UK

BONHAMS withdrew 16 lots, with a combined top estimate in excess of £200,000, from last Wednesday’s Bond Street furniture sale after they had good reason to believe the consignor was connected with disgraced ex-BADA dealer John Hobbs.

THIS late 18th/early 19th century Native American ball-head club made a house record when it sold for £33,000 at Charles Ross auctioneers in Woburn, Bedfordshire.

“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.

AT £5.26m hammer, Sotheby’s three-day dispersal from the attics, stables and stores of the Derbyshire seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, was the ultimate in a ‘dusting down’ sale.

GENERATING a 25-minute bidding battle at Halls' sale in Shrewsbury on October 20, The Earl of Oxford's Roan or Bloody shouldered Arabian by John Wootton (c.1682-1764) set a new house record when it was finally knocked down to an anonymous UK buyer for £326,000.

A YEAR after the move to the Lincolnshire Showground, Swallow Fairs are changing the format of their Antiques and Home Show. To take effect from the next event on November 29 to December 1, the show will now officially become a three-day fair running from Monday to Wednesday inclusive.

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.

AN interest in wine and a holiday to Britain 49 years ago led New Englanders Alden and Connie Lank to their first silver wine labels.

FOUND earlier this year in a house near Oxford where they were carrying out a probate valuation, auctioneers Mallams offered for sale this seminal painting Bravo! by C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946) on October 13.

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.

SHOWGROUND fair dealers are reminded to be vigilant after a visitor to the recent Newark fair had his pockets slashed.

WEST Dean College are to launch a ‘Conservation for horologists’ course next May.

Until May this year it was still in the ground in a Cumbrian field. Just five months later it was under the auctioneers’ hammer. Last week this Roman bronze cavalry parade helmet dating from the 1st-2nd century AD, sold for £2m (plus premium) to an anonymous UK private telephone bidder.

SUCH was the media coverage, and the worldwide interest, within the first three hours Sotheby's sale of the contents from the attics at Chatsworth had outstripped their modest £2.5m estimate for the entire three days.

CHARLES Hampshire of Peter Francis auctioneers in Carmarthen has won the NAVA National Auctioneer of the Year Award.

WHILE the sale of artworks and ephemera formerly owned by the Lehman Brothers bank had a strange attraction for souvenir hunters and contemporary art dealers, it was, perhaps more surprisingly, also of interest for enthusiasts of marine art.

WHEN Barnes Thomas, director of Barnes Thomas County Auctioneers of Penzance, was called to the home of a retired fisherman in the town to value a painting, he found a cache of works by the original St Ives naive painter, Alfred Wallis (1855-1942).

THREE masked raiders who stole £30,000 of antiques from a Petworth gallery before leading police on a chase across the home counties, have been jailed.

A RARE East Anglian Iron Age gold torc dating from c.150-50BC, thought to have been discovered in the Diss area of Norfolk around 1942, sold for £44,000 (plus premium) in Spink's latest sale of coins and medals.