East Midlands

THE family firm of Gildings Auctioneers, established since 1987 in Market Harborough, are to open additional premises on the edge of Leicester.

JUST one week after Christie’s held their series of London sales from the cellars, storehouses and attics of Althorp, ancestral home of the Spencer family, Sotheby’s announced that they are to hold an autumn auction of attic treasures from Chatsworth, the Derbyshire home of the Dukes of Devonshire.

LINCOLN saleroom Thomas Mawer and Son has been sold to Grantham auctioneer Colin Young.

ARTHUR Swallow Fairs, organisers of the giant antiques and collectors’ event at the Lincolnshire Showground, will launch two new fairs this year.

A WEEK before she launches her West London Art & Antiques Fair, Caroline Penman has announced another new summer event, The Towcester Antiques Fair which will take place at Towcester Racecourse in Northamptonshire from June 25 to 27.

• Stoker's great granddaughter puts unique cache up for sale • Collection includes, letters, photos and even table waresA remarkable collection of documents and artefacts relating to the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13 will be sold by Bamfords of Derby on May 26. The cache of largely unseen material has been entered for sale by the great granddaughter of Edward Archibald McKenzie, a crewman on the expedition supply ship Terra Nova.

THIS George I christening mug was one of four items of silver stolen from dealer Clive Wilder at IACF’s Newark fair on Thursday April 8.

THIS previously unrecorded George II mahogany ‘sign post’ angle barometer was made by the gifted mechanician and scientist John Whitehurst (1713-1788) of Derby.

IN his day the work of the Lincolnshire woodcarver Thomas Wilkinson Wallis (1822-1903), who set up business in Louth in 1843, was favourably compared with that of the most famous English woodcarver of all, Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721).

INTERNATIONAL Antiques and Collectors’ Fairs (IACF), the owners of the Newark and Ardingly showground events, have announced plans to hold a regular one-day fair at the RAF Swinderby site.

THE first salvos in the battle between the showground fairs giants saw up to 4000 exhibitors head to Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire earlier this month.

FOR an item almost destined for a landfill site, this delapidated red leather chesterfield, found in the outhouse of a Northamptonshire rectory, wouldn’t be the first thing you would expect to generate international bidding.

THE massive antiques and collectors’ fair held six times a year at RAF Swinderby since 1995 is to move to the Lincoln Showground for all future events.

THIS intricate piece of turning and carving is by Binh Pho, widely regarded as the finest woodturner working in the world today. It will be just one of a number of lots created by the cream of the woodturning world being offered at a charity auction on August 7.

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.

THIS pair of Irish George III mahogany and brass-bound peat buckets drew multiple bidders at Mellors & Kirk's two-day auction in Nottingham on April 30-May 1.

THERE was high drama at the Mackworth Hotel, Derbyshire on April 15 when a creamware teapot and cover carrying a telling political message sold for £69,000.

THIS van, pictured here, was clean, but dozens of others were not when security checks for entry-fee dodgers swung into action at Swinderby on March 31 and April 1.

J.P. Humbert Auctioneers are to combine their two salerooms and focus their business in Towcester.

DERBYSHIRE police are investigating a theft of diamond jewellery from a dealer’s hotel room after he returned from exhibiting at Dragon Fairs’ two-day Derby University fair.