Priceless

The Side-Show, Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)

While I have a friend who as been a carnie for over thirty years, respect the culture, and have even taken over one of his concessions when its usual operator became unavailable, there is a time and place for everything. My friend even told a disgruntled customer (angry about not seeing a genuine "missing link" in human evolution on exhibition at the Calgary Stampede midway): "Never trust a carnie!". You pay your money and become amused at the difference between what is advertised and what is actually presented. Malcolm Muggereridge defined humour as the disparity between human aspiration and human performance. At a carnie side-show you become the target of the joke.

But on the midway, you should expect that sort of thing: the Man-eating chicken (of course) is a man sitting on a chair dining on KFC (ten days of doing that for many hours cannot be good for the health). The giant Parisian sewer-rat turns out to be a South American coypu, and my friend's mermaid in a tank was all done with mirrors. The carnival has an illustrious history; from letting off steam before the Roman Catholic Lent all the way back to the shaman's bag of tricks, it combines wonder, theatre and folk art; it shows us that everything has its opposite and that we should not become too stuck at one end. Venues who strive more for wholesome family fun and no deceit at carnivals are really missing the point and most of all that remains is rigged gambling and adrenaline-producing rides.

The press borrows quite a lot from the carnie because the object is not to inform but to sell papers. On some subjects, though, there are still a few people who believe what is presented. As information about the past is most often viewed as educational and not sensational, we might be forgiven for expecting something at least close to the truth. Of course, the details will contain errors. I recently saw a press correction about Evelyn Waugh being a very popular female writer (Evelyn Waugh was a man). That was not a carnie trick, though.

My carnie experiences came back to me the other day when I saw the headline: "Priceless Roman brooch found by metal detectorist donated to Pontypool museum" All that was missing was an exclamation mark. The copy started: ""A PONTYPOOL man has donated a rare and priceless...".
The article describes and shows a very fragmented and corroded Polden Hill type of bow brooch: it is missing its pin, cord, and catch plate end. What might be left of the spring is hidden beneath the wings. It was found in Monmouthshire.This is an excerpt from what Richard Hattatt has to say about the type in Brooches of Antiquity, Oxford, 1987, p. 96:

"Their distribution is... mostly to the southern part of England, but with a certain concentration towards the lower Severn area... As compared with Dolphins, Polden Hill brooches exhibit even greater variety of form and decoration... Hull divided them into many sub-types. ... The moulded decoration on Polden Hills takes  almost every conceivable form..."

So much for rare. They are even more common now than thirty years ago when Hattatt was writing his book. As for priceless, worthless would be more accurate. If you do want to spend a fair bit of money on one, it will be a splendid example like this one offered as a "buy it now" for 110 UKP, complete, attractive and with a nice patina, it is more the sort of thing you expect to see representing this common type in a museum.

The article later quotes the curator as saying that it will "be the highlight of our exhibition..." I can imagine what the tour guide might be saying: "Next, we have the dead cat found in a water cistern at..."
How much of the article is true and how much is journalistic fiction, we may never know.

Incidentally, I have long been thinking of making a sculpture out of such fragmented brooch bits. The shape of the bows will lend themselves to a sculpture of a Celtic-style boar figure so, seriously, if you have any you would care to donate to the project, please contact me. At least the sculpture will have some educational value about the use of certain shapes in Celtic art. it will be a sort of Iron Age/Steam Punk work.

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