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Philip and Jeannie Millward: On The Silk Route
Green Pebble Winter 2009/2010 issue

When Philip and Jeannie Millward bought The Old Skating Rink in the centre of Norwich, they were looking for a location which would function not only as a retail outlet for their furnishings business, but as a place in which they could share some of their 2000-strong collection of art from South Asia and neighbouring countries with the public.

We’re sitting here surrounded by furniture and kelims and what looks like the entire carved wooden facade of an Indian house, complete with balcony. Is everything for sale?
Philip: Not the Nuristani panels on the balcony, the Yarli, the arches; there’s a lot in here that’s not for sale and we never intend to sell, but we want people to be able to enjoy them. So we’ve incorporated them into the building.

Can anyone come and wander round without having to buy anything?
Jeannie: Absolutely. We’ve developed a catalogue so that people can read about what’s in the collection. We’re also building more display cases, and the items in these will be changed every three months.

How did your collection begin?
J: I collected as a child, everybody collects something, and then we went and lived abroad. P: Before that Jeanie used to have an antique shop. J: Yes, I collected and sold English domestic and Indian items. My grandfather was in the textile business, so when we lived in Iran in the middle to late 70s - the Shah was still there and in fact we stayed there until the Shah departed – we started buying old textiles. P: I used to have to travel to Pakistan regularly-- J: Philip returned after one trip to Pakistan with all these textiles, an absolutely wonderful collection. He said he couldn’t resist it. He’d been to the local bazaar and somebody had helped him to buy a broken-down cardboard suitcase to put them into. P: That’s where we started collecting textiles.

What did you do with the pieces?
P: We just stored them. J: A lot of them are children’s dresses, old shawls, that type of thing. We’ve looked after them as best we can, and we’re now in the process of improving where we keep them, moving them into acid-free boxes. P: A lot of the Indian textiles are not the sort you would see in the Maharaja’s palaces but more used in everyday life. Textiles don’t have a particularly long life span so if something is late 19th century, it’s reasonably old. Many are from the first half of the 20th century.

What’s the appeal?
J: I think it’s the history behind them, how they’re actually made, because we’re obviously interested in the crafts side of things. The textures, the colours, the vibrancy. It’s exciting to see how the people of these areas dress up. Even if you’re out driving around in India, some ladies digging the roads are wearing the most vibrant clothes. You and I would find them difficult to wear even to go to the theatre in, and you think to yourself, How can they possibly be working in these clothes, with all sorts of jewellery as well? P: The main textile areas are between Pakistan and India in the Thar Desert. There, the contrast between the vibrancy of the textiles and the arid desert area is quite remarkable. J: They are quite bright. And in somewhere like Rajasthan, which is a very big desert area, certain castes will wear different colours. They’ll know where someone is from, and what caste they are, just from their turbans. P: In south India you don’t see the same vibrancy in colour, perhaps because it’s very much more agricultural and wet and humid? J: In the desert, they used to find mica and they would put that on their clothes to make them glitter in the sunlight. Nowadays they’ll put glass and beads into their textiles for the same effect.

What else have you collected?
P: In those early days, we travelled a lot in the Swat Valley (North West Pakistan), where there was recently a huge battle raging between the Pakistanis and the Taliban, and we took at least one, if not two, shipments of small wooden items because the whole region is famed for its wood carvings. Wood carvers there occupy a very high level in the caste structure, which is not the case for other parts of the sub-continent. The items we brought back were often domestic objects; things they used in their daily lives.

Then we spread into copper items. At that stage you could buy - in particular in the bazaars of Northern Pakistan - very good copper and brass, and at that time it was all sold on a weight basis and you paid very little for the craftsmanship. J: But what they tended to do was to ‘tin’ a lot of their copper and so you were quite often buying it blind because you didn’t know what you were buying under the tin. Sometimes you got very pleasant surprises; other times you got rather disappointed (laughs).

P: It’s the sort of thing that’s harder to collect nowadays. Firstly, those countries have recognised the value of some of these things, and secondly the price of copper has gone up to such an extent that it’s very expensive. If you look at one of the lamps we sell, the base is an antique water pot made of copper, but it’s quite difficult to get those now because so many have been scrapped and sent to China to support their economic growth, and also because everyone has gone over to plastic and polythene over the years.

When did you begin collecting larger pieces?
P: As time went by we also collected examples of architectural pieces and what we describe as vernacular furniture. Pieces like the doors, chests, beds from Java, columns, entrance pieces from Swat.

