BBC Antiques Roadshow expert Justin Croft refuses to value particular item relating to Irish poet: ‘I’m not going to’
Antiques expert Justin Croft told a guest on BBC’s Antiques Roadshow he wasn’t going to value one of the items they had brought along.
In the latest episode of the classic BBC weekend show which aired on May 25, the specialists were gathered in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast.
One guest brought along a collection of works by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who had attended Queens University in Belfast, which sits very close to the Gardens.
Born in 1939, Heaney enjoyed a long association with the university, firstly as a student in the late 1950s and later as a lecturer.
“So we’re looking at really a massive material here relating to the poet Seamus Heaney,” Croft explained as he looked at the archive brought to him.
He continued: “And this is all material from the Seamus Heaney Center here at Queen’s University in Belfast, which is just beyond the trees.
“So you have a collection of, really, his earliest materials, the formation of him as a poet. This is Queen’s University English society called the Gorgon.
“You’ve got six issues of that. You’ve got a copy of, I assume, the first edition of his first collection.”
The guest replied: “That’s 11 poems which were published by Queen’s University in 1965, so there are 11 poems in here – 10 of which are in his first collection, which came out in ’66 so yeah.
“This is really… This tells the story across these Gorgon magazines. It’s really the story of Seamus Heaney becoming the poet. It’s really interesting.
“If you look through these, the very first issue that he publishes in, which is number three, he publishes not under Seamus Heaney, but under Incertus, the Latin for uncertain.”
“He’s not using his name. And and then in issue four, he publishes for the first time as Seamus Heaney.”
“And these are incredibly ephemeral pieces,” Croft noted. “They’re essentially duplicated type scripts, aren’t they?”
He went on: “So I’m guessing they were produced in pretty small numbers. I can’t imagine that more than a handful of copies of these survived.”
“There are certainly not a huge number of them,” the guest confirmed, adding: “David Oliver, who was the editor of number four, gifted us these. He said to Seamus, ‘If you’re going to give me a poem, I want you to use your name.'”
“I think what’s what’s wonderful about what you’re doing is you’re bringing all these things together, just also, amazingly, you have his form of application for admission to the Faculty of Arts. It’s dated second of October, 1957,” Croft pointed out.
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“This belongs to Queen’s University itself. It doesn’t sit in the Seamus Heaney collection,” the guest shared.
Summarising, Croft continued: “I love the poems of Seamus Heaney, I value them for their kind of directness, their accessibility. I love the sense of place. I love the landscape.”
“There is great immediacy of language, a mastery of form as well. But I think it is – it’s something that communicates so immediately from those earliest poems,” the archive owner noted.
Getting around to the valuation, Croft took in the works and decided: “So you know, and I know, that the value in this doesn’t necessarily lie in the commercial.
“But we can think about it. A collection such as the 11 poems, It regularly makes £5,000.
“The Gorgon is rarer, and you might say, to some extent more important. Six issues, of which four have Seamus Heaney contributions…
“It’s a fantastic connection to Oliver, as you talked about, I can see this at probably between £8,000 and £10,000, something like that.”
However, he didn’t want to put a price on every item, explaining: “The student record. I mean, to have the photograph of Seamus Heaney on his original student record in Queen’s University register…
“I’m just not going to put a value on it. To me, the cultural value of that is immeasurable.”
“That’s good, because we have to give that back!” the guest quipped, with Croft responding: “Thank you so much. It’s been a real, real pleasure and a treat. Thank you.”