In its 41 years on BBC television , the Antiques Roadshow has transformed popular appreciation and knowledge of antiques. For that considerable feat, part of the credit must go to David Battie, the only expert to have appeared in the very first broadcast in 1977 who still remains in the show.

Battie’s background is in ceramics and Oriental works of art. You may recall his appraisal of a Chinese jade bowl from around 1750 which he valued at £25,000. The owner had been using it as a water bowl for her dog.

I was delighted to meet Battie during a recent talk he gave at Cotswold auction house Tayler & Fletcher. He is every bit as genial and generous with his knowledge and insight as he appears on screen, and a gifted raconteur with a host of amusing anecdotes.

There was the added pleasure of viewing a selection of fascinating items from his personal collection, all better captioned than is the norm at museums. Most items were Japanese, Chinese and European tea vessels and utensils, including a whole section devoted to the Japanese tea ceremony. A white Hirado porcelain mizusashi (水指) container for cold water was particularly attractive. The knop on its lid was a minogane (蓑亀) or ‘straw raincoat-turtle’ symbolising long life, as the turtle lives for so long in the water that it collects a ‘tail’ of seaweed resembling the straw coats you can see worn by Japanese farmers and porters on old ukiyo-e. I spent nearly two decades in Japan yet somehow missed the minogane. I also never encountered another exhibit, a ‘brick’ of compressed Chinese tea. My apologies for the poor quality of the photographs …

At school, Battie must have suffered endless taunts for his unusual surname, pronounced ‘batty’which is also slang for being of unsound mind (derived from the idiom ‘bats in the belfry’). By uncanny coincidence, an illustrious ancestor, William Battie (1703-1776), wrote a seminal work in psychiatry, A Treatise on Madness, that advanced the novel idea of mental illness being susceptible to treatment, instead of just cause for confinement. Dr. Battie put his enlightened theories into a practice by founding St. Luke’s Hospital, directly opposite the notorious Bethlem Hospital in London where chained and manacled inmates were objects of public spectacle and entertainment. (Bethlem is the origin of ‘bedlam,’ meaning chaos or a ‘madhouse’.)

A copy of the Battie Treatise on Madness was among personal possessions that descendant David used to illustrate his lifelong passion for antiques. He paid £5,000 for the book at Sotheby’s in London, where he began work as a porter and rose up the ranks to became a director.

Battie had studied graphic design at art school and coveted a masterpiece of 19^thcentury colour printing, The First Six Books on the Elements of Euclid by Oliver Byrne. Battie acquired an extremely rare copy for a considerable sum and also shared it with us.

Standing before Battie on the auctioneer’s rostrum there was also a small blue-green shabti doll from an ancient Egyptian tomb. Carved wooden shabti acted as servants in the afterlife.

He clearly has eclectic tastes in collecting, and before coming to Bourton-on-the-Water he had been busy combing antique shops in the north Cotswolds.

In 2012, Battie was on his way to give a talk in Norwich when nature demanded an urgent visit to a nearby oak tree. On his way back to the car, he slipped on some wet grass, somersaulted onto the road, and broke his leg. In hospital, ‘scaffold rods’ were drilled into the bones and bacteria entered through the drill holes. The infection resisted all antibiotics. In order to save his leg, surgeons had to cut infected flesh and bone from his right ankle, and in a 10-hour operation, fill the space with a chunk taken from his left thigh.

In 2013, the once dapper dresser returned to the Antiques Roadshow barefoot and with a wild mass of a great hair and beard.

The hair has now been tamed, and Battie looks merely distinguished, with a stick for leg support. While still appearing on the Roadshow, nowadays he is also an ambassador for the charity Antibiotic Research UK.

Expertise, of course, is not the same as omniscience or infallibility.

In the Q&A after his talk, I asked why the British became a nation predominantly of tea drinkers, while the French and Italians mainly stuck to coffee. To my surprise, Battie did not know the answer. (My own unproven theory is that it is linked to differences in trade routes and the taxation of tea and coffee.)

 While I have never known Battie to be wrong, the same cannot be said about everyone on the Roadshow. While watching an episode broadcast on 30 April last year from Trelissick in Cornwall, my jaw dropped as another expert on Oriental ceramics explained to viewers that “the Meiji Restoration took over from the Shogunate” and “the court moved from Yedo, which is now Tokyo, back to Osaka.”

This prompted me to send the following to the BBC: ‘While it is true that Edo (sometimes written as Yedo by foreigners) was renamed Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration, it was the capital not of the ‘court’ but of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The emperor and his court were in Kyoto, the imperial capital. As a result of the revolution (‘Meiji Restoration’), the emperor moved from Kyoto to Edo, and occupied the shogun’s castle, which became the Imperial Palace. Edo was then renamed Tokyo (which means ‘eastern capital’). Osaka was and is the commercial centre of Japan and its second biggest city. Osaka has NEVER been home to the emperor or the court. The emperor was given the posthumous name Meiji, hence the ‘Meiji Restoration’ (of imperial rule).’

Eventually, I received a reply from Roadshow executive producer Simon Shaw, who said that the expert (whose name I have removed) ‘agrees that he made the mistake in the original recording and apologises for this. In [his] defence, however, he did point out the error having reviewed his recording and asked for the correction to be made in our editing process. Unfortunately that note was not picked up and the original recording was broadcast. We are going to correct the error in future showings of this episode. Many thanks for drawing the matter to our attention.’

 

© Cotswold Antiques, 2018