In the dead of night in August 1976, a man crept around the back of the Camborne Free Library, smashed a window, and climbed up the stairs to the location of Camborne Museum. He forced open one cabinet and smashed another. He took £1600 worth of snuffboxes and disappeared back into the night.

Julia Webb-Harvey, researcher and museum volunteer, continues the Under the Eaves series investigating the origins of our collections. The Museum of Cornish Life absorbed the collections of Camborne Museum in 2005.

The snuffboxes were donated to the Camborne Museum, probably in the 1940s, by the surviving sisters, Emma Jane and Laura Grace Carah, of Reverend Canon John Sims Carah. In the bequest made by his sisters, 61 boxes came to Camborne Museum. The only reference to the theft in the museum’s records was a scrawled note in annotating the margin of the acquisitions register. There were no other documents that came with the collection that cast any more light on it – it is to the newspapers that we have had to go for the story.

In February 1977, two newspapers reported on the theft that had taken place the previous summer. The West Briton and Royal Cornwall Gazette recorded the capture and charging of unemployed Gerald Vincent (39) of 177 Holly Park-estate, Crouch Hill, London. In April 1977 the West Briton reported more details. Vincent had been on holiday, staying in accommodation opposite the library. He had gained access by breaking a window at the rear of the building and taking off with the goods, worth £1,600, including £1,000 for the silver snuffboxes donated by Carah. He later sold the goods in London for £200.

Whether you go back to prison again will depend on you

Vincent was caught at home after being visited by the police on an entirely different matter. Vincent is reported to have said, “I suppose you’ve come about the Camborne job,” when the police hadn’t. Vincent was given a suspended sentence, and a supervision order. The Receiver said to him, “In many ways you are a very pathetic creature… You have been to approved school, Borstal, and prison and when you speak of your home being the one thing you now have in your life, you are probably speaking the truth… You are 39 and you look 50, a lot of which you have brought on yourself. Whether you go back to prison again will depend on you.”

I thought that was the end of the matter – the report in the newspapers had finished the story. Imagine my surprise when I was checking the contents of the Camborne boxes when I unwrapped a snuff box… and then another… and then another. In fact, another 13 emerged from the boxes that had been under the eaves since 2005. I wondered if some of the snuff boxes made their way back to Camborne after the heist of 1976, but they weren’t silver, and mostly in poor repair.

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I wasn’t even sure that I knew what snuff was

At one level I couldn’t believe that I had been chasing the story of snuff boxes in and out of records, archives, and boxes. I wasn’t even sure that I knew what snuff was, and why anyone would offer up a collection of snuff boxes as well as Romano-Jewish antiquities. Snuff boxes are more than vehicles for storing snuff – they were used as canvas for different kinds of art-forms including miniature painting, inlay work and intricate carving. They also became a format for souvenirs of places and events a bit like mugs are today. In this sense the fact it is a ‘snuff’ box in our collection is much less important than their artistic achievement. That wasn’t necessarily true for the original purchaser or recipient, as I refer to later in this article.

Snuff is simply dried tobacco leaves, which often has flavours added to it. It is very finely milled, to a powder. Flavourings are added to give the user different sensations. YouTube is full of people reviewing different brands and flavours of snuff, with comments like, “starchy, with an undercurrent of pasta,” (this is a good thing, apparently). To get an idea of what snuff is like for the uninitiated, I watched a short YouTube clip from the 2014 BBC Television show QI, where they were exploring the letter K, Kendall Snuff Mill. In the clip the panel try snuff. Alan Davies slaps the table repeatedly after he’s taken some. Noel Fielding taps the tin onto his face and manages to get some in his eye. Colin Lane describes it as awful, and that it has the flavour of cat litter.

It’s a wonder that it ever took off as a habit.

Snuff was initially in the nasal territory of the aristocracy, but during the Great Plague of 1665-6 it was touted as a nasal curative, and its popularity increased and diversified. Snuff and chewing tobacco were the most common ways of taking tobacco until the cigarette rolling machine was invented in the 1880s. The way that snuff was transported was in a pocket-sized box.

The dazzling details of these boxes

It is hard to imagine from the thirteen boxes in the museum’s collection that snuff boxes were desirable and collectible, but then the finer ones from Canon Carah were stolen.

The V&A has an extraordinary collection of snuff boxes, the Gilbert Collection alone has 200 exquisite examples. According to the V&A, ‘Gold boxes were among the supreme luxuries of 18th-century Europe. They were presented as gifts to friends and lovers, and by monarchs to ambassadors and courtiers. The boxes also led to the ‘language of the snuffbox’, a phenomenon at European courts where specific gestures involving a box had hidden meanings – a secret code between individuals.’ On a personal level, I love it that these boxes held much more than snuff, they held stories.

This seems to be one of the threads that appealed to the Gilberts. The V&A gives some insight as to why Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert were passionate collectors, writing that they ‘delighted in the dazzling details of these boxes, which tell stories on an astonishingly small scale using precious and exotic materials. As collectors, they enjoyed handling the boxes close-up, and finding out about their previous owners. Their collection of over 200 boxes is one of the most extensive ever formed and includes several magnificent, bejewelled table snuffboxes commissioned by Frederick II, the Great, King of Prussia.’

The fact that there were many boxes in circulation from the 18th century onwards made from different materials and inlays coming in different shapes and sizes make them intriguing to a collector. They were objects on display in society, they were carried in pockets, they were given as gifts. So, as collectibles, they are small and relatively inexpensive, quite easy to find, and they represent a connection to a different era.

Whatever the reason that Canon Carah had for making his collection of snuffboxes, the theft in the 1970s and the trail through records, boxes and objects has left us with a puzzle to solve at the museum and ultimately an interesting story to tell.

Julia Webb-Harvey
Volunteer Researcher