Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry - could a cigar hole scorched into the fabric unlock secrets of its Nazi past?

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the treasures of the medieval world. Across 70 metres of exquisitely embroidered scenes, it tells the story of one of the most seismic events in British history: the Norman Invasion of 1066.

But that’s not the only story it tells. In fact, there are many more stories woven into its fabric that may yet be revealed. In the new BBC documentary, Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry: Inside the Museum textile conservators Monique Pullen and Thalia Bajon Bouzid share a fascinating hypothesis which is familiar to those who work with the Tapestry in Bayeux, but little known beyond.

“In the middle here we have a big hole in the linen ground that has burn edges around the outside of it. [We think] this was a burn from a cigar during the Second World War,” conservator Monique says in the film. The story goes that “the Nazis came to Bayeux and had a viewing of the tapestry and one of them dropped cigar ash on the tapestry - and so this is the burn mark”.

A letter dated to November 6, 1942, alludes to the anecdote. Following a visual condition assessment of the tapestry carried out on September 16, 1942, by a curator at the Louvre, Mr Bazin, the letter records a, “small hole which appears to have been caused by cigar ash.” Unfortunately, he did not identify the exact whereabouts of the hole, or who made it, leaving the story open to interpretation.

While the story is anecdotal, what is known for certain is that the Nazis took a particular interest in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Ahnenerbe - or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage within the SS - claimed the tapestry was a Germanic object representing the early military success of the Aryan race - and as project curator Dr Millie Horton-Insch notes in the film, new archival evidence suggests that eventually it would have been moved to Germany.

Nazi occupation forces and specialized researchers were sent to Bayeux during World War Two to study and photograph the Bayeux Tapestry, but as contemporaneous photographs like the one below suggest, the agents who were inspecting it did not demonstrate the same duty of care demanded by the tapestry’s modern-day custodians.

Fast-forwarding to the present day, the BBC documentary shows how, in contrast, the exhibition conservators, working in pairs, are assigned one metre of the tapestry to assess over an eight-hour period, to check every inch for damage.

Each tiny mark tells a story about the tapestry’s chequered past. As Historian Dan Snow concludes in the film: “It has no business still being here! It has survived at least two major fires in Bayeux Cathedral. It survived Napoleon, who snatched it off and exhibited it in Paris. It survived the First World War, the Second World War!”

And so it seems that the marks of its storied past remain indelibly woven into the tapestry - charting not just the Norman conquest, but the 950 years of history since.

Secrets of The Bayeux Tapestry: Inside The Museum is a Blast Films production (1x60’) for BBC Two and BBC iPlayer. It was commissioned by Suzy Klein for BBC Arts and Jack Bootle for BBC Specialist Factual. The Commissioning Editors are Mark Bell and Emma Hindley. The Executive Producers for Blast Films are Sarah Spencer and Danny Horan, the Director is Joe Myerscough and the Producer is Bernadette Ross.

Secrets of The Bayeux Tapestry: Inside The Museum is available now on BBC iPlayer, and airs on BBC Two at 9pm on 14 September.

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