West Midlands

THIS week sees the announcement of two new auction houses for the West Midlands, the first based in Stourbridge, near Birmingham, the second in Newport, Shropshire.

Good stock furniture attracted bidders to the first of these Staffordshire August sales on 15 August at Richard Wintertons, the best being a George III mahogany sofa table.

FAIRLY routine furniture and modest pictures predictably took most of the higher prices at this Brightwells 850-lot sale in Herefordshire on 15-16 August but a couple of unusual items among the silver and the objets d’art were the eye-catchers.

SPECIALIST collectors and dealers don’t seem to have a closed season, certainly not in the arms and armour world and they turned up in strength at Weller & Dufty in Birmingham on 25 July.

THE two-day Staffordshire sale at Wintertons on 25-26 July was, at just under 800 lots, not perhaps quite a giant sale but it certainly covered the range of lower and middle-priced antiques.

A MIX of modest standard furniture and collectable ceramics hardly seemed a formula for success in mid-summer but the mix at Fellows (buyer’s premium 15%) attracted a full house at Birmingham on July 10.

NOWADAYS Antiques For Everyone seems to be antiques for everywhere, which proves that a successful formula will travel. At the beginning of July Fran Foster of Birmingham’s Centre Exhibitions, the organiser who pioneered that formula, for the first time took her fair to Manchester; then from August 2 to 5 she was back at her Birmingham base for the summer version of the thrice-yearly Antiques For Everyone at the NEC.

UK: Potential clash with summer Olympia - Date changes at two of next year’s Antiques For Everyone fairs have thrown the early summer fairs schedule of a number of dealers into disarray.

With the dearth of fresh-to-the-market quality antiques, the zeal with which dealers seek out sleepers ensures that few lie dormant. Such was the case at Leominster where an 18th century walnut and marquetry commode, 5ft 10in (1.78m) wide, sailed past its £2000-3000 estimate and sold at £11,800 to a Maltese buyer.

THE 1140 lots of arms and armour held offered by Birmingham specialists Weller & Dufty (15% buyer’s premium) on June 13 encompassed most forms of dealing out death and sparked enthusiasm from a range of collectors and dealers. But the pick of the day was this fine cased pair of 18-bore flintlock duelling/officers’ pistols.

UK: ONE of only three in existence, this Sir Stanley Matthews Royal Doulton Character jug shocked all in attendance at Louis Taylor in Stoke-in-Trent on June 11.

UK: ONE OR TWO lots that figured among the higher prices in this Midlands sale would seem to have been sold primarily as collections of travel or botanical plates, and these I have bypassed in favour of the following selection of books.

UK: THE Shropshire auctioneers Walker Barnett & Hill marked a first with their sale on May 1 by giving it a fully illustrated catalogue that was also posted on the Web.

After a long delay due to Foot and Mouth restrictions the Herefordshire auctioneers’ Morris Bricknell mammoth 1200-lot sale went ahead at the local village hall.

UK: THE Internet has, so far, hardly lived up to the initial claims made for it in the auctioneering world, but it does have its merits, as the Staffordshire firm Wintertons will attest.

Heavy snow across Staffordshire on the morning of this 800-lot dispersal did not deter buyers, with the auctioneers noticing a marked increase in the usual number of phone bids.

GOOD stock furniture was the strength of this 289-lot, £130,000 Halls Shropshire sale on March 9 where the top price was taken by a c.1775 two-tier mahogany dumbwaiter.

UK: Art imitates life in many ways – few stranger than this 1950’s pottery model of a Shetland Pony.

Farms still supply Herefordshire sale with original oak furniture UK: THE monthly two-day sale in Herefordshire got off to a rather unusual start with the first day largely given over to specialist items like instruments – both musical and medical – and collectables, but bidders responded with enthusiasm.

THE BOOK section of this Worcester sale contained a good many equestrian titles, and while several seemed to be fairly modern and were job-lotted, what appears to have been the most important of these horse books was tacked onto a lot that led with an 1830 History of the Hundred of Carhampton in the County of Somerset by James Savage, and “three other books”.