East Sussex Skulduggery: Museum Misdemeanours #2
By David Dennis
‘Please sit down Mr Dawson. My name is Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.* Welcome to Lewes Police Station. This burly gentleman is Police Constable Truncheon, here to observe.’
‘Why am I here? Do I need a solicitor?’
‘Mr Dawson, may I call you Charles? You are a solicitor - and one is more than enough. You are here because of certain problems that have come to light. These concerns have come to the ear of our monarch, King Edward the VII and he is most concerned.’
‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that. I hope it won’t affect my knighthood and Fellowship of the Royal Society – my discoveries are legendary and there’s much more to come.’
Painting of the Piltdown skull being examined, by John Cooke (1915). Charles Dawson is third from the left. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
‘You are married to a widow – Mrs Postlethwaite?’
‘Yes’. I married her in 1905. The intellectual life of the nation is centred in the south. We moved down here from Preston to get away from the hoi polloi.’
‘I have information that by 1908 you had taken over an old wine cellar, smeared the walls with cow dung and then claimed it was a dungeon you had discovered - a new part of ancient Lewes Castle. How say you?’
‘I was experimenting.’
‘With reality?’
‘People admired what I had discovered. I am on my way to becoming Provincial Grand Swordbearer of the Uckfield Freemasons’ Lodge.’
‘I am investigating more than just rolled-up trouser legs. You are interested in secrets, I hear?’
‘Yes Inspector. Very much so. I am a man with many friends with an interest in spiritualism, destiny and the secrets of the universe. What is the ultimate destiny of Man? Are we really descended from apes or was the Roman Catholic Church right to say that Man was created by God alone and Woman from Adam’s rib? I am sure my mother could see my intellectual potential even at birth. She called me Charles after Darwin - and if he was right, then there is the Missing Link that combined apelike features with noble humanity – a creature on the bottom step of a staircase to the stars?’
‘Ah yes. A creature that walked upright.’
The Skull of ‘Piltdown Man’ (1914). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
‘Even William Blake thought so, Inspector – did he not write ‘and did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s…’
‘Sorry to interrupt Charles, my dear fellow, but I think he was writing refrains about our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ – Yeshua – not ape-men. But let me press you further.’
‘I am an open book.’
‘Very well. Let me review your reported accomplishments. Well, there’s the very ancient Iron Age Bexhill hybrid boat, the eerie and horrific Loch Ness Monster-like Bexhill Sea Serpent, the unique Roman tile found at Pevensey Castle proving without doubt that the Emperor Honorius had supported the Saxon Shore Fort. What about the superb Hastings Beauport Park find amongst the iron slag of a Roman mine – the only Roman cast iron statuette ever discovered? Then there’s the teeth of the vital hybrid between reptiles and mammals – called Plagiaulax Dawsoni of course. Not to mention the strange shadow people on the wall of Hastings Castle, and the toad found embedded inside flint at Brighton. Have I missed anything?’
‘By heavens yes - don’t forget the Iron Age Bulverhythe Hammer. No wonder that the Sussex Daily News named me ‘The Wizard of Sussex’. I have the most wonderful success in uncovering the past. I am an archaeologist par excellence. In far off Norway my name is being mentioned even now, as they consider if the new Alfred Nobel’s prize fund might allocate monies for an Archaeology Prize – then I would be world famous in perpetuity.’
‘In all this you must have had help?’
‘Why certainly, my good friend the Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin who lives in Hastings and someone you may know on the police network – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They have both helped me greatly. Some of the golden glory showered on me will no doubt tinge them with gilt.’
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
‘Fascinating. But has not Conan Doyle made a fool of himself by saying that the Cottingley Fairies shown in the children’s photographs are real? And has not His Holy Father the Pope banned the writings of de Chardin?’
‘Minor matters. The Pope banned the works of Galileo – and the wonderful 900 theses of Pico della Mirandola. Teilhard can see that Darwin was right and that the Omega Point is Man himself – the glory of creation. Holmes has been maligned. The spirit world is not to be mocked. I myself have seen elves. Who knows what goes on in the woods at night?’
