Lot left on the side despite its impressive looks and credentials

Cotswolds auctioneers Chorley’s offered a mahogany sideboard with an exemplary provenance two weeks ago – yet it remained unsold.

A few years ago, such a fine late 18th Century serpentine front sideboard, carrying a maker’s label as this example did, for ‘T. Willson, 68 Great Queens Street, London,’ would have been untroubled by its £5,000-£7,000 hopes.

Times have changed. Salerooms and dealers are selling quality Georgian furniture for less than half of what it achieved a decade ago. Furnishing an Edinburgh New Town property or an apartment in Perth’s fine Georgian terraces would cost a fraction of what it once did.

Can provenance help? You’d think so.

Chorley’s sideboard was once the property of Ethel Gordon Fenwick, a prominent nurse and suffragist, whose house in Upper Wimpole Street, London, bears a blue plaque.

Fenwick was born in Elgin, the daughter of a doctor. Moving to England after the death of her father, she trained as a nurse in Nottingham and Manchester, then moved to London to work in hospitals at Whitechapel and Richmond. She was then appointed matron of St Bartholomew’s.

She was the founder of the Royal British Nurses’ Association in 1887 and campaigned for their state registration. This was achieved through the Nurses Registration Act 1919, and Fenwick was registered as ‘Nurse No 1’ when it was launched in 1923.

Fenwick acquired the Nursing Record in 1893 and became its editor in 1903. In 1927 she established the British College of Nurses and became its president for life.

The sideboard was loaned by her greatgrandson to The National Trust and stood in the dining room of Wallington Hall, Northumberland, before Chorley’s auction, where, despite its history, it failed to reach its reserve.

Picture: Sideboard with a story to tell (Chorley’s Auctions).