How I Deliberately Destroyed over £1m of Irreplaceable Art

Please don’t shout at me. I’m still dealing with it.

This, sadly, is not a trick headline.

The simple fact is I really am personally responsible for the destruction of unique pieces of art valued at well over one million pounds. Not in a story, not in a comedy sketch about bungling art robbers, but in real life.

In fact, the true value of this faux pas is likely to be far more than that because it’s a low end guess and we can’t ever know for sure. Nothing now remains of the fifty or so oil paintings, and who-knows-how-many preliminary sketches, photographs and notes that I permanently removed from the planet one cold autumnal day many years ago.

Nothing, that is, except the nightmare of replaying what I did over and over in my mind. But it wasn’t my fault. You see, my dad told me to and I was only 11 years old at the time. As excuses go, you’ve got to admit that’s a pretty good one.

However, I think I’d better rewind a little and explain how this all came about.

It was the early 1980’s in England. The three TV channels broadcasted for what seemed like five minutes a day at a resolution so low it now seems impossible that we managed to actually watch anything. Cars rusted within the first few months of owning them and mustaches were the facial hair de jour. Not that I had any of these things. Like I say, I was only eleven.

My parents had already been divorced for some years by this time and my dad was now based in Maidenhead, a mere half hour’s drive from my sister and I’s childhood home. Every other weekend we’d be at his one of his properties from Friday until Sunday evening. It was a routine we were used to.

‘Properties’ was plural because my dad was a builder. At that time, he owned a private club on the river near the famous Boulter’s Lock and a very large detached house he had recently bought for development further up the river, adjacent to the Maidenhead Bridge and on the opposite river bank of the legendary Skindles Hotel. He’d paid the comparatively enormous sum of £15,000 and he was converting the building into 4 large two bedroom flats.

By the time my dad bought it, it had been empty and derelict for some time, though it remained broadly intact and watertight. As all builders know when you acquire a property like this, your first job is to strip it bare. Literally everything has to go, right back to the plaster and sometimes beyond.

That means ripping out carpets, removing any old kitchen and bathroom units, pulling up floors, taking out old electrics and so on. This was no different to any other job in that respect.

However, some of the rooms appeared, at some point, to have been turned into storage areas and some sort of basic studio. There were old desks, chairs and a mountain of boxes containing all manner of mysterious artifacts, each covered in thick, uniform layers of dust, something I found fascinating as a young boy.

I was allowed to go through them and see what I could find. In my young mind it was like being given access to an ancient treasure trove that had been untouched for years and, in retrospect, this analogy was closer than it appeared at the time.

Despite our young ages, my sister and I routinely helped my dad with his projects doing jobs that were commensurate with our years. This particular weekend, we were going to clear the house of all the clutter ready for the ‘big boys’ to come in the following day and start the job properly. This meant one thing — building a giant bonfire in the back garden. It was a child’s dream — build a fire and burn everything in the house! Yay!

It wasn’t long before a huge, hungry fire was raging in the overgrown gardens. Obsessed with building it higher, I was running backwards and forwards with chairs, boxes, scrap wood and anything else I could lay my hands on while my dad, helped by my sister, remained inside breaking it down into manageable chunks for my young hands to carry.

As I returned inside for more fuel on one trip, I discovered that they had stopped working and were examining a huge stash of what appeared to be oil paintings, some framed, most not, that had now been exposed by the removal of the junk that lay in front of it.

I don’t remember much about the paintings themselves, but I do remember being surprised when my dad announced that we would burn them all. After all, it was probably some ‘local wannabe artist’ as we’d never heard of this John Piper fellow who’s signature was clearly scrawled on each image. As much as I loved my fire and relished the thought of watching actual, real oil paintings curl and succumb to the heat, I couldn’t help but feel it was a bit of a waste.

There was some discussion about whether we should keep some, so my dad allowed my sister and I to keep one each. The two we selected, ruined buildings in a dark landscape that I found compelling even at that age, were put to one side and I started roughly stacking the rest for disposal, excited by the fact that this was such an unusual thing to do.

Of course, in these days of access to instant information, a simple internet search would have revealed that John Piper was, in fact, one of the UK’s most foremost artists, photographers and designers.

