Collectables

“I LOOK upon [it] with equal amazement, as I do upon St. Paul’s Cathedral; each the work of one man, each the work of an Englishman”.

MAKING £160,000 hammer at Convery Auctions last week, Nobby Stiles' 1966 World Cup winner's medal eclipsed the £140,000 made by team-mate Alan Ball's medal at Christie's South Kensington in May 2005 and set the highest price seen for a '66 medal so far at public auction.

IN a week when the 1968 European Cup winner’s medal awarded to George Best sold for £130,000, the appearance of more blue-chip sporting memorabilia on the auction market has been announced.

A COLLECTION of 11 antique violin bows valued at £110,000 is now feared stolen after they were left on a train.

THIS watercolour sketch comes from a remarkable 120-page First World War journal penned by Lieutenant Kenneth Edwin Wootton of the 1/21 Battalion, London Regt Tank Corps.

SPORT is never far from controversy these days. So it was no surprise when the news that George Best’s and Nobby Stiles’s most valued medals and trophies were to be sold that there was an outcry in certain sections of the media.

BLOOMSBURY Auctions are to reduce their buyer’s premium when offering the Richard Harris collection in two forthcoming sales.

SOTHEBY’S have launched a retail and online wine business based in New York.

THE October 8 toy sale at Nagel in Stuttgart will include this Märklin gauge-1 model of the Stuttgart train station.

A UNIQUE archive of original Enid Blyton material is being offered for sale by her elder daughter's estate at Ilkley auctioneers Hartley's on September 15.

IT looks like a flying saucer, and to those viewing it on the monastery wall in Verona where it had hung since the Middle Ages, it can have had hardly less of an impact.

EXCITING plenty of bidding against its £500-800 estimate at Ely-based saleroom Rowley's was this rare 9in (22.5cm) early 17th century engraved horn shoehorn.

The late Fred Dibnah's 1912 Aveling and Porter Ltd steam tractor fetched £240,000 at Cheffins vintage auction on July 24, selling to Michael Oliver, chairman of Knutsford-based manufacturer Oliver Valves.

ON August 21, Andrew Hilton will host his first sale of commemoratives and pot lids under the new name of his business, Historical & Collectable.

“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.

THERE can be no more important figure in British inter-War aviation than the aircraft designer Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895-1937).

WITH the retreat from Dunkirk so much in the news at the moment, Aguttes have a particularly topical offering in their June 18 sale of manuscripts, postcards and historical documents.

PRIMARY source material relating to the last days of Napoleon’s life has emerged at a charity valuation event in New Zealand and will be offered for sale on June 29. The consignment of more than 40 items includes a lock of Napoleon’s hair and a sketch of the former emperor on his deathbed drawn from life.

SOMETHING for the dealer with almost everything, a personalised car registration plate with the legend ANT IK is being sold later this month.

THE original autograph stock book of Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, found in a box of girlie magazines, sold for £25,000 (plus 17% buyer's premium) at the Shropshire auctioneers Mullock's in Ludlow.