Arms, Armour & Militaria

ONE of the rarer acts of peace-time bravery saw the crew of the airship R33 awarded the Air Force Medal.They included George Ernest Long, whose medals and associated ephemera came up for auction at Lockdales of Ipswich on March 27.

SOUTH London saleroom Rosebery’s of West Norwood had to be evacuated on Wednesday, March 23 after a client left a Second World War bomb brought in for valuation at the front desk.

THE Professional Footballers Association were active at Spink's latest sale, successfully bidding £210,000 to acquire a Great War Victoria Cross group awarded to Second Lieutenant D.S. Bell, Yorkshire Regiment.

THIS watercolour sketch comes from a remarkable 120-page First World War journal penned by Lieutenant Kenneth Edwin Wootton of the 1/21 Battalion, London Regt Tank Corps.

WITH the retreat from Dunkirk so much in the news at the moment, Aguttes have a particularly topical offering in their June 18 sale of manuscripts, postcards and historical documents.

THE first Victoria Cross awarded to a soldier in the British Army sold for £210,000 (plus 20 per cent buyer's premium) at Spink in London on April 22. The Conservative Party donor and VC collector Lord Ashcroft was beaten to the prize by an anonymous buyer.

BLOOMSBURY Auctions and Dreweatts have announced an alliance with Hermann Historica, the German specialist auctioneers in arms, armour and militaria.

A PENCIL and watercolour sketch showing men at work on a celebrated escape tunnel was a major attraction in a log or record compiled in 1943-45 by a Scottish P.O.W. sold by Lyon & Turnbull of Edinburgh for £3200 on January 13.

THE Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft has reportedly paid nearly £1.5m for the only double Victoria Cross awarded during the First World War.

WHEN John Harrison set about solving the problem of how to measure longitude, the name Association would have held a special resonance for him.

PICTURED here is a medal commemorating the taking of Porto Bello by Admiral Vernon in 1739. It was among the items stolen from a country house museum in south Derbyshire on the afternoon of May 20.

Bonhams sold their second WWII Spitfire aircraft in the space of seven months last week when businessman Steven Brooks paid £1.58m plus premium for a TR Mark IX specification model at an auction held at the Hendon RAF Museum on April 20. The plane had been estimated to make in the region of £1.5-£2m.

A VOLUNTEER at the Royal Signals Regiment Museum in Blandford, Dorset, has been jailed for 12 months for stealing £33,000 of medals and selling them on eBay.

THIS extremely rare 18th Century Khyber knife was the highlight of the London sale conducted by Norfolk-based sporting gun specialist Holts, where it sold for a surprise £38,000.

LORD Ashcroft’s Victoria Cross collection – the largest in the world – is to go on public display following his £5m donation to the Imperial War Museum. The news comes as the museum has also received a donation from the Art Fund to purchase an important watercolur by Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) at auction.

Lord Ashcroft has been at the centre of a successful bid to recover 96 medals, including nine Victoria Crosses, stolen from a museum in New Zealand in December.

Two medals awarded to the same man during the Crimean War, but separated for many years in different collections, have been reunited after selling to the same buyer at Smith & Wilde’s March 21 auction of militaria at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

Spink are to put the unrivalled Victoria Cross collection of Lord Ashcroft on display in an 11-day exhibition in their main gallery in April. The exhibition is a forerunner to what is expected to become a permanent public display in two years’ time.

Eleys Auctions in Boston, Lincolnshire have sold by private treaty 43 personal effects of the legendary World War Two double-amputee pilot Douglas Bader.

A JUDGE’S ruling over an antique steel knife has challenged the policy of “Let the Buyer Beware” and may affect auctioneers’ cataloguing practices and their terms and conditions.