The treason of the beaks

Anthony Lipmann on the decision of Charterhouse, his former school, to sell the contents of its museum

Nv hat's cooking at Charterhouse? Last month the school signed a franchise agreement with Starbucks for the opera tion of its tuck shop. There was harrumphing and puffing from old boys. Charterhouse seems to have been unfazed; but Starbucks pulled out of the deal. Apparently, the multinational peddler of coffee and muffins had the grace to be embarrassed by what looked like an assault on hallowed tradition.

The Carthusian elite these days is not hot for tradition. In fact, when compared with the sacking of the Charterhouse museum, the coffee-shop incident begins to look like very small beer. Last year many of the school's most precious treasures were sold at Sotheby's — but no one has noticed. There has been no bleating in the broadsheets.

You might have expected more reverence for the past from a school that is governed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and a Conservative peer, Lord Wakeham, and produced Robert Graves, George Mallory, Lord Baden-Powell, Thackeray and John Wesley. The Charterhouse museum was not just any school museum; it was an end-ofempire jewel. Its instigator was one Revd G.J. Davies, a Charterhouse teacher (in Charterhouse parlance 'beak') who seems to have suggested over a cup of tea in 1874 that 'current boys & OCs should donate objects of interest' for a museum. He cannot possibly have imagined quite how generous Old Carthusians would be. In fact, their donations were so magnificent that by the time I was at the school in the 1970s the collection included items that would have added lustre to the British Museum, and included objects from all the great civilisations — Hellenistic, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian, New World — as well as pieces that were European or local Anglo-Saxon in origin.

A shortlist includes stone adzes and arms from New Guinea, a Papuan gope board, which is a decorated shield-like totem, an early Hawaiian necklace, an Easter Island figurine, Etruscan, Roman and Greek pottery and bronzes, a fragmentary Cypriot terracotta head from the

6th century. Much of the Egyptian collection was accumulated because Old Carthusians had subscribed to digs in Egypt in the 1890s under the aegis of the Egypt Exploration Fund, and it included gifts of a monumental Egyptian red granite bust of Rameses II from the 19th Dynasty, 1292-1190 BC. Then there was a collection of Mesopotamian seals from about 3,500 BC, a selection of Roman glassware, perfect and uncracked, showing only the patina of time. From Greece there was a Corinthian bronze helmet, beaten from a single piece of metal, thought to be 6thcentury BC. If this were not enough, there was also the Charterhouse Buddha.

This Buddha dates from about the 2nd or 3rd century AD and was carved in grey schist. It was presented to the school in 1881 by Charles Pearson OC, district inspector of schools in Rawalpindi. He related in a letter dated 19 February 1881, 'This image of the Buddha was given to me by the Khan of Dubyan, a village near Holi Mardan in the Peshawar district.' It therefore dates from the first moment when the figurative form of the Buddha was portrayed in art. Before then, as Buddhist scholars and theologians know, the Buddha was depicted only by symbols such as the soles of his feet. This early sculpture is therefore the lens through which we first see how the ancients perceived the godhead. It is thought that the desire and technical skill to create a figurative representation of the Buddha came with the soldiers of Alexander who remained in this area following his conquests as far east as Afghanistan and India.

When I was in New York in July, I dropped in on Sotheby's to talk to the head of antiquities about the sale. (Only the Buddha was sold in New York; the other 168 items from the museum went under the hammer in London.) The Sotheby's building is somewhat reminiscent of a department store, which, of course, it is — a department store for historical artefacts. However, unlike Saks Fifth Avenue, it is not the whiff of the perfumery but the scent of money that greets the visitor. It was enough to declare my interest to be shown up to the antiquities department. There the US equivalent of an English blue-stocking, complete with pearl necklace, most courteously wrote down my details in longhand with a pencil. Within moments, one of the heads of antiquities came out to speak to me.

