London, March 5: A treasure of jewels and gold coins, which most likely belong to English crime writer Agatha Christie, have been discovered in a battered old trunk bought for £100 at an auction.
AGE CORRESPONDENT
A Christie fan, Jennifer Grant, found a black crocheted bag containing 35 gold sovereigns and 17 half-sovereigns, a diamond mounted platinum ring and a diamond buckle-shaped brooch in a locked box inside the trunk.Ms Grant had bought the trunk in September 2006 at the sale of the contents of Greenway, the crime writer’s former home in Devon, after the death of her daughter Rosalind Hicks. The sale was by the auctioneers Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood.
Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard, who is her only grandchild, had found 27 half-hour-long tapes of her recordings in a dusty cardboard box as he cleaned out a storeroom her former house in Greenway in 2008.
"When I received it, I realised it contained a locked strongbox and the auctioneer had no knowledge of a key. It was a talking point at dinner parties for years but I never thought there might be anything in it," Ms Grant told the Homes and Antiques magazine, whom she approached after discovering the contents of the trunk. "For a long time, I dreamt about what might be inside but I never really believed anything would be. It was my cousin Vera who finally convinced me to open it," she added.
The link of the treasure trove to Christie seems to be strong: The trunk has the initials CMM engraved on it — Christie’s mother was called Clara Margaret Miller. In her autobiography, Christie has written that her mother’s valuable jewellery consisted of "diamond buckle, diamond crescent and diamond engagement ring".
The treasure has been valued at over £12,500, without taking the Christie links into account. "With the Christie family connection, who knows what they could go for? In all my years in this business, this is the most amazing story I have ever come across," jewellery specialist John Benjamin told Homes and Antiques, which revealed the story in its latest edition.
Prichard said that he would be interested in buying if these jewels came on the market.
Christie, famous for creating detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, has sold an estimated one billion copies of her novels in English and another billion in 103 other languages. Born at Torquay in Devon on September 15, 1890, Christie spent much of her life in the seaside town and died in 1976. She wrote 80 detective novels and short story collections along with numerous plays and romantic novels.