Ambrose Nicholas Cattermole

Ambrose Nicholas Cattermole names, dates and describes the old machines that pass through London’s collector trade. His catalogues give that trade a language polite society can use without embarrassment.

Ambrose Nicholas Cattermole is a gentleman cataloguer of obsolete engines. Old instruments, pre-Breaking seals and fragments of condemned apparatus move through London alongside debt and salvage, some openly through licensed antiquaries and auction rooms, some under false descriptions, some only at supper. Where Lionel James Petherick of the Black Gull Auction Rooms makes a public business of that traffic, Cattermole gives it a language respectable enough for banks, widows and curious nobles.

His work is patient and exact. With illustrated catalogues, rulers, gauges, blueprints and a shelf of reference books, he turns a heap of corroded brass into a named, described and dated mechanism. For larger pieces he brings articulated measuring arms, brass gauges and restrained luminous instruments that help him reconstruct how a machine once ran. He is as likely to be found in a noble drawing room, identifying an opened engine for its puzzled owner, as underground in some repository, studying a vast pre-Breaking mechanism that will never be moved.

Cattermole is old, courteous and wholly absorbed in his subject, and his descriptions carry weight. A Cattermole entry can steady a price, reassure a lender or let a widow sell her late husband’s collection without scandal. Some in London note that a respectable description can also make a dangerous object sound harmless. Whether he minds is not recorded.

Companies seek him out to learn what they have found, and what it might be worth, before they sell it. He, in turn, may need younger legs: an escort into a flooded or forgotten repository, the recovery of a missing component, or someone to find out where a machine he once catalogued has gone.

In person

In person Cattermole is a short, remarkably thin and markedly stooped man in his seventies. He is almost bald, with a wild halo of fine white hair above and behind the ears, a huge domed forehead, a long narrow face with sunken cheeks and a small pointed nose. His watery pale-blue eyes are magnified by thick round spectacles, and an enormous snow-white walrus moustache all but hides his mouth. Two fingers of his right hand are permanently ink-stained. He wears an old-fashioned tobacco-brown coat worn at the elbows, a dusty-blue waistcoat, an ivory shirt and a slightly crooked cravat, with pockets overflowing with pencils, catalogues and measuring tools.