One October in 1991, a warder in the Museum of Mankind – the Piccadilly home of the British Museum’s ethnographic collection for two decades until the late 1990s – was horrified to discover a wooden case prised open, apparently with a screwdriver that lay discarded nearby.
Three objects had been taken, with a combined value of £95,000, or about £208,000 today: two pre-Columbian vases and the largest of the museum’s akrafokonmu, or soul discs, which come from the West African kingdom of Asante, in modern-day Ghana.
Nigel Peverett, who worked at the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings in the early 1970s, had remained a “frequent visitor” to the museum until one day in April 1992, when he was caught leaving it with 35 prints worth around £5,000.
When police, following up on the attempted theft, searched Peverett’s cottage in Kent, they discovered 169 more prints, worth an estimated £27,000. Peverett then admitted stealing a further 150 prints, which he had already sold.
Peverett had taken the antique artworks – sometimes going into the British Museum with one bag and “coming out with four” – and using a razor, had scraped off the museum catalogue numbers, or cut them down in size, before selling them through a dealer who sold them at his stall at Portobello Road antiques market.
