David Ashdown

David Ashdown’s Society for Corrected Antiquities is the politest cover London’s collectors possess. For a newcomer with the right knowledge and the right manners, he can also be the first real patron the city offers.

David Ashdown is the man behind the Society for Corrected Antiquities, the most respectable of the capital’s collecting circles. Under the Society’s name, gentlemen may bid ruthlessly for provenance, fragments and old devotional matter the moment such things can be made to look legitimate. The word “corrected” does a good deal of quiet work: a piece that arrives with an awkward past is expected to leave the Society’s rooms with a tidier one, and nobody present thinks it polite to ask how.

Where other corners of collector London trade in warehouses and whispered suppers, Ashdown’s circle supplies sociability. His receptions are where an interest in the old bright centuries becomes a mark of good company rather than a cause for alarm, and they sit comfortably beside the lectures of Professor John Alured Bell, whose teaching flatters younger collectors while unsettling older moralists. Ashdown himself is social and imposing rather than bookish. His value lies less in scholarship than in his willingness to vouch for those who have it.

That makes him one of the city’s remembered intermediaries. A newcomer often finds his first real London patron not in a ministry but in one such figure: James Wren turns a grievance into paper, David Corvin turns a room into introductions, James Thornycroft decides who is fit for the suppers where London changes shape. Ashdown’s particular gift is to convert antiquarian usefulness into respectable sponsorship, a letter or an introduction that makes a nobody into somebody’s protégé.

Adventuring companies meet Ashdown when they have found something old and need it to become saleable, or when they have skills a collector can use: identifying a fragment, tracing a provenance, retrieving a piece without scandal. He pays in standing as much as in coin, and a company that proves discreet may find itself introduced where it could never have walked in. The cost is deference. The Society decides what an object’s history was, and those who embarrass it tend to find polite London closing its doors.

In person

In person Ashdown is a big, powerful man of about fifty, well over six feet, thick through the chest and shoulders and a little soft at the middle. Dense, wavy iron-grey hair is swept back from a large, round, olive-complexioned face; his eyebrows are exceptionally thick and black above dark-green eyes, his broad nose has plainly been broken, and a luxuriant black-and-silver beard is carefully forked into two points. One front tooth is gold. He dresses in cream, bottle-green and gold: a beautifully tailored evening coat, an embroidered waistcoat, a large silk cravat, several rings and an antique society chain. Provenance papers, sponsorship letters and a seal press are rarely far away, and at a sale he is quick with the paddle.