Peter Thompson and his grandson James proudly held on to the Fijian war club (totokia) as the BBC television cameramen and host explained the story of the war club to its viewers against the historic and world heritage site backdrop of Fountains Abbey in Northeast England.
The duo appeared on the BBC television show, the Antique Roadshow, which was aired one and a half years ago.
For Peter it was a proud moment because he knew exactly where that war club came from, as he had once served in Fiji as part of the last remnants of the British colonial service there.
He was born in the South Indian city of Madras (now known as Chennai) and with a curriculum vitae reading like a tourist passport, Peter is a well-travelled colonial civil servant and later a consultant in various agriculture associated projects around the world.
He first came across the war club in 1969 while on annual leave with his wife Valerie from his posting in Fiji where he was working as an officer with the Department of Agriculture.
“It was the summer of 1969, we were on home leave from Fiji and renting Raintree Cottage in the village of Romaldkirk. Our landlord Bill Allen, the chief research officer in Fiji and my immediate boss, offered to rent us his house, which was fairly close to both Valerie’s parents in Norton-on-Tees and mine in Rawdon, Leeds,” Peter said.
A chance lunch time visit to the village pub,Rose and Crown, Peter immediately spotted the war club on the wall of the bar and his curiosity too got the better of him.
“The landlord had recently purchased the pub “lock, stock and barrel” and did not know what the object was and was undecided if it would fit into his ideas for the future décor of the bar. Before the end of our holiday we had reached an agreement that if he did decide to sell the club he would give us the first refusal and we even agreed on a price of 15 pounds.
“By 1969 I had lived in Fiji for 10 years and it would be surprising if I could not tell an original war club from those on sale at Suva wharf on a boat day,” Peter said.
Peter returned to England three years later and made it a point to visit the Rose and Crown to see if he was able to make good on the bargain struck in 1969.
“We were next on leave in 1972 and at the first opportunity returned to the Rose and Crown to find that hunting prints and paraphernalia dominated the bar and we were able to buy what we knew to be a very fine example of a Fijian Pineapple War Club — as good, if not better, than any specimen in the Fiji Museum,” Peter said.
He knew that to stumble across an historical piece such as a Fijian war club at the other side of the world might mean something but it was more so of the ties he had with the country that made him buy the war club at the first chance he got.
“In due course we returned to live in England where we installed the war club in pride of place over the mantlepiece at Bramley Cottage. We were keen to find out more, and a useful starting point was Fergus Clunie’s Fijian Weapons and Warfare. “Although generally known as a pineapple war club this is something of a misnomer as this type of club was in use long before the introduction of the pineapple to Fiji,” Peter said.
The description that Clunie gave in his book named the club as the totokia or beaked battle-hammer and describes a similar club in the possession of the Fiji Museum.
“The totokia or beaked battle hammer was probably developed from the i tuki battle hammer, heirloom clubs passed down through the generations in Fijian families, giving it a history of at least several centuries. It was designed to drive or peck a neat hole through the enemy’s skull, the weight of the bulky head being concentrated in the point of the beak or kedi-toki (toki: to peck, i toki: a bird’s beak) These clubs were often carried by chiefs in both life and death and, according to tradition were particularly favoured for murder and in skirmish warfare in thick bush, the heavy head driving the beak through the skull without a long warning swing likely to alert the target or catch on undergrowth. The clubs were also used in open battle to kill wounded enemies, to execute offenders and sometimes to severely beat criminals about the body.”
The name and the use of the war club that Peter derived from Clunie’s book was the only record about the war club he had but he really wanted to find out more about it and how it got to England.
Between the 1970s up until 2006, Peter was finally able to made more inroads in his quest to find out where the club originates from but more importantly, how did it end up in a village pub in the middle of England.
“One of our flights of fancy supposed that it was acquired by Captain Bligh whilst passing through Bligh Water in 1789. On his return to England, perhaps he presented the club to his uncle the Reverend Bligh the rector of Romaldkirk who in turn gave it to the Rose and Crown. Unlikely as he (Captain William Bligh) was being chased by Fijian warriors at the time,” Peter said.
“A more prosaic suggestion when we bought it was that it had been in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle and that at some stage it had been sold off,” he added.
Another chance meeting with his old boss Bill Allen and his wife Rena in 2006 set off another chain of events that eventually led to the confirmed the origin of his war club.
“(We) … discovered that their son Robert works at the Rose and Crown and we suggested that some detective work might be undertaken. Changes of landlord at the pub meant that our find had passed out of local knowledge, however detailed investigations by Rena and son Robert at the Bowes Museum and elsewhere provides us with a very probable provenance.
“The first lead came from a curator at the Museum who suggested that the club might have been part of the Reverend George Brown’s collection of ethnography acquired by the Museum in 1920s. Fortunately the life of George Brown is well documented in three references,” Peter said.
Enter the Rev. George Brown of the London Mission Society who was the head of a mission to the areas of New Britain and New Ireland a group of islands in the late 1800s, some parts of that mission today forms parts of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Rev. Brown’s mission group also included Fijian and Samoan missionaries, some of whom became martyrs after being killed and eaten by cannibals there and it was this point that led Peter to share the story of his war club.
It was during this mission, that Rev Brown took great interest in the local cultures that he spent considerable time collecting war clubs and other cultural artefacts from these groups of islands, including Fiji and Samoa.
After Rev Brown died in 1920, the collection was bought by Bowes Museum, which is near his place of birth.
Peter found out through official records from the Bowes Museum that there were 21 war clubs, a masi beater and nine baskets from Fiji.
Further records revealed that when the collection was first opened to the public in May of 1924, it described some of the Fijian war clubs as, ‘most very fine carved with pineapple heads’.
Another record states that when Rev Brown left Fiji in 1881 after a short visit, it was recorded, ‘They trooped up to Mr Brown’s house bringing pigs fowls, spears clubs and other things which they count valuable’.
It appears, however, that Fiji may not have been Rev Brown’s favourite place in the Pacific as he recorded that, ‘In no other land in these seas were the people more cruel than in Fiji and nowhere did the chiefs yield more despotic power’.
“It is probable that the club was amongst the gifts presented in 1881,” Peter said.
Bowes Museum then sold Rev Brown’s collection to the University of Newcastle in 1950.
“Perhaps the University did not acquire all of artefacts and some, including the club, were sold locally,” Peter asked.
The Rev Brown collection was finally sold in 1986 to the Osaka Museum in Japan for £600,000 and is on display as examples of South Sea artefacts.
It was this tale of Peter’s natural curiosity and personal ties to Fiji that eventually led him to find out more about the war club he is in possession of and onto the BBC’s Antique Roadshow at Fountains Abbey in August 2012.
“We were selected for filming and duly appeared on TV on 30th December 2012, when the War Club was valued at a conservative £8,000,” Peter concluded.
