As the expert examined them, I could read the messages myself, the few words coming from the War Office, the few words from Hitler and Rommel.
Other amazing things were shown. One guy, who bought a load of papers from what the Brits call car boot sales, rather like American garage sales, was of an architect’s working drawing from the building of the Albert Hall 7, a true monstrosity of a building with appalling acoustics, in Kensington, built to honor Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria. Turns out this large piece of paper was plan #9, and it was missing from the set of original plans. He’d found it at a sale in Yorkshire, in the north of England.
The things that really got to me though, time and time again were the stories that came along with the medals, from both wartime and peacetime. The former were medals from wartime events, stories of people getting shot down, being incarcerated in prisoner-of-war camps, stories being told both by the relatives of those dead, and even more powerful, stories from people who were there.
And the latter, a particularly impactful piece of history for me was seeing two medals from the 1928 Olympics, held in the Netherlands, where a young black man, George Lammers, on the German team won a Bronze for the 100 meter sprint and a silver for the 4 X 100 relay 8, becoming the first black athlete to win Olympic medals, this before the name we all know, Jesse Owens 9 , who won four Gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Germany, one of them also for the 100 meter sprint.
It all had me go back to thinking of what happened when my uncle was killed on July 20, 1940, and where that deep grief, never truly dealt with, took my mother and affected her for the rest of her life. His body was never found. His death, for her, was never resolved.
Both my families served in the wars. In WW 1, my great-uncles Hugh and Amphlett joined the Royal Navy; their sister, my grandmother, enrolled in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. In WW 2, my mother joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force repairing planes, and her brother, John Myers (always known as Jack), was in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm flying his Skua on reconnaissance missions. On my father’s side it was similar. My father joined the Marines, being demobbed as Captain; his two brothers Douglas and John, were in the army, leaving as Majors. And even later, after the war, my eldest stepbrother did his National Service 10 in the army, and Mickey, older than me by seven months, in the air force. And none, other than Mickey, were involved in actual fighting.
And today I am still managing what happened during the wars to my family and to me. Now, in my eighties, I continue on the journey to heal from the traumas of that time, doing research, uncovering memories, peeling off the skin of the onion as I continue to be alive on this round rock I call my home.
The photo is of Uncle Jack, in uniform, on the deck of the destroyer he was based on. Photographer was probably taken by my grandfather.
1 Antiques Roadshow – according to the AR website, this session is not available anymore. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mn4l.
2 https://www.britbox.com/us/
3 The Titanic was a British ocean liner launched in 1911 and sank a year later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic.
4 Dover Castle during WW II was used as an air-raid shelter and a miliary command center and hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Castle.
5 Flimsy – in this context is a thin, light, and insubstantial piece of paper used by the miliary to send messages. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flimsy.
6 Rommel was a field marshal in the German army in WW II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel.
7 The Royal Albert Hall https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall.
8 1928 Olympics https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/amsterdam-1928/results/athletics/4x100m-relay-men.
The owner of these medals didn’t know the name of the runner, only that he was black.
9 Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens.
10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Kingdom