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My Internet sales and marketing campaigns are aimed at fairly comfortably off house holders and business people, who live in London and the Home Counties, that are located south of The River Thames. Why? Because that is where I started marketing web based packages in 1997 and that market, is the market which I know far better than any other. It is my “stamping ground.”
I was absolutely thrilled to be the first applicant who was selected to work for Arthema, a large fine art auction house and information web site, which was was heralded by them, as unrivalled in the marketplace. They assured me, that they would be rated just below Sotherby’s and Christies as soon as their sales campaign was launched and the two main search engines of the time (Yahoo and Alta Vista) added their links. They were convinced that e-bay was not in the running and that they would take the number three position very soon. I worked for Athema for for four months before they announced that the site was closing and the sales teams’ commissions were forfeit. The financial backing for Arthema was not small change. They had smart newly built offices in Cirencester, one of the most excusive British Market Towns and one of their financial backers was a member of The Danish Royal Family, another was a very well known French aristocrat with wealth, wine cellars, property and influence. E-bay looked like small fish in comparison to Arthema in 1997. I will never forget telling my customers that e-bay was insignificant and would fold within three months. I cringe when I remember that.
Athema’s free lance consultants set off to introduce the enterprise to the public and we discussed the responses among ourselves. Nobody wanted to tell the directors that they had got their marketing policy completely wrong. Local people were not interested in services for the elite members of society. The established and wealthy antique dealers already traded on the old boy network and they has no intention of wasting valuable time or money testing some new fangled, web based machine for Arthema’s profit rather than their own. Guess which one of us was the first to pass this news on to the Managing Director?
We pointed out the fact that some, who showed interest were dealers with specialist knowledge, those whom we now describe as being into niche products. There were others who said they would use the service, if it encompassed small communities who congregated together in locations, mainly the well known London antique village communities. The big news was that the majority wanted Athema to teach them how they could sell their own products on their own web sites. This was what the majority wanted in 1997 and still want today.
Arthema compromised one one issue, after I introduced John Worsley to them. He lived in Putney and I knocked on his studio door. He was prepared to spend £100 to put a few of his paintings in their auction and give a web site a chance of selling one. At that stage Arthema would not accept the work of living artists. They were on the point of refunding John Worsley’s money, when one of the senior staff latched on to who he was. John Worsley was one of the two British artists who were commissioned as World War Two artists. The commission from the British Government, was to paint war at sea as it was happening. John Worsley’s adventures, paintings and exploits had made me gasp and I thought that all online artistic communities should know more about this amazing, down to earth English man. I made this point to Arthema and they listened.
John Worsley started painting the stokers at work in the engine room on his first ship. His fascination with the Liverpudlian stokers who worked in temperature that the human should not have been able to endure, lasted for the rest of his life. He had more respect for these men than most of the senior officers, whose portraits he was commissioned to paint after the war. He was assigned to two ships that were sunk by German U-boats. He was one of the last on to the life rafts, as he wanted to portray the reaction of the men in an unprecedented situation. His life raft was picked up by a British ship on the first occasion but he was not so lucky the second time. He was rescued by a German Navy vessel and handed over to the Gestapo, as they did not believe he was an artist and they thought he must be a spy. He was tortured by the Gestapo but he was not a spy, so he could not tell them anything. His self preservation instincts took over and he asked for a pencil and paper to prove that he was speaking the truth. A picture did not come to mind but his instincts (possibly genetic memory) took over and he started drawing porn which his brutish torturers loved. They kept him alive and well fed so that they got more samples of his work every day. He convinced the Gestapo, that he was not a spy and was eventually sent to a normal POW camp with the other survivors. He spent most of the war in captivity where he drew everything that he witnessed going on around him on whatever materials he could find. A lot of his work has been preserved for posterity and it can be seen in various museums including the Imperial War Museum in London.
John Worsley’s most famous exploit was made into a film after the war. He managed to create a life size papier mache male figure, whom he nicknamed Albert RN. When the committee orchestrated an escape, the men carried “Albert” out and lined him up for roll call. He was so life like, that the Germans were taken in. They did not notice that Albert was a dummy and they had been hoodwinked for several days. When they did realise that there was a man missing, it was too late for them to find him.
When the camps were liberated John Worsley returned to England and the British Government commissioned him to paint high ranking military and naval officers’ portraits. Those portraits are now museum pieces but he continued to paint ordinary people, that attracted his interest. One of the picture that I liked best was a painting of an old, dumb mute woman of Malay Chinese origin. John Worsley had been so impressed by her patience and behaviour as an artists model that he had paid her twice the agreed fee for her services. He was even more impressed when her face lit up and she thanked him very much. He was man enough to respect somebody who had fooled him into believing that she was deaf and dumb to get herself a job as an artist’s model. He has no regrets at having paid her over the odds for her services.
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