APRIL
FOOL'S DAY 1992
Friday
morning, in broad daylight, on the third of April, a minibus pulls up
in leafy Lincolnshire outside the house of an art collector. Eight
men jump out of the vehicle. They're head to foot in black. One of
them is carrying a package under his right arm. As they approach the
front door of the eighteenth century mansion, the van they arrive in
drives away and parks out of sight, at the side of the
house.
There's this one picture on a wall of our local pub
that stands out like a sore thumb. Most people assume it's a print
and hardly give it a second glance. It certainly looks like it could
be a scene from the Manchester Ship Canal, and the foreground of the
piece has Lowry's trademark matchstick men and women, but the truth
of the matter is that no one really knows if it is actually a Lowry
print or something by another artist after the manner of his iconic
style.
When Saturday came, and Boston United played Altrincham
FC in the GM Vauxhall Conference League, exactly nine hundred people
attended the game, including nine Manchester lads from the Acrobat
crew, who had jibbed in, good style, both under and over the
turnstiles. I for one, thought they would have been better off
walking a few hundred yards up Claremont Road to see Man City beat
Leeds United four nil at Maine Road like most of the blokes in this
pub did.
But there you go, they had their own agenda and they
were sticking to it. The Acrobats, who for reasons best known to
themselves, always dressed in black, reputedly went on a two day
bender around Lincolnshire. However, I suspect that part of the jolly
was to do a little reconnaissance work for the mission that suited
the true purpose of their extra long weekend away.
Of course
some of us knew what the picture really was, and almost exactly how
long it had been hanging on the pub wall. I (along with others)
remember the day that it went missing. It was the first of April
nineteen ninety two. Shakespeare's Sister were at number one in the
UK charts, and the
hostelry was extremely busy. Then, when the
picture amazingly reappeared, the following Sunday, one of the
regulars suggested that it had been stolen for a joke, a prank,
perhaps, by someone from another pub.
There
it was, hanging in its usual place on the wall at one end of the bar.
There was no visible damage to the artwork or the glass, or the
frame. In fact, if anything, the colours looked brighter and the
images appeared to be clearer now than ever before. Then there were
those of us who knew different, not to mention a certain gang of lads
who travel up and down the country to supposedly watch a game of
football anywhere they can and to cause a bit of mayhem and to drink
a shed full of beer in the process.
They say that they
actually support City, because they started off as 'Mind yer car
mister?' kids whenever the blues were playing at home. However, these
days they only go to watch the Cityzens when they play away from
Maine Road. Therefore, when City play at home and a different local
side is playing away against another club, even at the other end of
the country, if it suits their purposes, that is where you'll find
them.
So on April Fools Day that year, the afore mentioned
'City fans' just happened to stroll into my local pub, as they
sometimes did, for an afternoon snifter. That was of course, the very
same day that the framed picture disappeared. Rumour had it that this
gang were planning a long weekend trip to watch Altrincham FC play
away from home against Boston United. Most of the local gangs, in
those days, continued the Victorian tradition of naming themselves
after the streets where they lived, like the Scuttler gang the
'Bengal Tigers' from Bengal Street in Ancoats, and the 'Beach Boys'
better known as 'The Beech' who hailed from Beech Road. Those of us
who knew the Acrobat crew, also knew that they were from the flats
near the old shopping precinct.
No one could possibly
foretell, that a bunch of drunken Mancunians would be arriving in the
city of Lincoln in the early hours of Thursday morning, for a mammoth
pub crawl on their way, supposedly, to Boston for a football match on
the Saturday. Also, that somewhere, carefully wrapped up, and
concealed inside a black hooded sweat shirt, they had brought with
them an inexpensive, but adequately framed Lowry pub print.
Once
inside the house, the Acrobats set to work, being careful not to
touch or disturb any of the numerous works of art in the priceless
collection. They searched for and soon found the piece they were
looking for, it was known as 'Northern River Scene' but was actually
a Lowry painting of the Fosdyke Canal in Lincoln which had been
bought the previous year, at auction, for a significant wad of cash.
One
of the Acrobats lifted it from the wall and laid it face down on the
art dealer's billiard table. Then, taking a Swiss Army knife, he
expertly opened up the frame and liberated the original artwork,
quickly doing the same thing to the print they had brought with them
and swapping the two, fastening up the cheap pub print inside the
expensive frame with all the letters of provenance and art dealers'
marks stamped on the back. He offered it up, and repositioned it,
carefully, in the very same place on the art connoisseur's
wall.
Exactly seven and a half minutes after their arrival,
the Acrobats were seen driving away in a minibus with cloned number
plates. And oh yes, the original Lowry painting, which has been
innocently hanging in our local boozer ever since, is now worth
several hundred thousand pounds. As for the inexpensive print that
previously hung on the pub wall, well, it sold to a private collector
nine years and two months later, for £443,750, on the eighth of June
two thousand and one, at Christie's auction house.
And
just for the record, in April nineteen ninety two, Boston beat
Altrincham, by two goals to one, on Saturday the fourth. The official
attendance was eight hundred and ninety one, but if you know, you
know. That's that, end of story, nothing more to say... Or is there?
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