In places like Swat, you had a lot of people who went to work in the Middle East and when they came back they were relatively prosperous. Often one or two would build a new mosque for the village, with the result that they pulled down the old ones.

When we first went there they were burning a lot of wooden items. We have a door that we bought very early on which we had to save from being destroyed. I don’t think it’s going on to quite the same extent now, because over the 30 year period the people have become more sensitive to their cultural heritage.

J: All over the world things are changing, not always in a way we would like and often to the detriment of the traditional crafts, but you can understand the changes. If you had to carry water on your head everyday and someone gave you two plastic buckets that allowed you to carry more in one trip, wouldn’t you use the plastic buckets too? You can’t say to people, We want you to live in poverty so that you continue to produce traditional things, but we’re ok, Jack. We can’t expect people in these countries to sit in a living museum, they’ve got to move on, but we can make sure some of it is preserved.

As you travelled, did you think that one day you would have our own museum?
P & J: Not really. J: It evolved. This whole thing started as a hobby. It was one of those things that gradually gets a bit more…not exactly out of control…but we were lucky when we found this building. We had been thinking of buying a barn, we felt it would be nice to keep it all together, and then when this came up in the middle of Norwich, we thought, Gosh! It was in a pretty ropey state but it was perfect for the collection.

Did you ever have the case of one of you saying ‘No, that really is TOO big’?
J: Occasionally yes, we’d be looking at things and I’d say to Philip, ‘Maybe there’s a limit!’ P: Having said that, we’ve actually got a complete bazaar shop front which we bought some years ago which we’re going to put up on the far side, as an opening into another retail area. J: Pieces like that are very evocative. We have a cupboard we bought in the Swat valley and you only have to open the door and you’re there; the smell of ghee and smoke.

You also collected paintings and prints?
P: Yes, we collected pictures and prints by European artists who travelled through South Asia in the late 18th century to about the middle of the 20th century. We have watercolours and oil paintings. Many of these paintings were done by military people because they’d often been trained in surveying so they were good draughtsmen. There weren’t all that many professional painters who went out to India, other than Thomas and William Daniell, George Chinnery, Edwin Lord Weeks, and Tilly Kettle - one of his paintings is in Norwich Castle Museum. They did mainly portraits of East India Company officials and Indian Maharajas. A lot of the early watercolours were done by military people and amateur civilians.

The East India Company officials also trained Indian miniature painters to paint in the European manner and they did albums of trades people and scenes of everyday life. Europeans bought these and took them back to Europe to show people what life was like there, particularly before photography. So we’ve collected quite a lot of those.

How did you find them?
P: Many of these pictures you have to buy in this country. You would pay substantially more if you tried to buy them in India.

Is this because they are trying to repatriate their culture?
P: In some ways it isn’t actually their culture because they were painted by Europeans, for Europeans, but they certainly have an interest in them. If you take the aquatint engravings by the Daniells, they’re just crazy to get hold of those.

We did buy some prints in India about a year ago, some unusual ones we’ve been trying to get for some years, but generally we find them in this country. And that’s the same for the pictures by the Indian artists who were taught by the East India Company. Because they were generally done for European clients, many of them have ended up in this country. Again, you do get some competition from buyers overseas, but to a lesser extent than on the prints.

Are forgeries a problem?
J: There are copies around. We’ve not made many mistakes. We’ve made a few, like all people, but not very costly mistakes.

How are you managing the collection?
P: The displays will be funded by a charitable trust, which we’re in the process of setting up. By doing this, we also hope to formalise the tours, lectures and post-graduate travel scholarships we have been giving for some years.

If someone was planning to do research, can they contact you?
J: Absolutely yes, most of the collection is digitised as well. Obviously we keep adding to the collection but we’re also hoping that the people who get our travel scholarships will also collect examples. And if there is anyone who would like to donate items or give us items on loan, we would welcome putting them on display. P: And unless you’re a Trust, you can’t easily do this. So it’s very exciting.

For more information about Philip and Jeanie Millward’s South Asian Decorative Arts and Crafts Collection and The Old Skating Rink where it is housed, visit Country & Eastern

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Philip and Jeannie Millward: On The Silk Route Green Pebble Winter 2009/2010 issue

Philip and Jeannie Millward: On The Silk Route
Green Pebble Winter 2009/2010 issue