Shaun Greenhalgh - Family Roles

Family Roles

Shaun Greenhalgh was the artist, but the whole family was involved in "the garden shed gang". They established an elaborate cottage industry at his parents' house in The Crescent, Bromley Cross, South Turton, which is about 3.5 miles (6 km) north of Bolton town centre. His parents, George and Olive, approached clients, while his older brother, George jnr, managed the money. Other members of the family were invoked to help establish the legitimacy of the various items. These included Olive's father who owned an art gallery, a great-grandfather who it seemed had had the foresight to buy well at auctions, and an ancestor who had apparently worked for the Mayor of Bolton as a cleaner and was gifted a Moran painting.

Shaun Greenhalgh left school at 16 with no qualifications. A self-taught artist, undoubtedly influenced by his job as an antiques dealer, he worked up his forgeries from sketches, photographs, art books and catalogues. He attempted a wide range of crafts, from painting in pastels and watercolours, to sketches, and sculpture, both modern and ancient, busts and statues, to bas-relief and metalwork. He invested in a vast range of different materials - silver, stone, marble, rare stone, replica metal, and glass. He also did meticulous research to authenticate his items with histories and provenance (for instance, faking letters from the supposed artists) in order to demonstrate his ownership. Completed items were then stored about the house and garden shed. The latter probably served as a workshop as well.

A quote from an amazed Scotland Yard detective who searched the house gives a sense of Greenhalgh's industry:

A next-door neighbour recalled: "I was finding bits of pottery and coins around the edges of the garden over 20 years back - bits of metal with old kings on." While this sounds like materials were openly displayed, it was perhaps not quite that obvious. Angela Thomas, a curator from the Bolton Museum, actually visited the family at home prior to the purchase of the Amarna Princess and reported nothing untoward.

Yet for all his daring – he once boasted that he could knock up a Moran watercolour in half an hour and claimed to have completed an Amarna statue in three weeks – Shaun Greenhalgh needed the help of his parents. At the trial it was said by the lawyer, Brian McKenna, that his mother, Olive (b. 1925), made the phonecalls "because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone."

Olive may have been a peripheral figure, but Shaun's father, George (b. 1923), was more involved. He was the frontman who met face-to-face with potential buyers. "He looks honest, he's elderly and he shows up in a wheelchair." George clearly embraced his role. On one occasion, trying to interest the Bolton Museum in an Amarna princess, an ancient Egyptian statuette about the size of a gnome, he told them he was "thinking about using it as a garden ornament".

The parents were perhaps most important because they helped establish a logical explanation for why the Greenhalghs had possession of such items in the first place, namely as family heirlooms. It even allowed them to offload items when they were discovered as fakes, such as the "Eadred Reliquary", and an L. S. Lowry painting The Meeting House.