Mr Nobody and a broken vase: Frank McNally on a British Museum accident with historic resonance

The mysterious smashing of a Chinese porcelain bowl in the British Museum recently appears to have been the work of a notorious recidivist vandal, celebrated in verse.

The rare, 300-year-old artefact fell from a shelf in its case on October 4th and, so doing, damaged another exhibit below. But according to the museum, CCTV shows that the room was empty at the time and there is no evidence of shelf “failure”.

So although investigations continue, the incident has most of the hallmarks of a well-known folk character who always tops the list of suspects in such cases:

“I know a funny little man, as quiet as a mouse / Who does the mischief that is done in everybody’s house! / There’s no one ever sees his face, and yet we all agree / That every plate we break was cracked by Mr Nobody.”

The accident, if that’s what it was, caused outrage in China. There were also claims there that it had been underreported in England, perhaps due to embarrassment in a country that sometimes justifies its accumulation of global treasures on the grounds of safe keeping.

Either way, it’s a relief to know there were no Irish students involved in the British Museum’s latest embarrassment, because the case has some echoes of a much more notorious one from nearly two centuries ago, in which there was a clearly identifiable culprit.

One day in 1845, a young Dubliner – who later confessed to have been drinking for a week beforehand – visited the museum and committed an act of vandalism that should have earned him permanent infamy.

That would have been ironic because, until his moment of madness, he had been living under an assumed name in England, as William Lloyd, having left unspecified “family troubles” behind in Ireland, where he was a student at Trinity College.

Before his drinking binge, he must have been trying to keep a low profile. Then he went to the museum and smashed the Portland Vase, a masterpiece of ancient Roman glass that had, until then, survived intact for two millenniums.

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Breaking it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The vase was itself under thick glass, in a case. Unfortunately, this being the British Museum, there was a large lump of basalt nearby, from the ruins of Persepolis.

So, having first waited for a supervisor to leave the room, “Lloyd” launched the basalt sculpture at the case, shattering the priceless vase into 200 pieces.

Museum investigators later established that his real name was “William Mulcahy” and that his family was poor. Beyond that, posterity has allowed him to return to obscurity. So little else is known about him today that he might as well be Mr Nobody.

In the short term, he benefited from a good lawyer who pointed out that the legislation he was charged under, for “wilful damage”, applied only to objects worth a maximum of £5. He was therefore convicted of destroying the case, not the vase.

Then, an unnamed benefactor bought him out of a two-month jail sentence he had been given in lieu of the fine he couldn’t pay.

A London Times correspondent demanded “severe public flagellation”. But the vase’s owner (it was on loan to the museum then), the Duke of Portland, was more charitable. He didn’t pursue a civil action against the guilty party, not wanting the man’s family to suffer for his folly.

More than a century later, in 1954, an unnamed writer of this newspaper’s London Letter revisited the incident after a conversation in a Wedgwood shop in Piccadilly.

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The keeper of the shop was Wolf Mankowitz, later a well-known playwright and screenwriter (and later again to retire and die in west Cork, courtesy of Charlie Haughey’s artists’ tax exemption).

He was then an expert on Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, who had once borrowed the Portland Vase and made 40 copies. Through that, Mankowitz knew a bit about the man who broke the vase: that he had been a “scenic painter” and that his brother was “a lecturer, probably in mathematics, in Trinity College”.

If anyone could tell Mankowitz where or how the museum vandal had ended up, the London Letter added, he would be “overjoyed” to hear. But if there was any response to this appeal, it was not reported.

The job of restoring the vase was a challenge similar to the reconstruction of Humpty Dumpty. A first attempt in 1845 was good enough to make a name for the craftsman John Doubleday, although when finished he still had 37 small pieces left over.

These were then stored carefully in a box but later devolved into the ownership of somebody who couldn’t remember what they were. After they and the vase were reunited, a second restoration was attempted in 1948, adding some of the misfit fragments. But a third and, so far, final reconstruction was required in the 1980s.