Recently, I drove down to Hastings, the small town on the south coast best known as the location, almost 1000 years ago, of the last battle fought by an invading force on English soil. The reason for my visit concerned still more ancient history – a large number of gems that had gone missing from the British Museum, some of which may have been up to 3500 years old.
The chief and only suspect for the thefts is the former keeper of the Greek and Roman department of the museum, a man named Peter Higgs, who lives in Hastings. In 2023, the museum announced that more than 1500 items, including gold jewellery, semi-precious stones and glass dating back thousands of years, and said to be worth millions of pounds, were missing from its collection.
There was also compelling evidence that many of these items had been sold on eBay for just a few pounds. It was a national scandal and a grave embarrassment. The British Museum is perhaps the leading institution of its kind in the world, an extraordinary mixture of museum, library, university, science lab, publisher and archaeological detective agency with more than eight million objects in its possession.
Only 8000 items are actually on display at any one time, and it seems the missing pieces came from the several million items that remain uncatalogued, or only partially catalogued in ancient ledgers.
The museum is also home to a number of famous works of art whose rightful ownership is hotly contested. Chief among these are the Benin Bronzes, which were looted by the British in 1897, and the Parthenon Sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, that were taken or bought by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens, and shipped to England between 1801 and 1812.
The Greeks have been demanding their return for many decades, but their argument has gained greater weight since the post-colonial reckoning that has spread through the academic world and into institutions like the British Museum that house the spoils, as it were, of imperialism.
The museum has always argued, not entirely unfairly, that it is the best place to hold safe the world’s treasures for all the world to see.
That boast loses some of its persuasive power when the man in charge of the Greek and Roman department was thought to be flogging its contents on a site more normally associated with second-hand furniture and clothes.
Higgs was soon dismissed, but the director of the museum, Hartwig Fischer, and his deputy, Jonathan Williams, also had to resign when it was discovered Williams had been warned Higgs was selling items from the museum’s collection, but chose to believe his colleague’s denials.
Since losing his job, Higgs has continued to claim his innocence but has refused to speak to anyone. There has been a civil case brought by the museum in which he was named, and there is also a police investigation that appears to be progressing at a snail’s pace. About 650 items have been recovered, but some 1000 others are still missing.
Although the evidence Higgs was involved in the thefts is such that any other explanation defies belief, no one knows why this curator of more than three decades, a man with a doctorate in archaeology who apparently loved his job, took such huge risks for such meagre rewards.
I’d heard rumours of a possible motivation and wanted to speak to Higgs. But if he was at home he wasn’t answering the door. The reputation of the museum will take time to recover from the thefts, but the mystery of what drove the thief himself may never be solved.
