Trying to Recover the British Museum’s Gems, and Its Reputation

A year has passed since the British Museum said it had fired a curator for stealing from its supposedly lock-tight storerooms and selling the artifacts online. Ever since, the museum has struggled to deal with the fallout from the scandal, which has battered its reputation as a protector of world treasures.

Hartwig Fischer, the museum’s director, resigned. Foreign governments used the uproar to renew claims for the return of artifacts from the collection. And the museum brought a lawsuit against a former curator to try to help get back the items, which include gems and carved glass.

Nobody has been criminally charged, but while a police investigation continues, the museum has asked an eight-person team based in its Greek and Roman department to secure the return of about 1,500 missing artifacts.

The team is searching for the items online, in public auctions and in other museum’s collections, and contacting antiquities dealers who may have bought the artifacts and then sold them to collectors.

In recent interviews, team members said they were making progress but might never recover every lost item.

“I don’t think we’ve ever said that we won’t get everything back, but I suspect we won’t,” said Thomas Harrison, who leads the Greek and Roman department.

So far, Harrison said, his team had secured the return of 634 items, leaving more than 850 missing. Harrison said he was “fairly confident” that another 100 gems would rejoin the museum “in the next year or so.”

The poor quality of the museum’s records was a major obstacle for his team, Harrison said. Because many of the missing items were not especially valuable, officials had never fully cataloged them. Dick Ellis, a former head of Scotland Yard’s art and antiquities squad who is not involved with the inquiry, said the lack of photographs and incomplete paper or digital records would also slow down the police investigation. If you can’t prove ownership, he said, “you don’t have a victim.”

“To be honest,” Ellis added, “the case is a bit of a nightmare. I’m not surprised no one’s been charged.”

The British Museum says the curator at the heart of the incident is Peter Higgs, who briefly ran the Greek and Roman department. In March, the museum won a civil case against Higgs, compelling him to return any stolen items and explain the whereabouts of other artifacts that the museum says he sold online.

Higgs did not attend the hearing in London and has never spoken publicly about the thefts, but court documents say that he disputes the accusations. The British Museum declined to comment on whether Higgs complied with the court’s order, and Higgs did not respond to interview requests.

Each member of the recovery team has a different area of focus.

Some search the museum’s archives to work out what is actually missing. Ollie Croker, a project curator, said many of the items had once belonged to Charles Townley, an aristocrat whose well-cataloged antiquities collection was acquired by the museum in the early 19th century. Croker said one of his main tasks was comparing items in the storerooms with Townley’s records and looking for discrepancies.

Other members focus on tracking down the missing items. Sara Aly, the recovery team’s art market expert, said she scoured auction records and spoke with dealers who might have traded them. Those investigations could be twisty, Aly said. One recently returned gem had passed through “seven hands,” including dealers in Britain, Switzerland and the Middle East, she added.

The museum is paying collectors the same amount that they spent on the missing items, Harrison said; everybody the museum has approached so far accepted that offer.

The team is in regular contact with the police, Harrison added, but is not trying to gather evidence. “There’s very clear lines between what we’re doing and what they’re doing,” Harrison said. (The police declined to comment.)

Morale seemed high in the team’s offices, and Harrison said he worked hard to keep it up. Paloma Ley, the team’s administrator, had recently obtained a metal hand bell for staff members to ring whenever they made a breakthrough. “There’s a need to express joy,” Harrison said.

At a staff meeting, Harrison gathered with his team in a book-lined room in the Greek and Roman department, where they updated one another on their efforts to secure items from Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Harrison was about to end the meeting after 30 minutes when he remembered two things to celebrate: Aly had just located a missing purple gem engraved with a likeness of the goddess Venus, and Ley had found another gem of interest on an auction house website.

Harrison asked Ley to get the bell, and the two team members took turns to lift it above their shoulders and ring. They looked a little embarrassed but swung the bell heartily.