A coalition of British museums has banded together to preserve one of the country’s finest collections of silver and gold plate which would otherwise have been broken up and sold at auction. “The nine museums, including the V&A, the British Museum and the Ashmolean in Oxford, pooled their resources and secured hefty grants, including over £850,000 given by the National Heritage Memorial Fund to celebrate its silver anniversary, and over £400,000 from the Art Fund charity. The collection was built up by the financier Ernest Cassel, who was born into a poor Jewish family in Germany in 1852, arrived in Liverpool in 1869 with a violin and a small bundle of clothes, and by the time of his death in 1921 was one of the richest men in Europe.”