Letter

An impressive collection of pictures, studio pottery, furniture, personal effects and letters has been consigned to auctioneers Mitchells of Cockermouth from the estate of Mary Burkett, former director of Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal.

Only a year before the centenary of the Easter Rising, a powerful letter by the Anglo-Irish diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger David Casement (1864-1916) has surfaced in South Africa.

An autographed letter signed from Charlotte Brontë doubled its estimate to make £24,000 at Lyon & Turnbull’s September 4 rare books, maps and manuscripts sale in Edinburgh.

A letter written by pioneering scientist Dr Francis Crick containing what is probably the first description he gave of the discovery of DNA has been sold for a world auction record.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has acquired an important collection of letters, photos and documents relating to Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank.

At the tender age of 15 young ‘Bob’ Wroughton became the world’s first Boy Scout, and had a glittering career of success in front of him. Yet just seven short years later, he became one of the first to die in the killing fields of the First World War.

Wind in the Willows characters Mole, Ratty and Toad are to go under the hammer at Michael Bowman of Newton Abbot in Devon on May 5.

“ED seriously injured late today when train hit car – Ritch”. When a shocked John Steinbeck received this telegram in May, 1948, he left immediately for Monterey, California, but by the time he got there his good friend Ed Ricketts, the man he later described as being “part of my brain for 18 years”, was dead.

• 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.

A MANUSCRIPTS dealer from Cheltenham has uncovered a major theft of letters from an American university. The case is now being investigated by the FBI.

A SUBSTANTIAL, and previously unpublished, collection of letters written by various members of the Bloomsbury Group to Helen Anrep (1885-1965) is to be sold by the East Sussex auctioneers Gorringes in Lewes on September 3, along with a collection of artworks by members of the group consigned from the same estate.

A HANDWRITTEN letter written by Albert Einstein in the year before he died giving his thoughts on religion drew spectacular bidding in London last week when it sold at £170,000 (plus premium) against an estimate of just £6000-8000.

PREVIOUSLY unpublished letters from the poet John Betjeman are to form part of the setting for a travelling display of early 20th century jewellery designer Helen Holmes at Bonhams.

The Museum in Docklands have acquired a rare and significant archive of 18th century papers highlighting London’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Four Beatrix Potter watercolour Christmas cards, recently discovered in a Wiltshire attic, will be sold by Highworth, Swindon auctioneers Kidson-Trigg on September 20. The cards have been consigned by descendants of the original recipients, Elizabeth (1888-1977) and Elinor (1886-1979) Lupton.

AN unseen and apparently unique collection of photographs, letters and maps that illuminates the campaigns of Field Marshall Montgomery in the Second World War has emerged at Kent auctioneers Watermans.

Though blessed with means of communication beyond the comprehension of anyone of Nelson’s navy – superior by far to signal beacons, semaphore and speeding sloops and cutters – an unfortunate breakdown in these modern methods meant that the two Nelson items featured in last week’s reports were not joined by what proved to be the star turn in a Lyon & Turnbull sale of February 1.

Formed by screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin during research for a trilogy of plays, The Lost Boys (first broadcast in 1978) and for his biography of J.M. Barrie, a 19-lot collection that tells the story of his friendship with the Llewelyn-Davies boys and the emergence of one of the best known characters in all of children’s literature, Peter Pan, attracted a great deal of media publicity before being put up for sale at Sotheby’s on December 16.

Autographs, manuscripts and printed ephemera have long been a great strength of sales at Strides of Chichester, but the December 3 sale was rather special, being devoted entirely to that field and, though not billed as such, the first part of the personal collection of Derek White, who for many years has catalogued for the Sussex saleroom.

AN October 21 sale of historical documents and letters to be held in Ludlow by Mullock Madeley includes a vellum document of 1227, witnessed by Hugh de Burgh, in which Henry III grants the right in perpetuity to hold an annual fair to the Prior and Canons of St Mary Magdelene of Combwell (on the Kent/Sussex borders).