231027 Collection Digital Cover 1 - Flipbook - Page 139
“The items from Tutankhamun’s tomb remained in
Cairo,”… but [Carnarvon’s] collection of antiquities
[from his previous digs] were on display at the Castle.”
If much of this is in the public domain, the details bring all the
disappointments and triumphs to life. “I tried to put myself into
the Egypt of that era,” says the Countess, of a country which, prior
to Independence in 1921, was an archaeological hotbed of competing
French, English, American and German interests. While she had access
to the inventory of the Earl’s discoveries, many of his papers were lost,
and research led her down unexpected avenues. “It was like piecing
together a detective story,” she says. “By an extraordinary piece of luck,
I found the diaries of Evelyn, the 4th Earl’s sister, in the Winchester
archives.” Another invaluable source was Patricia Beauchamp, the 5th
Earl’s granddaughter. “She was born in 1924 and was still alive when
I was researching my earlier book on [her grandmother], Almina. I used
to go and visit her in her nursing home. She was a living source of stories
on the social niceties of the day and gave me all sorts of nuggets. She was
fan-bloody-tastic!” laughs the Countess. “My difficulty was to distil the
wealth and diversity of what I found into something readable.”
At this point, Lady Carnarvon is called away to see a man about a rental,
and the Earl offers to show me the Egyptian exhibition. “The items from
Tutankhamun’s tomb remained in Cairo,” he says, “but [Carnarvon’s]
collection of antiquities [from his previous digs] were on display at the
Castle.” These were kept in the Smoking Room and the Music Room
but, after the 5th Earl’s death, with the Rothschild money gone and huge
death duties to be paid, Almina had no choice but to sell the collection.
It was catalogued by Howard Carter, 1400 items were despatched to the
Metropolitan Museum in New York, leaving behind, in Carter’s words,
only “a few unimportant antiquities.”
But the untimely demise of the 5th Earl in Cairo, on 5th April 1923,
from an infected mosquito bite, less than five months after the tomb
was opened, was to give birth to the legend of the Curse of the Mummy’s
Tomb. And no-one was more prone to believe it than his son, the 6th
Lord Carnarvon.
“Until one day in 1987, when my father’s butler, a Carson-like character
called Robert Taylor, told him: ‘O, my Lord, there’s Egyptian stuff hidden
away between the rooms,’ we had no idea there were still some items here,”
says the present Earl. “My grandfather [who had recently died], was very
superstitious, and had a fixation that the antiquities brought bad luck.
So he sealed them up in an old cupboard trapped in a wall.”
Carter, in the wake of the Tutankhamun’s discovery, could be forgiven
for being blasé in his evaluation of these items. To Dr. Nicholas Reeves
of the British Museum, who assessed the find in 1988, it contained
“several pieces of first-rate importance” – among them, “a charming blue
faience hippopotamus,” bronze figures of the child Horus and of Apis
the Bull, items from tomb of Amenophis III, and a carved alabaster jar,
one of 13 found at the 13th century BC tomb of the Pharaoh Merneptah,
and which, the Earl tells me, “were dug up by my great-grandparents
with their bare hands,” in 1920.
Today, what remains of the 5th Earl’s collection can be seen in the
museum, specially created in the former cellars. While the originals
languish in the dilapidated Cairo Museum, awaiting transfer to the
long-delayed, shiny new Grand Egyptian Museum (due to open later
this year), and Tut’s mummified body remains in the Valley of the
Kings in an air-conditioned box, the Highclere exhibition honours
the 5th Earl’s greatest legacy with some spectacular copies of items
that recreate Tutankhamun’s tomb.
These include Tutankhamun’s famous golden mask, the Mummy,
the intricately decorated second coffin, and a magnificent painted
chest – the first item to be removed from the site known as KV-62 –
which Lord Carnarvon says he calls, “My Thomas Crown Affair chest,
because the copy is so good, I could swap it [for the real thing] and
nobody would know the difference!” Several craftsmen were responsible
for these copies. One, in particular, stands out: “We met someone who
had helped the Cairo Museum with some restoration work, and who
created a remote museum [of Tutankhamun] in Cornwall. I offered
to buy his replica objects and brought them here,” says the Earl.
“The Mummy arrived in a hearse – it was all very Addams Family.”
The first quarter of the 20th century, spanned by Downton Abbey, neatly
dovetails with the stewardship of Highclere by the 5th Earl Carnarvon –
as, coincidentally, does the birth of The Stafford London hotel, in 1912.
For a taste of that gilded era, and in celebration of King Tut, Highclere
has created a commemorative gin – which I am off to sample in the hotel’s
American Bar.
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