Dry Storeroom No. 1 (40 page)

There are
some
jewels that are just too valuable to be placed out in the galleries. These are kept in a very large green safe in an office behind a door that opens to a special key. I had better not tell you exactly where the door is. Hidden away, of course, are diamonds. When I was shown the contents of the safe, it did produce a little thrill to hold a large cut diamond, of a size that might interest a seriously rich film star. To a mineralogist, however, an imperfect diamond may well be more interesting than a flawless piece of “ice.” Minute inclusions within the body of the diamond can reveal much about its conditions of formation deep within the Earth. Diamonds on the surface of the Earth are strangers from a strange world, hijacked upwards to Garrard’s and Fabergé. Tiny bubbles, so small as to be hardly visible under a lens, can be analysed by techniques like Raman microspectography, which uses a laser beam to excite the constituents of the bubble into revealing their spectral properties. No harm comes to the diamond. Diamonds have a simple crystal form. In the hidden collection there is a diamond octahedron the size of a cherry—the octahedron is its uncut natural shape—still emerging from its bed of yellow ground. This was an historic find from 1872 in South Africa, at the beginning of the exploitation of the diamond pipes that founded the fortunes of the De Beer family, who subsequently provided the Natural History Museum with a Director, and who still dominate the market today. Weathered yellow ground preceded the fresher blue ground as the pipes were mined ever deeper, and both are a legacy of the deep event immortalized by a profound duct that runs towards the centre of the Earth. Seventy-five per cent of diamonds were formed in an event about three billion years ago. Scientists are still arguing why this should be, but it means that the impurities in diamonds are potentially one of the best ways to learn about our planet at an early stage of development. For example, large-scale ion microprobes have investigated the sulphur isotopes in tiny flecks included in diamonds that are effectively “fossils” preserved from the early Earth. The results show that at this early stage in the Earth’s history the sulphur from the diamonds was likely to have been derived from the atmosphere. Diamonds are a mineralogist’s—and not just a girl’s—best friend.

The Big Hole diamond pipe at Kimberley, South Africa, source of many giant gems

They are also a thief’s greatest temptation. The Natural History Museum mounted a blockbuster show on diamonds in 2005, bringing together a selection of famous stones. Rare yellow-or blue-hued diamonds could be seen alongside scintillating giants, each of which doubtless carried a special curse. Security was an important consideration; but it was still evidently inadequate, for the show had to close early on 23 November at a loss. Staff were informed that “reliable information” had been obtained by the police that a bold jewel heist was at an advanced stage of planning, and that the greatest robbery in the history of the world might happen at any minute. For several weeks one had to walk past guards carrying sub-machine guns to get to the office while the splendid diamonds were sent securely back to their several homes. It was a slightly humiliating experience—especially as the London newspapers ran articles along the lines of “Mr. Big Spooks Museum.” The guards had no sense of humour, either, when an employee gestured towards his briefcase and winked. It was rather a relief when the diamonds had gone home. Though what was once the largest diamond in the world still resides at the Natural History Museum…Or, to be truthful, the
space
that it once occupied is curated in the Museum. It is an odd story. The Koh-i-noor diamond is not only one of the largest diamonds but could claim to be the one to which the cliché “steeped in history” most dramatically applies. It is not merely steeped, but is marinated, stewed and spiced in history; naturally, it also has a whopping curse upon it. It was mined in India in Andhra Pradesh in medieval times, and its early history is more legend than fact, but by 1526 it was probably in the possession of Babur, the first Mughal Emperor. Thereafter it changed hands and country repeatedly as spoils of war: it travelled to Persia with Nadir Shah in 1739; and thence to Afghanistan with the warlord Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1747; and then on to the Punjab in 1813, when it was captured in turn by the Maharaja Ranjit Singh. During its Mughal days, it spent time mounted in the famous Peacock Throne. Finally it passed by right into the hands of the greatest Empress of them all, Queen Victoria. It was an attraction at the Great Exhibition of 1851: “the lion of the Exhibition” according to
The Times.
But its drop-like shape did not please Prince Albert, and in 1852 the stone was recut over the course of eight days for the then astonishing sum of £8,000. During this process it shrank from 37.2 grams to 21.6 grams (that is a 42 per cent loss)—and became much more brilliant. The original was lost for ever. But, tucked away in an attic of the Mineralogy Department, Alan Hart found a cast of the original Koh-i-noor diamond—it still exists, if only as a hole inside a plaster cast. It had been forgotten since 1852, but could there be a better demonstration of the First Law of Museums:
never throw anything away
?

Recutting the Koh-i-noor diamond in 1852. Considering the value of the stone, the figure on the right seems rather nonchalant.

