Silent Might (1916), a sombre and powerful monochromatic depiction of a fleet of British dreadnoughts purposefully cleaving the icy waters in the bluish penumbra of dawn or dusk, is doubtless one of Bernard F. Gribble’s most celebrated canvases—widely reproduced in its day (‘by permission of His Majesty the King’), the latent jingoism of the painting’s subject was reinforced by a rhetorical legend invoking ‘[the] silent and powerful guardians of the sanctity of the Empire’s island home and protectors of her commerce on the boundless deep’—, a work whose very celebrity has been fostered by its prominent exhibition in the the main wing of the Imperial War Museum, an institution whose hallowed halls recently reverberated to the unseemly scandal caused by the casual discovery that this paean to British naval prowess had been secretly tampered with and that Gribble’s gloomy brushwork had been overlaid by a foreign and—as a cursory inspection of the canvas once it was removed from the wall revealed—recent hand whose uncanny alteration of the original—imperceptible at a passing glance, the figures being secondary in the general composition—had turned the two vigilant mariners at the bow of the battleship into lovers exchanging a passionate kiss, this subtle subversion causing the IWM’s director Sir Cedric Glasscock to order an internal security investigation that soon revealed the discovery of a second altered painting (the Service Regulations Manual being confidentially passed by one slender lipsticked WAAF to another in the staff canteen in Sir Lawrence (‘Larry’) Driscoll’s brittle academic exercise of 1943 had been deadpanly tranformed into Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness) and ended with the formulation of the inescapable hypothesis of a militant band of highly organized anti-war homosexuals having infiltrated Museum personnel, at which stage Scotland Yard was called in to further an inquiry that ultimately threw suspicion on a newly hired museum guard, Kelvyn Rimm, whose Bayswater bedsitter, promptly raided by the men from the Yard, threw up pamphlets, T-shirts, badges and bumper-stickers produced under the auspices of the so-called Pansy Power Putsch (PPP), a group advocating—in an arcane jargon that meant precious little to Constable Plod—‘the (re)articulation of queer representation via dadaist-cum-situationist cultural praxis’ and counting amongst its adherents the professional art-forger Icarus Lam, already sought by Europol for questioning in relation to the Cedric Quartis-Jones paedophile murder case and whose subsequent implication in the IWM affair resulted in Scotland Yard surrendering its jurisdiction in the matter and shunting the dossier over to Europol’s Detective-Inspector Duncan Stalker who, after vigorously grilling Rimm, came to the conclusion that the PPP, while indubitably vandalistic in intent, was nevertheless inspired by benign—and from a certain point of view, laudable—theoretical urges whereas Lam, whose affiliation with the ideology of the PPP was merely tangential, appeared more and more as a dark master of deceit (not for nothing had he assumed the pseudonym of ‘René Schwarz’), a pasticheur and counterfeiter of genius whose diabolical talent had for some time been stealthily subverting the markets of art, philately and numismatics.