He was born in 1903 and had studied art at Richmond College, evidently rebelling against his father who wanted him to become a lawyer and thereby losing his inheritance as a result.

‘One of the most significant artists of the twentieth century’

During the war, he had been commissioned as an Official War Artist by the War Artist’s Advisory Committee and was sent to bombed out buildings to record bomb damage in paint. Some of these works became iconic British images, often reproduced on covers of museum guides and art books.

He counted John Betjeman, Geoffrey Grigson and Ben Nicholson among his friends, each masters — and now legends — of their own trade. During his own lifetime his work was exhibited frequently and even now, many years after his death in 1992, it still is. Just last year, the Tate Gallery in Liverpool ran a three month exhibition of his work, showing 55 pieces, where he was described as ‘One of the most significant artists of the twentieth century’.

After the war, he had experimented with photography and stained glass, designing windows for Coventry Cathedral, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and many others. He even created tapestries that still hang in Chichester Cathedral to this day. He was definitely not a ‘local wannabe’ artist as my dad had surmised.

It still makes me nauseous when I think about the fact that these very hands I’m typing with once held dozens of masterpieces by this artistic legend. I took them down in batches of three of four and stacked them next to the bonfire. Once I had acquired a substantial pile of canvases varying in size from tiny to enormous, I threw them on, one by one and watched them bubble and curl as they met their fate. Then, I returned again to grab boxes of sketches, notes and photographs and emptied those too, directly into the grateful flames.

Even now, well over three decades later, I still physically shudder at the thought.

It was several years after the building had been converted and the flats had been sold that we discovered the awful truth, in a chance encounter with a local art dealer who proudly displayed one of his pieces in his shop with a hefty price tag.

Although my dad had made a substantial profit by selling each flat for some £30,000 each, the inescapable truth is that these paintings would have yielded more profit than doing any of the work required to get to that point. In 2008 for example, just ONE of his paintings fetched £325,250 at auction in Sotheby’s.

And we destroyed at least fifty of them, enough to fill the Tate a second time. That would put the value closer to £16million, not including the photographs, notes and sketches.

That’s aside from the fact that between us we had permanently deprived the world of beautiful pieces of work considered by many to be the quintessential British statement pieces of the century. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

But, remember, we’d saved two. The ones that my sister and I had selected and carefully put to one side before the work began. What had happened to those?

In an extra twist of fate, they were also lost. We’d forgotten to take them home that Sunday and the builders who came in to rip out the rest of the building the next day had simply dumped them in a skip and covered them with bricks, thereby destroying the last of Piper’s Maidenhead collection forever.

Officially, there’s no record of John Piper ever staying in that house, though it can be confirmed he lived locally for a period and, on the balance of probabilities, it’s likely it was that very building. One of his surviving photographs displayed at the Tate, for example, is of the Maidenhead Bridge, literally visible from the front windows of the house.

Other photos he took are of buildings within a few minutes’ walk, lending extra credibility to the theory. Whatever the reason for them being left there — something else we will never know — they deserved to be seen by the world.

It took many years for my dad to recover from his decision to burn them, and even now, the mere mention of the artist’s name sends shivers down his spine. Yes, the financial loss was definitely part of it, but my dad became a reasonably wealthy man anyway through the property boom in the years that followed. In reality, I think this was more about the fact that in a final, and somehow fitting, twist, my dad developed an interest in art in his later years.

He was able to buy some nice pieces that still adorn his walls and sometimes I wonder if this is some sort of deep psychological penance for his actions all those years ago. Perhaps, though I doubt if he even knows.

One thing is for sure; none of them are by John Piper.

Love funny, heartwarming, positive or, above all, ‘human’ articles like this? Why not subscribe to ‘Human Stories’ and receive periodic updates in your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time.

The building my dad converted still stands opposite the park next to the river at the end of Ray Mead Road where the Maidenhead Road runs over the bridge and can be seen to this day. Both my dad’s club and the world famous Skindles Hotel are long gone, replaced by housing estates. John Piper’s surviving (!) works can often be viewed at major exhibitions held regularly in the UK and other countries.

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll probably like these too: