Here’s one which we didn't make earlier
11:11am Monday 4th February 2008 in News By Alan Calvert
WHEN the Amarna Princess - the subject of an embarrassing forgery scam - first went on display in the Egyptology room at the Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, I stood in front of the case and found myself distinctly underwhelmed.
I suspect I was not the only Bolton citizen to wonder how, exactly, this headless lump came to be worth £440,000, even if it was 3,300 years old.
Things have moved on since then and the man who conned various experts with a skilful little job created in a Bromley Cross garden shed, Shaun Greenhalgh, is in jail and his elderly parents have received suspended sentences for their part in a breathtaking operation which involved the creation and sale of at least 20 items over 17 years.
We British love tales like this and I suspect somebody is already weighing up the prospects for a book or Ealing-style film based on these extraordinary events.
Meanwhile we should be grateful to Judge William Morris for his decision at Bolton Crown Court that the fakes, including the Amarna Princess, should not be destroyed.
He grasped, correctly, that there is clear public and academic interest in Mr Greenhalgh's copies and it raises the possibility that the Amarna Princess - boosted by publicity to a level of interest possibly missing before - will go on display in Bolton again.
One suggestion last week was that the fake princess would form part of an exhibition telling her own remarkable story - she was the mother of King Tutankhamun.
All right, I suppose, but it would surely be much more interesting if there was an honest display telling the full story of the con - maybe under the heading "Here's One that Wasn't Made Earlier" - showing newspaper cuttings, photographs of the perpetrators, some of the other items recovered by the police and a detailed account of the successful investigation carried out by the Metropolitan Police Fine Art Squad.
I suspect that if Bolton does not do it, somebody else will.
