South-west England

THE Taunton rooms of Greenslade Taylor Hunt (10 per cent buyer’s premium) were graced with the presence of a “minor media celebrity”, on St. Valentine’s day when this rare Steiff rod-jointed teddy bear, right, known as Percy, made an appearance.

Top seller at a brisk day’s bidding at the Cheltenham sale held by Mallams (15% premium) on January 31 was a pair of classical style gilt metal and lapis lazuli urns and covers, one shown right.

THE COPY of Colonel William Fitzpatrick’s Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul... that sold for £380 in this Somerset sale at Greenslade Taylor Hunt on 13 December was not a great one.

NOT the priciest offering at Exeter auctioneers Hampton & Littlewood (15% buyer’s premium) on January 30, but undoubtedly the most interesting was this early 19th century automaton right, made from bone.

In 1805, William Blake was commissioned by Robert Harley Cromek to make a set of 40 drawings to illustrate Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, 20 of which Cromek proposed to have engraved by Blake.

Rise of Winifred Nicholson goes on apace with amazing bid of £100,000 for portrait of Ben: Over the last two or three years Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), the first wife of Ben Nicholson, has become an increasingly significant figure in the Modern British market, culminating in the record £52,000 paid last July at Phillips for one of her trademark window still lives.

The Wiltshire rooms Woolley & Wallis usually hold four specialist carpet sales a year but a fifth was squeezed in before the scheduled Valentine’s Day event, and with a 77 per cent rate and £77,000 total on the 284 lots on offer, the decision by specialists June Barrett and Ian Bennett was more than justified.

AUCTIONEER Mark Bowman is hardly the first auctioneer to be taken aback by the price achieved by a piece of Oriental porcelain, and not just at provincial rooms like his operation at the Wotton Auction Rooms (10% buyer’s premium).

There was no charitable quarter given to rival bidders when this plaster bust of General Charles Booth took centre stage at Duke’s (15 per cent buyer’s premium) dispersal of the Timothy Rich collection of Staffordshire figures in Dorchester on January 24.

THOUGH not a first class copy, a 1632 edition offered as part of this first Bath sale of the year at Bonhams was still a highly desirable and scarce item and brought the day’s top bid of £17,000 from Maggs.

Just the thing to lift the spirits in the cold, dark, stock-deprived days of winter, this spectacular whorl of a tropical centre table received a warm reception at the Salisbury salerooms of Woolley and Wallis on January 8.

This unrecorded, William Billingsley painted campana vase appeared at Woolley and Wallis’s sale in Salisbury on November 28, and not without great controversy.

Although there has been talk of the furniture trade holding back at auction, dealers may now be looking to buy stock in the run-up to Christmas and the trade secured almost all of the top furniture entries in Michael J. Bowman’s 489-lot sale on 13 October.

A 1926 first, limited edition copy of Winnie the Pooh, signed by both Milne and Shepard, that came for sale in these Rendells Devon auction rooms on 12 October was in the original binding but dampstained to the front board, causing some loss of the paper. It sold at £950.

THE nationwide buyer-base of Lays auctioneers was reflected by concerns far beyond the Duchy – Bath dealers, for instance, were particularly worried about selling on to American clients. However, a £213,076 total from 1906 lots was proof enough that business is still there to be done.

THE first UK clocks and watches sale after the summer lull presented a good opportunity to examine the health of a market which is notoriously prone to ups and downs. From results at Gardiner Houlgate, Bath, it would seem that the trade in gentleman’s pocket watches remains buoyant, while ladies’ wristwatches are still hard to shift.

DAVID Lay’s trawls through Cornwall to mount regular sales like this 2000-lot marathon on 16-17 July usually throw up something special but here it was a case of piling ’em high and selling ’em reasonable.

With their sinister gliding gait and shrill cries of Exterminate! Exterminate! the Daleks sent small children cowering behind the sofa when they first appeared on TV in the 1960s in their bid to rule the Universe. At approximately 8in (20cm) high, however, this particular example of spin-off merchandising from the BBC series Dr Who is more likely to invoke fond nostalgia than fear.

UK: DEVON dealer in early furniture and works of art Michael Dann of Hatherleigh Antiques holds another of his splendid exhibitions of very special pieces from September 12 to October 13.

Horology topped the July 24-25 519-lot sale at the Bournemouth rooms of House & Son (15% buyer’s premium) when an 18th century longcase, being sold on the behalf of a local storage company where it had been left uncollected for years, was a specialist target.