Notes accompanying the virtual specimen show that the cast was prepared under the supervision of Nevil Mervyn Herbert Story-Maskelyne—one of the leading mineralogists of the time—as a record before the recutting of the famous stone. There was a previous tradition of making glass models of renowned jewels, so replication was common practice. Three hundred and fifty of Sir Hans Sloane’s glass models are one of the better survivors from his original collection in the British Museum. Story-Maskelyne became Keeper of the department in 1857, and he it was who first built up the meteorite collection, and arranged the public exhibitions under what was then the cutting-edge, chemical classification, which still forms the basis of the display. He was a pioneer in the use of chemical methods in mineralogy, and demanded a laboratory, in spite of the fact that he had virtually no assistance for a number of years. Nonetheless, he somehow found time to keep on his Oxford professorship, become a Member of Parliament and develop into one of the important early photographers. He was almost Heron-Allenesque in his versatility, though without the interest in mumbo-jumbo. Are we lesser people today, or do we expect less of ourselves? I imagine Heron-Allen passing Story-Maskelyne on the stairs. “Ah! My dear Maskelyne, I regret I cannot spare time for persiflage just now, as I have to finish my monograph in time for the violin recital. Perhaps we will meet at the Sufic Poetry Society this evening?” “Would that it were so,” Story-Maseklyne might reply. “But I fear I must complete the determination of the latest parcel of minerals from India before I leave for my constituency in Wiltshire by way of the Welsh silver mines, there to glean materials for my photographic plates.”

Whatever our deficiencies of character, we do have better scientific instruments these days; modern scanning techniques may even allow us automatically to recreate the original shape of the Koh-i-noor from its cast—so to build a solid from the vacuum. As for the butchered diamond, it can be seen in the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London. And there are those who have attributed Prince Albert’s early death to the curse. Although it is a strange kind of death: his ghost still haunts South Kensington—from the Museum and monument that carry his name to the attic of an obscure part of the Natural History Museum.

From another box hidden in the safe Alan Hart carefully lifted the La Trobe nugget—717 grams of native gold, and not the usual formless mass, either, but a jumble of crystals, piled together like a gilded cubist sculpture. Charles Joseph La Trobe, Governor of Victoria, sold it to the Museum in 1857. It remains one of the most magnificent examples of native gold ever found, and it is priceless. It feels curiously heavy in the hand, and somehow it is hard to credit that it is the real thing. One expects it to have a label on it saying 100%
REAL GOLD.
Another piece of native precious metal from the safe may be even more valuable. It feels a little tasteless to mention value while looking at the treasures in the national collections—rather like the man invited to an aristocratic high table whistling through his teeth and opining out loud that the dinner service must be worth a fortune. But the Kongsberg silver wires really would fetch something approaching a quarter of a million pounds on the open market. The famous silver mines near Buskerud in Norway were opened in 1623, and at their height employed several thousand miners. They stopped production in the middle of the last century, so no more specimens will be found. The wires are very odd—they club together to make a spiral of native silver threads rising from a calcite base, slightly blackened in the atmosphere, but silvery withal. The form is somewhat reminiscent of the famous if unbuilt Tatlin tower of the Russian Constructivists, which was to have been built in 1917; if one was less generous, one might say it was more like a weathered bedspring. Whatever the comparison, it is an extraordinary production of nature, which is why it is so valuable. This spiral “sculpture” was acquired in 1886, but belonged originally to the Geological Survey, whose Museum was formerly a separate institution with its entrance on Exhibition Road. The Natural History Museum took over both the Survey minerals and the galleries in which they were displayed in 1985. The former Geological Museum became the Earth Galleries of the NHM, and the silver spiral was added to the collections.

Everyone would like to find his or her own Aladdin’s cave, a jewelclad grotto of the heart’s desire. While I was researching this book I gained access to a part of the Museum I had never visited before: not so much an Aladdin’s cave as an Aladdin’s attic. It was a strange feeling climbing a staircase for the first time in a building where I had spent most of my working life. The Russell Room hides in what would be called the rafters in any regular building. The square columns that pass through the room still carry the effigies of eurypterid fossils—so once upon a time the public would have had access to this corner. But now it feels like the most sequestered recess of a building that is already the apotheosis of nooks and crannies. The room is lined with the polished wooden cabinets and drawers that are the hallmark of the old Museum. Much of it is taken up with the collection of Sir Arthur Russell Bt., who made the greatest ever collection of British mineral specimens. It was received as a bequest by the Museum in 1964. There is an endearing black-and-white photograph of the baronet sharing a tandem bicycle with his mother, all Oxford bags and cardigans. He is alleged to have visited every British mine outside the Isle of Man in search of mineral booty. His name has been adopted for the leading society for amateur mineralogists, the Russell Society, and naturally there is a russellite, with its type locality at Castell-am-dinas Mine at St. Colomb Major, in Cornwall, the ancient county that Russell scoured for fine examples. On the top of the cabinet lies his catalogue, immaculately written out in what I would describe as a boyish hand—perfectly formed letters but not joined together. I leafed through it to look for the usual signs of ageing, but in vain; the first entry is as neat as the thousandth.