Extraordinary letters in the laundry room

Extraordinary letters in the laundry room

One of the greatest collections of historical letters ever amassed has been found in a laundry room. Susannah Morris was called in to examine the hoard after the death of the secretive collector and was astonished to be led not into a library or a safe room but to the basement.

In the laundry room, wedged between a washing machine and a tumble dryer, was a plain metal filing cabinet. Morris, who works for the auction house Christie's, opened it and could not believe her eyes.

Inside was the most remarkable collection of letters she had seen outside a national institution: a love letter by Napoloen; a diplomatic note to the king of France in the hand of Elizabeth I; a letter of condolence by John Donne; a tragic account written in 1545 by John Calvin, the theologian of the Reformation, about the suicide of a friend; and a withering letter by Charlotte Bronte on male shortcomings.

As Morris delved through files, where the papers were arranged by size rather than alphabet, date or subject, her eyes grew wider. There was a letter by Beethoven, one by Albert Einstein, by Isaac Newton, Hemingway, Frederick the Great, Darwin, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Pushkin, Monet, Churchill, Gandhi, Defoe, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky. By the time she had finished her first trawl she had counted almost 1,000 letters written by the great monarchs, scientists, authors, painters, philosophers and musicians from the 15th to the 20th century in almost every European language.

After months of research Morris has valued the find, which is to be sold in separate lots at Christie's in London on July 3, at £2 million (Dh14.6 million).

Remarkable collection

She said yesterday: "It was an extraordinary find in such an improbable place. It is a history in miniature of the last 500 years of western civilisation and is the most remarkable collection on the market for a generation or more."

The man who spent half a lifetime putting it together was Albin Schram, who died two years ago. The son of an Austrian industrialist, he was born in Prague 1926 and, after the annexation of Czechoslavakia, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1943.

He was soon wounded and captured by the Russians and thrown into a prisoner of war (PoW) camp in Konigsberg but escaped and made his way on foot through Germany to rejoin his family in Vienna. He worked at the ministry of justice there but later went into banking and moved to Lausanne in Switzerland where he spent the rest of his life.

It was in 1973 when the collecting bug took hold and he made his first purchase, buying a 1795 love letter from Napoleon to his future wife, Josephine, one of just three known to exist from the period when they were engaged. It is fiercely passionate - they had had a quarrel the night before. Christie's have estimated it at £30,000 (Dh219,106) to £50,000 (Dh365,177). Much later Schram bought a letter from Josephine to her brother Eugene, written in 1807 during the build-up to her divorce from the emperor. It is a bitter commentary on her relationship with the Bonaparte family who detested her.

The most valuable item in the collection is Donne's letter of condolence in 1624 to Lady Kingsmill the day after the death of her husband. He says that man should not judge God's actions "although we could direct him to do them better".

Existence

Morris said that Schram never showed his letters to others nor wrote a catalogue of them. Even his family barely knew of their existence.

She said: "He would buy at all the European auction houses. I remember him coming to Christie's sometime ago. He was a white-haired, gentlemanly figure. In the early days he bid under the name Henry. He was marked out by an extremely stubborn bidding style.

"Only two weeks before his death he was handing out the last of a series of wish-lists which contained not only well-known figures as Walt Whitman and, rather oddly, Richard Nixon, but a series of eastern European authors and historical figures whose obscurity would have had the most learned polymath running for his biographical dictionary - Jan Zizka, for example."

Zizka, it transpires, is a Czech national hero from the 15th century.