A museum gives back what it never should have taken

The crate left the loading bay at six in the morning, which is the hour museums choose when they would rather a thing happened without a photograph of it happening.

Inside were nine hundred objects, catalogued in 1897 by a man who described the acquisition, in his own hand, as "taken".

Eleven years

The claim was filed in 2015 and refused. It was refiled, and refused. The archivist who eventually found the acquisition ledger was not looking for it; she was checking a date on an unrelated bequest, and there it was, in a box that had been mis-shelved for sixty years.

The paperwork was never lost. It was simply never looked for, which is a different thing and a worse one.

What returns and what does not

Nine hundred objects go home. Four hundred more remain, because their provenance is genuinely unclear, and the museum has for the first time published the list of them — with the gaps marked, rather than filled.

It is not a resolution. It is the first honest catalogue in a hundred and twenty-eight years.