Furniture in the Dock: The Shrager-Dighton Trial of 1923.

This application seeks to secure research leave in order to complete a monograph on a piece of research that I have been working on since early 2007. This research focuses on a 1044 page manuscript produced after the 1923 Shrager-Dighton trial which is currently on long-loan to David Beevers at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. There was only ever one copy of the trial manuscript produced, on the orders of Percy Macquoid after the trial was complete and no significant work has ever been completed on it to either map its contents or explore its significance for furniture history and for the development of the market in furniture in the early twentieth century.
In 1922, Adolphe Shrager, having made significant sums of money during the First World War, decided to furnish a house he had bought in Westgate on Sea. Not being an expert on furniture himself, he was directed to the London dealer Basil Dighton, who sold him about five hundred items. On obtaining a valuation of one of these pieces shortly afterwards, Shrager was horrified to find that, having been purchased as an antique, it was judged of recent construction. On consultation, Herbert Cescinsky, a furniture maker and the author of a number of key texts on furniture history, endorsed this view, declaring the objects as both fake and grossly over-priced, leading to a writ being issued against Dighton and his company, citing the furniture as 'altered and made up and spurious'. The trial, heard at the Official Referee's Court in January and February 1923, and the subsequent appeal in July, has become a cause celebre in furniture history, featuring, on one side, Shrager and Cescinsky and on the other, Dighton and his expert, Percy Macquoid. Macquoid and Cescinsky were two of the founding fathers of the discipline of furniture history, which was beginning to blossom in the early twentieth century from its roots in the pattern books of the late eighteenth century.
The case demands that we ask questions about the writing of furniture history and its links to the sale rooms, where objects provided with provenance by the history books began to fetch huge prices in the auction house in the 1920s. The fact that Shrager lost both the first trial and the appeal, despite demonstrating on numerous occasions that he had a clear case against Dighton also raises questions about issues of race and class, where the establishment, in the form of the English gentleman dealer of 'seemingly impeccable social credentials', backed up by the Marlborough educated, well-married Macquoid, closed ranks against Shrager, a Jew, presented by the opposition as a war profiteer, supported by Cescinsky, the journeyman cabinet maker.