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There was travel. 

And then there was collecting.

Wellcome had a dream, a grand ambition with his collecting. It was to;
Gentleman collectors in the Victorian era were ten a half penny but the way Wellcome went about collecting was something entirely different: it was industrial.
Partly this was born of his innate curiosity. Partly his American drive that had taken him from a wood cabin in frontier country to a multi-millionaire living within the fashionable London set. But mostly it was driven by the huge resources he had at his disposal.

Reading about Wellcome’s collection is jaw dropping and ultimately a little dispiriting. How was I to find a record of my little phallus in this lot? To give you some idea of just how much Wellcome collected you need only know that they measured it by the ton.

There was 3 and a half tons of swords, five tons of photograph albums, 2 and half tons of guns and cannons and shields.
There were 110 cases of Graeco-Roman objects.
In all a million plus objects made up Wellcome’s collection. Somewhere in this million was my little phallus.

Though Henry Wellcome travelled extensively seeking objects for his museum (Much to the disgust of his wife Syrie “Ever since our marriage, the greater part of our time has been spent in places I detested collecting curios” - they later divorced) he did not take sole responsibility for acquiring objects for his museum. He did have a company to run after all, but also because he recognised that his presence at auctions was likely to push the price up of his desired object. To overcome this he was known to effect disguises, as he told a friend:
Alongside his own undercover missions he also employed a team of agents to travel the globe to find suitable objects for his museum. A bit of internet research brought me to one Captain Johnston Saint, one of Wellcome’s agents who undertook a tour of Europe on behalf of Wellcome. I wondered if he might be the man who purchased my little white phallus. I wondered how I might find out whether he was.


The Captain

Peter Johnston Saint. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection

Peter Johnston Saint was born in 1886. He had served in both the Royal Flying Corp and the Indian Army. Well connected, (one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters was a childhood friend), he adored socialising, travel and fast cars.
He joined the, now named, Wellcome Institute in 1921 and had soon impressed Henry Wellcome. Within a very short time he was given the title of Foreign Secretary. The sole purpose of this role was to travel and buy up objects suitable for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. It was a job Johnston Saint was well suited to involving, as it did, much hobnobbing with Ambassadors, Cardinals, Directors of key museums and other such notables.
A friendly member of staff at the Wellcome Collection (thank you Ross!) pointed me towards the papers they hold on Peter Johnston Saint. There were letters to Henry Wellcome, reports on his activities as Foreign Secretary and (joy!) his travels diaries.
Somewhere in these diaries I might find my little white phallus. Hoping he had decent handwriting I began to read about Johnston Saint's trip to Italy. (click on the link if you too want a read).


Johnston Saint began his Italian quest on Saturday 19th January 1929:

His diary is an interesting insight into how objects were sourced and brought for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Some of the work involves making contact with the right people. Such as on Monday 21st January when Johnston Saint meets with Cardinale Gasquet, the Prefect of the Vatican archives. The Cardinal is presented with a gift:
Johnston Saint also meets with the Ambassador and secures a letter of introduction to the Heads of Italian Museums. But alongside hobnobbing with Directors, Ambassadors and Cardinals, Johnston Saint spends a great deal of time browsing through the small shops of Rome:


I thought for a moment that within those 99 phallic objects might be my phallus but as Johnston Saint drily records:
He did not purchase them.

But later that same day he is to be found in further small establishments:
To put this in some context the average annual wage in 1929 was £200 per year. Johnston Saint spent £25 in a single day and this compared to some days was a low amount. Later this same week he spends £64 on a single drawing. Henry Wellcome's pocket was swimming pool sized, however, as we have seen Johnston Saint is very much using his own judgement on artefacts. Several he rejects as inadequate or over priced but not:

A Priapus from Pompeii. Not the one JS purchased. Attributed to Aaron Wolpert

The baths of Caracalla have him recording wistfully:


Bad weather might have prevented the work that day but work did continue and these massive ships were eventually exposed.

The now lost pleasure barge of Caligula. Look at the man to the left to see the huge awesome scale of this boat.

Sadly they were destroyed during the second world war. All that is left of them is a few artefacts recovered and displayed in Rome’s National Museum and photographs that show the epic scale of these ships. They were truly awe inspiring and to think that Peter Johnston Saint was so close to seeing these epic pleasure barges revealed from the water!








On Tuesday 29th January Johnston Saint reveals that he is leaving for Naples. Would he visit Pompeii? Would he stumble across a certain small white phallus, and hopefully write down that he did? Or did the phallus not come from Pompeii at all? Was it maybe discovered in one of those small shops by the Forum selling phallic objects by the hundreds?
There was only one way to find out. I kept reading.....


