Feature: Wellcome's collector
17 December 2009
A suave and well-connected ex-army officer, Peter Johnston-Saint (above) was one of Henry Wellcome's most trusted collecting agents. In his role as Foreign Secretary for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum between 1927 and 1935 he travelled all over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Saint bought thousands of manuscripts, books and artefacts for Wellcome. Amongst his acquisitions were Turkish shoes made from an old motor tyre, an eighteenth century boot-shaped bath equipped with a furnace (used by a French doctor who suffered from leprosy), the doorway to a school for training Buddhist monks as doctors in Lhasa, an account of King Louis XIV's last illness written by one of his doctors at Versailles, and a single hair from the head of St Catherine of Siena held in a small piece of paper sealed with a cardinal's seal.
Saint was the perfect ambassador. He had a wide social circle, but he was not a pretentious man. He was equally happy talking to the King of Spain, whose wife he had known since childhood, or drinking with locals in a remote tavern in the Sicilian mountains in the company of "goats, fowls and diminutive asses". (Each of these encounters, incidentally, yielded new accessions for the Museum to Wellcome's great satisfaction.)
Johnston-Saint's travel reports are littered with the names of European politicians and members of the aristocracy. Spanish dukes and duchesses, Italian cardinals, Indian maharajahs and French princes all grace the pages of his diaries, but he could also find himself in rather unsavoury quarters.
At Lisieux, in Normandy, where pilgrims worshipped at the Shrine of Saint Teresa of the Infant Jesus, he found a house that "was occupied by a sort of dealer in junk and odds and ends", but he did not stay long, "because the stench was so dreadful. A dreadful old woman with whiskers came to see what I wanted, and assuredly she did not add to the relief of the situation."
One bookshop in Valencia, which he found in March 1928, was in fact "a junk shop of the first order."
"It was in a narrow dirty street and it was lighted by one gas jet. The proprietor was reclining in a broken wicker chair smoking the stump of a cigar. All around him in the small room, some 12' x 10' were piles of rubbish, loose leaves, pamphlets, vellum bound books and such like which you had to walk on indiscriminately."
Here, Saint unearthed medical books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that were virtually impossible to find in Spain. He purchased about 150 titles there and then.
"It has always been a matter of surprise to me," Saint wrote, "to find that in some squalid ramshackle shop which resembles more a go-down than a shop, the owner produces most wonderful objects - jewels worth many thousands and objects of art of great beauty and value."
In 1934 Saint was promoted to Conservator of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, a post he held until his retirement in 1947. He was one of the last people to have talked to Wellcome before he died in 1936. Saint's constancy, his diligence, and his delight in artefacts of all kinds must have left little doubt in Wellcome's mind that his great collection was in safe hands.
Image: Henry Wellcome (left) and Johnston-Saint.
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