British Museum admits employee theft of more than 300 artworks in 1990s

He didn’t need a basket to enter the museum’s corridors. In the early 1990s, a British Museum employee, then working in the prints and drawings department, stole more than 300 works of art before selling them on the market. This case, known to the police for around thirty years, was revealed thanks to the book The African Gold Kingdom: Great Britain and the Ashanti Treasure by Barnaby Phillips, which has just been published.

For more than twenty years, this employee ” model “ from the London institution, a certain Nigel Peverett, worked, “assiduously”. His family will describe him as a man “charming but irresponsible”. One day in April 1992, he was seen leaving the museum with his pockets full. Among his loot were 35 prints worth up to £5,000. Enough to alert the police sleuths, who immediately launched a search of his home.

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In his cottage in Kent, investigators got their hands on dozens of works of art. Nigel Peverett was not his first attempt. He had already brought home 169 other prints, the total estimate of which was around $27,000. His modus operandi was quite simple and easily identifiable. He entered the museum with one bag and came out with four. And as he had more than one trick up his sleeve, this strange employee of the British Museum also played the role of fence by reselling a good part of his thefts (150) on the antique market on Portobello Road.

95 works not found

Today, the British museum specifies that at least 95 pieces stolen by Nigel Peverett remain untraceable. In November 1992, after revelations of these internal thefts, efforts were made to recover missing prints. Only 55 of them were able to be repatriated to the museum’s collections. A spokesperson for the British Museum declared in the columns of The Independant what “these events occurred several decades ago and the individual was arrested and prosecuted at the time”.

Nigel Peverett died in 2023. This lover of art and classical music, who was “unable to manage money” according to testimonies from those close to him, suffered from severe depression after the police investigation. He then attempted suicide and was placed in a psychiatric hospital for six weeks.