What: Gold necklace taken by Col Sydney Yorke
Where: The British Museum, Great Russell St, Bloomsbury, London WC1B 3DG
Taken by Col Sydney Yorke at British seizure of Magdala, Ethiopia in 1868
The catalogue entry describes a “necklace made of gold”
Detail
Museum number: Af1922,0715.1
Purchased from: Mrs Georgetta Dance
Field Collection by: Col Sydney Yorke
Acquisition date: 1922
What: Silver anklets, ornamented with silver-gilt filigree, bought for £6 from Major Holland
Where: The Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL
The catalogue entry reads: “Silver, ornamented with silver-gilt filigree. Abyssinian. Price £6.0.0 the pair. Purchased from Major Holland. Date of receipt from stores 26th April 1869…
“The vendor may have been Major Trevenen James Holland who, with a military colleague, Sir Henry Montague Hozier, provided the only official account of the expedition on the orders of the Secretary of State for War. Their Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia was published in two volumes in 1870.”
Museum number:
1728-1869
What: A silver necklace with cylinders and conical pendants
Where: King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum, Market Square, Lancaster, LA1 1HT
The museum entry has a picture and reads: “Silver ornamental necklace”
Accession Number: KO0229/07
What: A necklace of silver and glass beads threaded onto blue silk cord, worn by Prince Alamayu. He was photographed and painted many times wearing it.
Where: The British Museum, Great Russell St, Bloomsbury, London WC1B 3DG
Photo: The British Museum charges people to reproduce images of things in its collection, even plundered things. My budget won’t stretch that far, so you’ll have to go to the museum website to see the necklace as it looks today – britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1912-0410-7
Here are some of the photos and pictures of Alamayu wearing it – two in Ethiopia soon after the Battle of Maqdala, one on Malta and the rest soon after his arrival in Britain in 1868.
There it is on the British Museum website, that necklace, the one Alamayu wore in the first photograph the Royal Engineers took of him when he was still reeling from the shock of war. You can see him wearing it again and again in the black-and-white engravings and the staged studio photographs on his rush out of Ethiopia and his first years in Britain.
It is still a jolt to see it today, in three dimensions, in colour, like the jolt when the colour floods into the old First World War footage in Peter Jackson’s documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old, something
out of distant history shifting into present reality.
Twenty-three teardrop or shell-shaped silver pendants, separated by bright red and white glass beads and threaded onto a blue silk cord. What had once been an emblem of rank for Dejazmatch Alamayu must have become something much more personal, something of home to hold on to as the world kept shifting from Ethiopia, to Britain, to India, back to Britain. He may have got a bit more tired of it as photographers kept insisting on him wearing it, even over his Western clothes.
It became a prop, a shorthand for the exotic, and disappeared from his portraits as he got older. The necklace ended up with Speedy – something of Alamayu for him to hold on to.
Details:
The British Museum catalogue entry describes a “necklace of silver and glass beads threaded onto blue silk cord, previously owned by Prince Alamayu , Son of Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia”.
Museum number: Af1912,0410.7
Donated by: Mrs Cornelia Mary Speedy
Field Collection by: Capt Tristram C S Speedy
Acquisition date: 1912
What: Silver necklace of two bands of 8 thin silver chains, said to belong to Queen Terunesh, Alemayehu’s mother
Where: The Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL
The Accessions Register reads: ‘Neck ornament. Silver plaques with cord ornament connected by eight minute chains, belonging formerly to the Queen of Abyssinia. Abyssinian. Given by the Secretary of State for India. April 28th 1869’.
See ‘Set of Articles of Deceased Queen of Abyssinia’ and related correspondence in British Library collections at IOR R/20/AIA/503.
Displayed in “V and A Africa: Exploring Hidden Histories”
15th November 2012- 3rd February 2013
Museum number: 405-1869
What: A bunch of 31 silver and gilt bells strung onto a wire, said to have belonged to Ethiopia’s Queen Terunesh
Where: The Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL
The catalogue entry says the bells were “formerly in the possession of Queen Woyzaro Terunesh, second wife of the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II (Theodore) and mother of the prince Alamayou … Given by the Secretary of State for India. April 28th 1869.”
See ‘Set of Articles of Deceased Queen of Abyssinia’ and related correspondence in British Library collections at IOR R/20/AIA/503.
Museum number:
412-1869