Stolen

A 90-year-old member of the Wine Label Circle has lost 70 items from his collection during a break-in at his East Sussex home. The wine labels were the only items taken in the theft.

The Victoria and Albert Museum have updated security following a second theft from their Ceramic Galleries in as many months. While the new systems were installed, the galleries were closed for a week.

VALUABLE Native American artefacts were stolen in a smash-and-grab raid on an auctioneer’s car in Surrey last week. A substantial reward is being offered for the safe return of the stolen items.

POLICE investigating the theft of Tang and Yuan dynasty jewellery and body ornaments from the British Museum on October 29-30 believe the raid could be linked to the theft of Chinese jades from the Victoria and Albert Museum earlier last month.

GLASSWORKS by Emile Gallé thought to be worth over £1.5m have been stolen from a Swiss museum. Thieves seized 15 items by the French master craftsman in the raid on the Neumann Foundation, housed in the castle of Gingins overlooking Lake Geneva, on October 27.

POLICE have alerted dealers across Ireland to a cache of antiques stolen in a weekend raid at the home of Lord Henry Mountcharles on his Slane Castle estate in County Meath.

TWO diamonds with a reported value of nearly £8m were were stolen from the Chopard stand at the Paris Biennale.

IN Antiques Trade Gazette No 1276, February 22, 1997, I reviewed a fascinating but somewhat disconcerting exhibition at Archeus Fine Art in London of drawings by Eric Hebborn (1934-1996), who has been described as the maker of the finest art fakes of the 20th century. The show offered rather convincing ‘Old Master’ drawings after the likes of Raphael, Rembrandt and Watteau, which were selling at prices up to £2500.

THE owners of a mid-18th century cello by Tomasso and Lorenzo Carcassi of Florence have appealed for its safe return following a theft in North Finchley.

SIX masked raiders broke into the South Cotswolds Antiques Fair at Westonbirt School, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire around 3am on the morning of Sunday August 15 and escaped with an estimated £400,000 worth of jewellery.

NEWS has come in of the theft of a New Zealand ‘Waitangi’ crown. This one should prove to be particularly easy to identify because it is the rare proof – not the ‘ordinary’ issue. 

A GANG made off with £400,000 worth of Asian jewellery after fooling a shop owner into believing they were police officers. Pretending to carry out a drugs raid, the men appeared to be genuine policemen with uniforms, radios, evidence bags, bullet-proof vests, and what appeared to be authentic ID and search warrants.

A GANG slashed patrol car tyres at Petworth police station before launching an audacious burglary at an antiques shop in the town, escaping with hundreds of pieces of silver.

CONTINUING the recent spate of sophisticated country house thefts, valuable antiques were stolen from two homes in the south east of England in the space of a week last month.

POLICE are investigating the theft of antiques valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds stolen from Uppark, the National Trust House in West Sussex, overnight on June 6-7.

THE vicar of St Thomas the Apostle in Hanwell is appealing to dealers to look out for an altar cross stolen from the West London parish church on May 20.

POLICE have arrested a woman wanted for questioning in connection with a series of thefts from London antiques shops earlier this year.

POLICE investigating a series of gate thefts that have occurred in North Wales believe that they were stolen in order to sell as antiques.

APPEAL Court judges have lifted the punishment given to a London dealer convicted of handling £1.5m worth of stolen silver after hearing how he had committed the crimes in order to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment.

THE gang targeting antiques centres in the south-midlands appear to have struck again, this time walking away with £4000 worth of carriage clocks.