Blind man claims Hitler paintings are fake - The Pasty sells saffron cakes from Cornwall and Cornish pasties

A blind dealer in Third Reich militaria claims that paintings by Adolf Hitler, which are being offered at a Cornish auction, are fake.

Mikey Hughes, of Mikey Hughes Militaria, argues that the 21 watercolours and sketches by the Third Reich leader are not authentic and that the best thing the auctioneers can do is “pull the auction”. He said: “I wouldn’t even put these so called ‘Hitler’ pictures on my kitchen fridge.”

Suffering from Stickler Syndrome, Mikey fully lost his sight in 1998 but continued to collect and deal artefacts from the Third Reich. He says the paintings, which will be auctioned on 26 September at Jeffery’s auction house, do not comply with the “4 S’s” of authenticity – science, style, signature and source.

After personally speaking to the auctioneer, Ian Morris, Mikey said: “Ian could not explain why the signatures on the paintings, apparently painted within a short space of time, were mostly all different.”

He continued: “Being blind I got somebody to write the signatures from the Jeffery’s paintings on a bit of paper, with my hand gently leaning over theirs. I then got them to write the signatures from paintings that were original and even using this basic technique the differences were immediately apparent.”

Ian also admitted that the last tests carried out to establish the age of the paintings were in 1986 in Belgium suggesting the invalidity of the age assessment, said Mikey.

Understandably the source of the paintings is undisclosed to the public, but Mikey points out that the “Hitler diaries” of the 1980s were also from a secret source, which turned out to be Stuttgart-based forger “Connie Fischer”.

Mikey has been collecting militaria for about 16 years and although he advises collectors to avoid buying the paintings offered at Jeffery’s, he defends the sale of Third Reich collectibles and original Hitler art.

A flood defence project that will increase the capacity of the River Valency has been approved by the North Cornwall District Council.

It is hoped that this scheme will reduce the risk of further flooding since the River Valency burst its banks in August 2004, costing millions of pounds in damage.

The scheme will involve the lowering and widening of the River Valency to increase its capacity. It will also include the demolishment of the 19th Century Lower Bridge and the replacement of it with a larger bridge further downstream.

The Environment Agency said the new defence system would reduce the risk of flooding to a one-in-75-year event.

Construction is expected to begin in October and will be completed in two years.

Cornwall County Council has approved a company’s plans to restart tin extraction at South Crofty tin mine at Pool, near Redruth.

South Crofty was closed in March 1998 as a result of falling prices, ending the county’s 3000-year-old tin-mining tradition.

Baseresult Holdings Limited, who bought the South Crofty site in 2001, hopes to restart tin-mining and create more jobs. The company’s managing director, Kevin Williams, said: “The new South Crofty will not be the South Crofty of eight years ago. It will be a modern, high-tech mine run with the help of computers - it will be a more efficient way of mining tin.”

Before closure in 1998, South Crofty was producing 2,100 tonnes of tin per year. Baseresult plans to double its production to 4,000 tonnes a year by making use of modern technology to cut production costs.

But former miner and county councillor Mark Kaczmarek said that restarting the mine would be difficult. He said: “It’s going to cost at least £30m. That’s a lot of money before you mine one ounce of tin. I don’t believe Baseresult have got the muscle and financial backing to plough that amount of money into it.”

A man who grew up in a Cornish orphanage turned up for work on his 100th birthday - despite being told to take the day off by his boss.

Buster Martin was born in France, but moved to Cornwall as a baby and grew up in a Cornish orphanage until he was 10 - when he moved to London.

He retired as a market worker 3 years ago, but started working again, as a van cleaner, because he became bored.

His colleagues at the Pimlico Plumbers in Lambeth, south London, threw him a surprise party and treated him to a tour of Chelsea’s football stadium.

Mr Martin said he last had a party when he was 21, when he “got as drunk as a Lord”.

Mr Martin woked on Brixton market helping store owners, before joining the army at 15 and serving for 35 years. He got married in 1920 and had 17 children.

He put his longevity down to working, and a daily pint of bitter: “Working keeps me active, that’s the main thing. If you’re active it saves you sitting in a wheelchair.”

Asked how things had changed over the century, he said: “It’s a bit too fast… I’ve never owned a telephone and I never will.”

