Judge weighs up prison suitability for ‘artful codger’
Dubbed the “artful codger”, silver-haired conman George Greenhalgh, 84, would turn up in his wheelchair at art houses and museums claiming to have “found” or inherited the objects.
The partially-deaf pensioner would feign innocence as he presented the items to stunned art experts, asking if his supposed family heirloom was worth anything.
In fact, each “antique” had been “knocked up” by his son Shaun Greenhalgh, 47, — a highly skilled , but dishonest, craftsman.
Yesterday George Greenhalgh turned up in a wheelchair, wearing thick, gold-framed spectacles, slippers and a shawl over his legs, as he appeared for sentence at Bolton Crown Court.
“I got two bullets in my head in the war in Italy, and one in my back and it still hurts,” he replied to the judge who had asked him if he could hear proceedings.
Judge William Morris said a younger man would undoubtedly go to prison for such dishonesty.
But he was adjourning the case to make enquiries with the Prison Service to see if any jails would be able to actually take and “humanely” imprison a wheelchair-bound pensioner in poor health.
Greenhalgh’s son faked the art objects using art and history books working from a garden shed at the family’s modest terraced home in Bolton, Greater Manchester. Greenhalgh, along with his wife, Olive, 83, and son, made at least £850,000 with their cottage industry, using the ruse to fool art experts for almost 18 years.
Their biggest success was managing to convince the local council-owned Bolton Museum to part with £440,000 (€582,732) for the Princess Amarna statuette.
The 20-inch piece was authenticated by the Egyptology department at Christie’s and the British Museum as 3,300-years-old.
Shaun Greenhalgh was jailed for four years and eight months at Bolton Crown Court last November, and Olive Greenhalgh was given a suspended jail term of 12 months after admitting the same offences.
Greenhalgh was given bail and will be sentenced on January 28.