It seems that the headmaster could not have timed the sale better. The destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taleban was still fresh in the public mind, especially in the wake of 9/11, and there was panic in the Buddhist art market. As one Sotheby's expert put it to me, 'It was like the Cultural Revolution all over The Buddha alone fetched the second highest price in sales history for an equivalent object — £431,000. A few weeks later, the London sale realised a further £731,000. More than 80 per cent of the objects sold realised more than the highest Sotheby's estimate, and more than 45 per cent sold at double.

Would Charles Pearson have suspected — when he answered the call to donate or give in trust objects of antiquity to the glory of his school — that those same objects would be sold 120 years later?

In retrospect, the Charterhouse I experienced as a pupil in the 1970s was itself a museum — a museum of bygone idealistic values. The process of learning was assisted by the physical presence of history as well as by a great set of teachers who all possessed learned and diverse enthusiasms from which we derived as much as from any formal curriculum. My housemaster was a gaunt physics teacher and miner's son, who was a wonderful fives player, puritanical and Christian in the best senses of the words. and who appeared to shudder at the sight of bouffant-haired parents arriving in their limousines. Our headmaster, Oliver Van Oss, whose voice could halt a bird in flight, appeared huge and Churchillian to our young eyes, and was an expert on Delft tiles and a friend of Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman. One of my history teachers was a former British intelligence interrogator (whose techniques ensured uninterrupted silence in class). Our French teacher was a pupil of Jean Paul Sartre, never spoke a word of English in class and hectored us on existentialism. (It was the only drug I took.) And one of my English masters, named Dr Blake, was an archaeologist by training and curator of the museum between 1970 and 1994. It was he who oversaw its transfer to new purpose-built premises, complete with a conservation laboratory. But, as with all the teachers I knew, whether of arts or sciences, the amount of time spent on activities that might in any other profession be classed as overtime was enormous. Dr Blake's was spent on the museum. in which students like myself could assist and even learn the rudiments of an archaeological dig which took place, I seem to remember, near one of the football pitches.

Over recent years Charterhouse has been unlucky. In the 1990s a headmaster was caught using the services of girls from the local town for other than educational reasons; another housemaster had a sexchange during one holiday and became a Ms (no crime in that); and an English teacher last year faked his pupil's coursework results. This from a school that charges parents a basic £20,730 per year.

The headmaster today is the Revd John Witheridge, who to my mind has more of the City than the Church about him. 'Why; I asked him earlier this year, 'did you feel the need to sell the museum?' We are building a new library,' he said, 'and the sale will help fund the computer room. Besides, none of the boys visited it and no one really knew it was there.' So there we have it: a headmaster who prefers computers to antiquities, browsing to Buddhas.

And yet is it not possible to think of a thousand ways in which these objects could have been used in a stimulating and educational way? In the British Museum, children are invited to sleepovers in the Mummy room — perhaps the British Museum should have been invited to take over the tuck shop?

One of the most moving objects of the museum was a papyrus from the 2nd century AD about the death of a child:

From the village of Senepta. At a late hour of yesterday, while a festival was taking place and the castanet dancers were giving their usual performance at the house of my son-in-law his slave Apaphroditos, about eight years old, intending to lean out from an upper room ... to see the castanet dancers, fell and was killed. Accordingly, I present this application in order that the body of Apaphroditos may receive proper preparation and interment.

Why is that papyrus important? Perhaps because we can all imagine that little boy straining on tiptoe over the balustrade to gaze out at the excitement below, like every little boy before and since. It is a fragment of life that unites past and present. That is why we have museums. Who but Hermann Goering or Mao Tse-tung would disagree?

Perhaps the final word should go to the former curator. Dr Blake, who was not consulted on any aspect of the sale, and who had no power to prevent it. When I rang him, he pointed wryly to Charterhouse's motto: Deo Dante Dedi (God having given [to me] I gave). Perhaps a more appropriate maxim for the current regime, he suggested, might be Den Dante Vendicli (God having given [to mei I sold).