Arms, Armour & Militaria

C&T Auctioneers’ (20% buyer’s premium) November 6 sale titled After the Great War Centenary also marked the final slice of a three-part offering of what specialist Matthew Tredwen called “one of the finest collections of First World War German militaria to have been sold at auction in the UK”.

Such was the scale of the Great War that the Cameronians regiment alone raised 27 battalions from 1914-18.

British Empire soldiers included more than a million Indian Army troops serving overseas.

The ‘heroic age’ of Polar Exploration coincided with the First World War. Shackleton’s perilous 1914-17 expedition was conducted against the backdrop of war in the northern hemisphere, while other earlier Polar explorers found themselves caught up in the conflict.

In April this year Spink held an exhibition to mark the centenary of the founding of the RAF, ahead of a dedicated section in its two-day Orders, Decorations and Medals sale the same month.

It was a British engineer, Robert Whitehead (1823-1905) – working in Austria at the instigation of the Austrian Navy – who developed the first self-propelled torpedo in the 1850s.

The vast human toll of the First World War did not end with the Armistice. On New Year’s Eve 2018 Oberleutnant Friedrich Ritter Von Röth committed suicide at the age of 25, as a result of being shattered at Germany’s defeat.

A Distinguished Flying Cross medal group offered at Stroud Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) on November 7-8 underlines the sometimes rudimentary nature of the embyonic early war in the air.

This classic First World war recruitment poster with the Old Lion of Britain calling on the Young Lions to answer the call to fight is estimated at £200-400 in Onslows’ poster auction on December 14.

A popular form of gift or memento to loved ones as troops left for the front was a ‘sweetheart brooch’.

The Hundred Days Offensive broke the back of German resistance in 1918 and by November the Allies were surging well beyond the once static Western Front.

The Scottish gun-making workshop of Doune in Perthshire produced pistols that were a firearm of choice for highland clansmen but were also favoured by wealthy socialites.

MADAM – Responding to your article in ATG No 2365 ('UK salerooms 'not aware' of new laws on deactivated firearms'), I felt compelled to write in.

The National Ballistics and Intelligence Service (NABIS) has warned of a rise in defectively deactivated firearms offered at auction since the law changed this summer.

While it was probably pleasing for a buyer at Holts (25% buyer’s premium) to know a pair of Purdey shotguns had previously been owned by ‘God’, or Eric Clapton as less passionate fans of the great guitarist know him, it did not materially affect the £160,000 winning bid.

Was this the gun that John James Audubon (1785-1851) used to create the world’s most expensive natural history book?

This medal documents a little-known moment in the history of the English Civil War. In 1648, following a revolt in the Parliamentary fleet, a number of ships went to Helvoetsluys in the western Netherlands and were organised as a Royalist squadron by Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619-82).

The next Antique Arms Fair at Olympia in west London will incorporate another key London collecting event, the long-running Park Lane Arms Fair.

'Who’s Absent? Is it you?' Simple and direct, these words appear on a British First World War poster, produced as recruits began to dwindle.