The artful codgers: Pensioners who conned British museums with £10m forgeries

 Add your view

A talented artist who masterminded Britain's biggest art and antiquities fraud with the help of his elderly parents has been jailed for almost five years.

Shaun Greenhalgh, 47, faked paintings, sculptures and artefacts worth up to £10million in the garden shed of the council house in Bolton he shared with his 84-year-old father, George and mother, Olive, 83.

In total, the conspiracy secured them around £850,000, although experts estimated that they could have earned as much as £10million had all their creations gone to sale.

Scroll down for more...

Fraudsters: The artful codgers, Shaun, George and Olive arrive at Bolton Crown Court for sentencing

Shaun Greenhalgh, who created the works of art from rare stone and replica metal and glass, was sentenced at Bolton Crown Court to four years and eight months. His mother was given a 12-month suspended sentence.

George Greenhalgh, salesman for the conspiracy, cut a frail figure yesterday and the judge deferred his sentence for medical reports. All three had admitted conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to conceal proceeds of a sale.

Here, we chronicle the unlikely saga of the garden shed gang...

As far as their neighbours were concerned, Olive Greenhalgh and her wheelchair-bound husband, George, were much like any other elderly couple, living out their years quietly in their council house.

Scroll down for more...

The Bolton trio of fraudsters: Shaun Greenhalgh jnr, his father George and mother Olive

But behind the door of their shabby terrace home, the unassuming pair were masterminding Britain's biggest conspiracy of fake art and antiquities worth a staggering £10million.

From their garden shed, the couple, together with their son, Shaun Greenhalgh, 47, ran a cottage industry in forged sculptures, paintings and ancient artefacts for almost two decades.

Using elaborate cover stories, thought up after painstaking art history research, the family, who lived off state benefits, fooled experts across the world into believing that they had inherited valuable and famous works.

The fakes, many of them ancient or missing pieces lost to history, included paintings by LS Lowry, SJ Peploe and sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

Their emergence generated much excitement in the art world.

Scroll down for more...

This forged Assyrian relief featured that spelling mistake that led to the Greenhalghs' downfall

Created by Greenhalgh Jnr, a talented artist, they were sold by his 84-year-old father.

He persuaded experts from some of the country's most famous museums, such as the British Museum and the Tate Modern, as well as auction houses Bonhams, Christie's and Sotheby's, into paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for them.

By far their most audacious and successful con was recreating a 3,300-year- old Egyptian statue called the Armarna Princess, which they sold to the Bolton Museum for almost £440,000 in 2003.

One of the several forged Lowrys

The fake marble bust, largely paid for by the taxpayer via a Government grant, was so convincing it was on display for three years and seen by thousands of tourists before anyone realised it was a fake.

The fraudsters, who have no background in art, were only rumbled when they presented three seventh-century BC Assyrian stone reliefs worth £500,000 to the British Museum in 2005.

An expert noticed that there was a spelling mistake in the ancient writing and called in police.

By then the trio had secured as much as £850,000 over 17 years.

However, they were not seduced by any trappings of their wealth, instead choosing to stay in their council house in Bolton.

Detectives from Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Unit, who raided the couple's address in March last year, discovered scores of sculptures, paintings and artefacts hidden in wardrobes, under their bed and in the garden shed.

Officers also recovered specialist stone, including marble, black limestone, sandstone and alabaster, and reproduction Roman glass and precious gold and silver, which Greenhalgh Jnr used to create the forgeries.

A sculpture, supposedly by Barbara Hepworth

Although officers recovered 20 items, they believe there could be as many as 100 fakes worldwide in the hands of unsuspecting art lovers.

If genuine, all the items they made would be worth £10million.

On his arrest Greenhalgh Jnr, who created most of his fakes from pictures in art books, boasted he could knock out a copy of a Thomas Moran - an American watercolour artist, who was born in Bolton - in half an hour.

He sold at least six or seven for around £10,000 each, claiming a former mayor of Bolton had given them to an ancestor who worked for him as a cleaner.

Bolton Crown Court heard that the conspiracy began in the autumn of 1989 when Greenhalgh Snr tried to con experts at Manchester University into believing a small silver vessel, containing a piece of wood - which he claimed to have found in a park in Preston - was in fact a missing Anglo Saxon artefact, known as the Eadred Reliquery.

He claimed the vessel dated back to the 10th century and that the wood inside was part of the "True Cross" from Jerusalem.

Although it was examined and found to be a fake, experts were divided on the authenticity of the wood and it was eventually sold for £100.

Despite the small profit, the family were undeterred.

It was the beginning of a 17-year con, in which they approached dozens of museums and auctioneers in the UK.

If one museum dismissed a work as a fake, they would try another.

In 1991, the Greenhalghs claimed to have discovered the Risley Park Lanx, a silver Roman plate worth £1million.

The fake Armana Princess, which made £440,000

Fragments of it had been dug up in 1729 and then disappeared. But the family said they had found them and welded them together.

It was eventually sold to two wealthy Americans for £100,000 who donated it to the British Museum and where it was on display until the forgery was uncovered.

The family went on to successfully sell two busts, including one of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, purportedly by the sculptor Horatio Greenough, through Sotheby's for £160,000, as well as a missing Barbara Hepworth terra-cotta goose, to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, for £3,000.

Greenhalgh Snr also tried to con the Tate Modern, London, into buying a carved stone head which he claimed his grandmother had said: "was by a chap called Moore who became famous".

The Greenhalghs also forged a clutch of paintings by Lowry.

They copied letters from the artist they found in archives, inserted their own names and claimed to be great friends of his.

Olive Greenhalgh, 83, told buyers that Lowry had given them to her as a gift on her 21st birthday.

Although the Lowry Museum realised one work, called the Meeting House, was a fake, the family eventually managed to sell it for a few thousand.

It ended up in a Kent auction house with an asking price of £70,000.

However, in 1999 the Greenhalghs embarked on their most daring forgery - the Armarna Princess.

To make their ruse appear genuine, the family bought a catalogue for an antiques sale in 1892 which detailed the contents of Silverton Park, the stately home of the 4th Earl of Egremont, a well known collector of Egyptian artefacts.

The Armarna Princess, a 20-inch statue of the daughter of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti, the mother of King Tutankhamun, was among the items listed for sale.

Scroll down for more...

The 'Roman' plate known as the Risley Park Lanx

Greenhalgh Jnr set about carefully crafting the sculpture, using basic DIY tools and making it look old by coating it in a mixture of tea and clay.

When arrested, he said he had "knocked it up" in three weeks.

His father meanwhile set about conning the Bolton Museum.

Appearing innocent, he inquired whether the artefact, which he claimed had been in his family for 100 years, was worth the £500 he had been advised and said he was thinking about using it as a garden ornament.

Experts at the British Museum and Christie's who examined the statue could not believe their find.

Assuming Greenhalgh Snr was a "nice old man who had no idea of the significance of what he owned", they told him he had a very valuable piece they wanted to buy for £440,000.

Of course, Greenhalgh Snr gladly took the cash.

But, by then, their time was running out.

In November 2005 the family tried to sell three marble stone reliefs, apparently worth around £300,000, purportedly from the Assyrian Palace of Sennacherib and dating back to 681BC, to the British Museum.

Greenhalgh Snr claimed they had been in his family since childhood.

But the relief, which showed a soldier and horses, had a cuneiform inscription.

The hieroglyphic-style writing, experts noted, had the sign KI, which lacked a single diagonal wedge at the top.

They said such a mistake would never have been permitted on a piece destined for the eyes of the king.

 

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter