Sporting Memorabilia & Equipment

Stanley Matthews’ 1953 FA Cup winner’s medal, sold for £20,000 to TV presenter and Stoke fan Nick Hancock, was the lot on which national media publicity focussed, but the Football Memorabilia sale held by Sotheby’s on September 21 – one of the first sales at the new Olympia salerooms – also contained some 150 lots of programmes, match cards, magazines and related ephemera.

On the eve of the Open Golf Championship every old swinger in the global village pitches up to the series of golfing memorabilia sales held in Chester and London on July 15 & 16.

Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) offered buyers two sporting sales last month, on July 18 and 19, with the first day devoted to a large golfing section plus a mix of other sports, while the subsequent session comprised 200 lots of pictures, objects and ephemera devoted to equestrian sports.

A sporting treble of Cricket, Boxing and Tennis made up the 311-lot sale held at Christie’s South Kensington back on June 22. This early tilt- headed lawn tennis racket which made one of the highest prices in the tennis section had the double distinction of being an early piece of equipment with a provenance to a pioneer champion of the sport.

Today’s national cricket teams jet around the world to their Test series by plane, but back in the early 20th century the cruise liner was the chosen mode of transport.

A well-wrapped and padded pair of boxing gloves are essential, one would think, for victory in the ring. But arguably it was the defective nature of the left hand glove, pictured here, which gave Cassius Clay his win over Henry Cooper in 1963, after letting him off the hook.

Golf fans will acknowledge the significance of this contraption, only the third wooden gutty cutter to ever have appeared at auction.

UK: THE most famous fortnight in lawn tennis is now upon us, and as a warm-up to the usual bazaar of champagne, strawberries and corporate hospitality, at Kempton Park on June 16 auctioneers Mullock and Madeley held aloft this Wimbledon trophy for the men’s doubles winners of 1919.

UK: ILLUSTRATED here are two items used to decorate the covers of the sale catalogue issued for by Dominic Winter for their May 17 Sports sale.

UK: THE football season may now have ended but back on April 24 when the Chester rooms of Phillips (15 per cent buyer’s premium) held their bi-annual sporting sale the season was at its height.

Golf in the USA PICTURED here is a remarkable wooden golf club that was the highlight of a specialist sporting and golf sale held in Miami last month.

ITALY: MINIATURE-like, this (33 x 47mm) silver medal of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-37) made Li950,000 (£315). The Imperial Crown on the reverse is preserved in the Hofschatz in Vienna.

UK: GOLFING enthusiasts flocked to the six-monthly sale of items relating to the game – a field pioneered at Chester – where 500 lots from clubs to balls, programmes to ceramics and miscellaneous emphemera such as advertising merchandise, were offered.

As most followers of the genre know, auctions of sporting memorabilia are one field where the ‘collectable’ epithet carries equal, or arguably even heavier weight than the ‘antique’ one.

UK: TWO days of selling in the niche sporting memorabilia market resulted in something of a score draw for specialists Mullock Madeley.

THE golfers who tee-off at St Andrew’s on Thursday might stand a better chance of winning the Open if they forced Tiger Woods to play with this locally made ball, rather than the standard ultra-scientific balata.

UK: POOR old Neville Chamberlain. He always takes the blame for all but delivering up the British people to Adolf Hitler, when perhaps he should really be seen merely as one of those Edwardian throwbacks like Eden who believed, quite rightly, that there was no aspect of a fascist dictatorship which could threaten the lifestyle of the English upper classes.

UK: MANCHESTER United may be the most successful football team in the world at present, but it was a reminder of the most tragic event in the history of the club which stirred bidders at Phillips sale of the Leslie Millman collection of team programmes and memorabilia at Old Trafford on April 10-11.

UK: AS yet there are no signs that game fishing is to become an endangered sport to follow hunting and shooting, not that the market for angling collectables is floundering on the bank of public indifference.

UK: IN the annals of blood sport history, one man stands above all the other hunters, shooters and fishers on his individual pile of trophies.