Auctioneers

Highest price in five years is achieved for Manchester School and Staithes Group artist

Stroud Auction Rooms’ sale on November 9-10 will feature over 1000 lots of guns, weapons, medals and militaria, including two notable collections.

Restoration expert Will Kirk, who appears on Bafta-nominated TV show The Repair Shop, has teamed up with auctioneer Christina Trevanion to present a new BBC daytime antiques series that launched this week.

Ceramics by Hans Coper (1920-81) and Lucie Rie (1902-95) have been assimilated into the collecting sphere of Modern British art with spectacular effect.

The cylindrical brush pot or bitong appears to have been introduced into the repertoire of Chinese ceramic forms in the late 1620s.

A group of father-and-son lots related to the Royal Navy may have been small in size but revealed a combined service in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that was lengthy.

Judging by recent events, members of the Conservative Party might well look back longingly to the days of Margaret Thatcher when Britain’s first female prime minister brought a comparative measure of stability to government.

'Paris Photo', the French capital’s annual fair dedicated to photography, holds its 25th edition at the Grand Palais Ephémère from November 10-13.

Air Commander J Searby had a key role to play in the Peenemunde Raid targeting the V weapons factory during the night of the August 17-18, 1943, as part of the RAF’s elite Path Finder Force.

A single-owner collection of watches assembled over many decades and spanning 500 years of horology was offered by Aguttes (25/23% buyer’s premium) in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris.

Relatively few gallantry medals available for what was short self-contained conflict, heroic stories involving highly collectable regiments, a relatively morally unambiguous backstory (for British collectors at least)… the Falklands War can generate high demand at auction.

Much, much earlier than most other entries in a comics and comic art sale that ran at Heritage (25% buyer’s premium) from September 30 to October 2 were examples of the work of Winsor McCay (c.1866-67-1934), who was well known as an accomplished editorial and political cartoonist and for his work in the world of animation and cartoon strips.

The big attraction in a job lot estimated at £60-100 that went on to sell for £14,000 in a September 23 sale held by Ewbank’s (25% buyer’s premium) was a copy of Britannia: or, a Chorographical Description…, Dr Edmund Gibson’s 1695, updated and English language version of a well-known earlier work.

When Bill Speakman won his Victoria Cross on November 4, 1951, fighting beside him was Corporal John Pender.

A couple of weeks after the Aguttes watches auction another collection in the same category went under the hammer in Paris.

A police ledger sold more than triple its top estimate featured original mug shots and criminal records relating to 500 people including a woman accused of plotting to kill Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1917.

In 1888, in response to a tender issued by the War Office, Prof Archibald Barr and Dr William Stroud submitted an application for an optical range-finder patent to the Patents Office.