UK

MANY auctioneers decide against holding sales in August, traditionally the quietest month of the auction calender. These Staffordshire auctioneers, Richard Winterton chose to go ahead with their monthly sales which, as so often throughout the year, was led by brown furniture.

WHILE prices for run-of-the-mill silver have been all but flat-lining since the extraordinary Seventies boom, there are welcome blips from time to time to show the market isn’t quite dead.

LONDON antique dealer Robert Hirschhorn lives in his showroom and it is the interior of his Camberwell Georgian town house which exemplifies his look, which he terms “Smart Country”.

THE sale on August 16 was the first time Bonhams, Honiton (17.5% buyer’s premium) had held a specialist collectors’ sale without cigarette and postcards after the decision was made to sell these at New Bond Street. With the sale now focused firmly on Goss and crested china, pot lids, Prattware and commemorative ceramics, lots of new buyers flooded in making the sale a big success.

A 19th century Aesthetic movement ebonised Japanesque cabinet was orginally housed in the Yorkshire home of a Mr Mossman, a wealthy Leeds wool merchant. When he moved from his house in Menston, near Ilkley, the cabinet passed into the hands of the new owner, the well-known music critic Ernest Bradbury and has passed by descent ever since.

The four-day Decorex International interior design trade fair runs this year from September 22-25 at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.

The Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair, the event that pioneered the decorative look for antiques fairs and the first to realise the growing importance of the interior design trade, celebrates its autumn staging this month at its Battersea Park marquee from September 24-29.

A second hand bookshop in Glasgow and two dealers are locked in a legal dispute over the ownership of a lost cache of William Blake watercolours, valued at over £1m.

THIS month, the international autumn fairs season gets seriously under way and the marker for the off in London is the country’s longest continually running event, the twice-yearly Chelsea Antiques Fair which will return to Chelsea Old Town Hall in the King’s Road for the 95th time from September 13 to 22.

THIRD time lucky for the annual Antiques For Everyone – Scotland fair, held at Glasgow’s Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre from August 23 to 25.

From the lakes of Killarney to the golf links of St Andrews via the Norfolk Broads, there is hardly any corner of Ireland and the British Isles that is not covered by Christie’s South Kensington’s sale of Travel Posters, which takes place next week on September 12.

THE highlight of the wide-ranging 1400-lot collectors’ sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt (15% buyer’s premium) at Taunton on July 20, was a Morris Minor 1000, from the Matchbox series, crucially painted in pale brown.

THE Essex auctioneers Ambrose had hoped the unusual top lot in their 561-lot sale on 19-20 July would fetch more, but bidding on the set of ten gothic-style Victorian mahogany dining chairs was hampered by their non-commercial design.

This large Highland hunting landscape by John Frederick Herring Senior proved to be the highlight of Sotheby’s annual auction series held last week at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, when it sold for £470,000 (plus 19.5/10% premium) to London dealer Richard Green Fine Art bidding on the phone.

Many sporrans are military or feral in character, but this leather wallet had graced the groin of Sir Harry Lauder, legendary laird of the music hall. Winston Churchill sounded dangerously like Samuel Johnson when he described the folk singer and comedian as “Scotland’s greatest ever ambassador”, but there is no doubt that Lauder, though dead since 1950, remains popular with tourists who swallow his sentimental vision of the old country.

LONDON: THE Greenwich Development Agency has just published a new guide in a bid to boost the trade in antiques and collectables in the south east London borough.

NEARLY 40 years after 15 men stole 120 mail bags containing £2.6m from the Royal Mail train as it passed through the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Great Train Robbery can still arouse controversy. In 1969 the police held an auction of items found in the robbers’ hideout on behalf of the banks who lost money.

UK: FROM October 1 – 31, to mark the 602nd anniversary of Chaucer’s death, the Gallery in the Friars, Canterbury, is holding an exhibition, entitled The Canterbury Tales.

TATTON Park in Cheshire is the National Trust’s most visited property, but not only is it the country’s favourite, it is also a big favourite of Essex organiser Robert Bailey who holds four Tatton fairs a year.

ON July 23 Bristol Auction Rooms (15% buyer’s premium) took the second highest price at auction for an oil by Hampshire artist Henry Garland (1854-1900). Back in December 1998 Bonhams Knightsbridge took a premium- inclusive £12,650 for the 3ft 4in by 5ft 7in (1.02 x 1.70m) oil Village Gossips.