Colleague Charlie Mullins said: “Buster’s a lot of fun, he’s quite a character who’s got a million stories.”

One hundred of Cornwall’s most vulnerable celtic crosses have recently been identified and fitted with microchips. Grants from a range of organizations, including the Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage are aiding in making the project possible.

The process uses electronic tags and causes no damage to the crosses. A number of crosses have been stolen over the past 20 years in order to feed a growing market for granite artifacts. The microchips are meant to deter criminals from these medieval boundary makers which established a path to the parish church.

“It is sad that protection of this sort should be needed,” said Ann Preston-Jones, senior archaeologist with Cornwall County Council. “As the crosses are monuments of great importance to Cornish identify and often well-loved and cherished by local communities.”

The World Wide Web was published 15 years ago today (6th August 2006) by Tim Berner Lee, an understated British physicist who used to holiday in Cornwall as a child.

Berners-Lee developed the Web, as well as HTML - the language web pages are written in, at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva. Its original purpose was to help scientists from around the world share information.

“I grew up in suburban London,” said Berners-Lee in a 2001 interview, “I felt I had inherited my parent’s love of getting outside into the countryside.

“The whole family really liked to get out a lot, made a point of getting out - you head for the hills when you can’t get out of the smog. We would go down to Cornwall whenever we could.”

Two Cornish villages are competing against one another to try and secure funding for a restoration project of a community landmark, thanks to the BBC programme Restoration Village.

The current series will see historic buildings being saved with Welcombe, near Bideford, aiming to save a farmhouse the same age of the Doomsday Book and Newlyn trying to restore the Trinity Methodist Chapel dating back to the early 19th century.

Lyn Edwards, spokeswoman for the Yarner Trust, said: “It is not just about the buildings. It is about what the Yarner Trust is doing to contribute to a more sustainable lifestyle and the many groups in our community who enjoy these buildings”

Restoration Village will commence in July and viewers of the programme will have the opportunity to vote for the best project to go through to the final, at the end of the series, where viewers votes will determine which project will receive BBC funding.

The National Maritime Museum in Falmouth is due to receive EU funding which will have changes enforced under the Visibility and Accessibility project.

The grant will be used to improve the reception and shop and the interior layout is to be modernised, in an attempt to raise the Museum’s profile. Carrick District Council has granted planning permission and the Objective One scheme has awarded £70,000 to the museum.

Tamsin Loveless, a spokesperson for the Museum, said they “were responding to customer comments.”

Officers at the Museum added: “It will not only be an investment for the place itself, but for the whole of Falmouth,” in a project that is expected to cost £290,000.

Researchers at Oxford university have found the earliest record of the Cornish language while working on ninth-century Anglo-Saxon writings associated with the circle of King Alfred.

Professor Malcolm Godden and Dr Rohini Jayatilaka, from the Oxford English Faculty, stumbled across the words ud rocashaas while deciphering and transcribing thousands of Latin annotations to a ninth-century manuscript of the ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae’ of Boethius.

Professor Godden said: ‘The phrase stood out because it was written in a different hand and is clearly not Latin or Old English. We consulted with colleagues at Jesus College and concluded that the annotation must be in early Welsh or a closely related language. Further study by Professor Patrick Sims-Williams, of the University of Wales, revealed that it may in fact be Cornish.’

The phrase means ‘it [the mind] hated the gloomy places’, referring to a similar comment in the Latin text of Boethius. The mind is imagined as flying up to the stars and looking down on the dark world below.

The discovery casts important light on cultural transmission in the period. The author of the text, Boethius, wrote ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae’ while under sentence of death in Pavia around 525, but the work seems to have remained unknown until it was discovered around 790. Interest then mushroomed, and it eventually became one of the great seminal texts of the Middle Ages. However, there is no trace of its presence or influence in England before the sudden appearance of an ambitious translation and adaptation around 890.

Professor Godden added: ‘The evidence of the manuscript shows that the text was being intensively studied in Britonnic-speaking areas in the late nine century, and suggests that Cornish scholarship may have played an important role in the flourishing of English culture at King Alfred’s court.’

The work was carried out as part of a project on the Alfredian translation, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The researchers are now hoping to build a complete record of early commentary on Boethius and trace its history and its influence on Anglo-Saxon culture.

From: http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/po/news/2005-06/jun/15.shtml