‘I have seen things too, Mr Dawson. I have seen a report here in front of me that says you found a skull at Barkham Manor near Piltdown?’
‘Why yes. My greatest success. I told you I had friends. When the original pieces of the skull were handed to me by workmen digging at Barkham Manor, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, FRS - the English palaeontologist and world expert on fossil fish, being curator of the Geology Department of the British Museum of Natural History, helped me to dig for further bone fragments.’
‘He found none – only you found anything?
‘Yes. I am blessed. I walk under a perpetual shaft of sunlight.’
‘Now my report, Charles, states that another find was made ‘from a second skull’ at Sheffield Park. Woodward confirmed the finds as the Missing Link?
‘Why yes - and I consulted Sir Arthur Keith FRS from the Royal College of Surgeons. He was delighted that I had found the original Missing Link between apes and Man. He even erected a stone at Barkham to commemorate my brilliance.’
‘Yes. I have a note of the plaque – it says:
‘Here in the old river gravel Mr Charles Dawson, FSA found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man, 1912–1913. The discovery was described by Mr Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1913–15.’
Restoration of the head of Piltdown Man (1915). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
‘It was a great day – world-shattering. We had a meeting illuminated by candles and supped wine to celebrate. I made a speech and quoted Shakespeare from his Second Quarto of 1604. If you will remember - Shakespeare causes Hamlet to declare:
‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!’
‘Do you feel like a god, Mr Dawson?
‘Why yes, now you come to mention it. I do – often. I seem to be almost at the Omega. I have supped the ambrosia of discovery in the company of Zeus himself. Archaeology and paleo-academia will never be the same again.’
‘Now Constable Truncheon is going to leave the room and come back with a box… Ah here he is now. I am lifting out this skull. Does this skull look like the one you discovered – the Missing Link?’
‘Goodness – yes, Inspector – it has a great likeness.’
‘Mr Dawson, Charles. Do you know the root of the word skulduggery? It turns out to have been a Scottish word for sexual misdemeanour – not the meaning it has now.’
‘I’m not sure I like your manner, sir.’
‘Do you think the Holy Bible is the word of God?
‘Of course. I am a good Christian. I would never be given a knighthood if I were not.’
‘Well you have not been given a knighthood. Instead you have greatly upset the King. Perhaps St Matthew is right to say in the New Testament: ‘…many false prophets will appear and deceive many people…’ How say you Mr Dawson? You are a cheat. An academic criminal. A forger. A dissembler. A rotten cad. And you are also under arrest.’
‘How dare you sir! You would not even be here if it were not for my good friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. All my discoveries are true wonders and you sir, are nothing but a miserable slave to the law – an elvish phantom. I have risen above the law because my god is science.’
Arthur Conan Doyle (1914). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
‘Mr Dawson. Sit down. Look at the bones of this skull on the desk, sir. These bones are a combination of human skull fragments and orang-utan jaw with filed-down teeth.’
‘Not so, sir. Human brains evolved due to orthogenesis in which our special universe filled with hydrogen and dark matter is in some way alive and trying to create something even more special - and oh happy day – I am it.’
‘You, Mr Dawson are the limpid mirror of Narcissus. You and your misguided friend Teilhard de Chardin view yourselves as the pinnacle of deliberate creation instead of just the natural random outcome of the nuclear mechanisms of second generation stars producing non-gaseous elements.’
‘Poppycock.’
‘We shall see, sir. The future will reveal your duplicity I am sure. Nevertheless, you are under arrest for passing a dung-contaminated wine cellar off as a dungeon - and obtaining pecuniary advantage from falsity.’
Charles Dawson. Cheat. Liar. Forger. (11 July 1864 – 10 August 1916)
If you found this parody interesting you can read these two books by Dr Miles Russell, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Bournemouth:
Piltdown Man: the Secret Life of Charles Dawson (2003) The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed (2012)
NB: Dawson’s fakes were not discovered for many years. He died of septicaemia before any cheating was revealed but many suspected it and said so but were severely rebutted and shamed. He was therefore never arrested for anything - but his reputation as a human is at the nadir, not the apogee, of humanity.
(* Editor’s note: Sherlock Holmes is a character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and is used here without profit.)