Those letters of introduction obtained from the Ambassador come in handy now as they gain him access to the Director of the Naples Archaeological Museum and a very famous cabinet:
It’s probably worth me pointing out, if you hadn’t already gathered, that Wellcome was very much interested in acquiring erotic/sexual material. The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum contained 300 sexually themed Roman objects. They were very much in keeping with his ambition of a museum dedicated to human kind and biology.

Dr Jen Grove of Exeter University has written a very thorough account of the collecting of sexually themed materials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is what she has to say about Wellcome’s collection:


He also collected images and objects outside of this sex/religion theme including materials dealing with the pleasure aspect of intercourse:
This was why Johnston Saint was dutifully examining and purchasing statues of Priapus and other phallic related materials. Although Johnston Saint cannot purchase anything from the pornographic cabinet he does buy an extensive range of photographs of the objects it contains.

One of Peter Johnston Saint's photographs from his 1929 trip to Rome. Image courtesy Wellcome Collection

The next day on Thursday 31st January Johnston Saint is given a tour of Herculaneum. His mood is greatly different from the interest and excitement at securing his photographs from Pompeii. To see the theatre at Herculaneum he had to walk down through 60 feet of lava (this is still the case today).

He is deeply moved by what he sees. One description he gives is particularly poignant and evocative:

That afternoon after his tour of Herculaneum he’s taken to see a local Hotel Proprietor. The hotelier's estate borders the Pompeii site and he has excavated his own grounds and found some objects he wishes to show off (and sell).   The hotelier had the permission of the Italian Government to offer these objects for sale, but with 50% of the receipts going back to the government. A fact that does not please Johnston Saint, as he notes;


However what the hotelier shows him is so impressive that he cannot hold back the bucks:

Also he buys a votive leg and foot. And records one final item of purchase:

A marble phallus you say? 4 inches long? Bronze wings? And a chain for suspending?
A bit like this one then?





Miraculously I had found it! I had found my phallus! It had been excavated in 1927 by the proprietor of a hotel that stood on the Porta Marina gate into Pompeii. He met Peter Johnston Saint on Thursday 31st January 1929 and showed him his collection of artefacts. Johston Saint purchased several of these objects on behalf of Henry Wellcome, including the phallus.
And that folks, is how my little white phallus ended up in a gallery in London’s Euston Road!



Epilogue


For some reason I feel this piece needs an epilogue. So here it is.

Henry Wellcome and Peter Johnston Saint Courtesy of  Wellcome Collection

Henry Wellcome died in 1936. He left quite a legacy. Not just for his vast collection of curios (of which a very small slice can be viewed today in London’s Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection which stands on Euston Road) but also for science. His will set up a charity named The Wellcome Trust. He wanted the profits from his business to advance medical science.

The company Henry founded with Silas Burroughs went through several incarnations (including Glaxo Wellcome) before it was finally sold off and GlaxoSmithKline one of the largest pharma companies on the planet was formed. The money from this sale was ploughed into the charitable Wellcome Trust. Today the Wellcome Trust has assets worth £20 billion and in 2017 spent £1.1 billion advancing medical science.

And as for that small marble phallus? Well 700,000 people visit the Wellcome Collection each year and let’s assume absolutely all of them stare at that little white phallus and think firstly “Wow” and then secondly “I wonder how it got here?"


Further Reading

I'd highly recommend Frances Larson's "An Infinity of Things: How Henry Wellcome collected the World." if you are at all interested in Henry Wellcome and his mania for collecting. This book gave me much of the material for this article.
Special thanks also to Dr Jen Grove and Ross Macfarlane for their assistance.



L.J. Trafford is the author of the Four Emperors Series set in ancient Rome. She also runs the hashtag #phallusthursday on Twitter, which examines the use of  phallic imagery in ancient art and has a bit of a puerile snigger about it all. 

 Julia might have made some sort of pass at him in their youth but she was as unhappy as he was with this marriage.  She was most probably relieved when Tiberius went off to Germany on campaign, leaving her in Rome. 

Four years after Tiberius ‘ flight from public life Augustus was finally made aware of what had been public knowledge for some years.  The Emperor was devastated and Julia, as the law he’d introduced  dictated, was banished.   

 After Julia was banished, he denied her the use of wine and every form of luxury, and would not allow any man, bond or free, to come near her without his permission,   

Suetonius