The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Going going gone
“Oh, and we sold a taxidermy of a goat’s head for £170,” he remembers.
The police lost and found auctions were always a source of surprises.
During Steven’s 30-year career, he’s also sold off Christmas turkeys, the contents of an equestrian centre (aside from the horses) and “everything from pallets of bricks to clocks.”
Some of his most memorable sales include a collection of 1920s railway posters and Empire Marketing Board posters which sold for £22,000, and a rare DC Thomson publication, The Magic Comic, issues one to 24, bound as one book, which sold for £13,000.
“People often turn up with boxes full of items asking, “how much will this make?”, he says.
“Some antiques and collectibles are extremely valuable, reaching hundreds and thousands of pounds, while sometimes bric-a-brac might only reach a fiver.”
It’s this unpredictability that makes the job and the auction house environment so exciting, he says.
“You can never tell what’s going to arrive on your doorstep and every auction is different – but all are exciting.”
His advice to beginners? Come along, get a feel for how the day progresses and return another time and put down a couple of bids.
“You’re guaranteed to get the bug,” he says. “If nothing else, an auction is an opportunity for a right good rummage.
“Keep visiting and what you are looking for will eventually turn up.”
An hour before the auction kicks off at Lindsay Burns and Company’s saleroom in Perth, there’s a buzz in the air that’s almost electric. Auctioneer Nick Burns has 717 lots to fire through and he’s confident he will sell everything.
There’s brassware, glassware, books, photo albums, porcelain urns, a 19th Century silver snuff box, antique pistols, a Nazi bayonet and a collection of war medals.
Then there’s a 1926 gold pocket watch, Clarice Cliff pottery, and porcelain salvaged from the Nanking cargo ship, which spent 235 years at the bottom of the South China Sea after being hit by a torpedo in 1943.
Bang on 10am the auction starts, paddles are raised, and with Nick, 40, rattling through 150 lots an hour, it’s fast and furious.
The highest prices are shared by two separate lots – a pair of early 20th Century silver tureens and covers, and an art deco burr walnut five-piece bedroom suite. Both make £950.
Among the buyers is Charlie Stuart. He’s travelled from Stenhousemuir to buy coins and medals from the 1930s.
“I spent £270 today and I’ll sell them online for a profit to pay the bills,” he reveals.
Kenneth Stewart has taken a day off work as an insurance officer at St Andrew’s University to come to the auction. He’s got his eye on an 1800 painting, a quern (a hand tool for grinding corn) and some 1900s curling stones and says even if he doesn’t buy anything, it’s a great day out.
While the auction may appear seamless, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, with buyers bidding over the phone and live via the internet.
“It’s very much a team process setting up and running the auction,” says Nick, whose wife Claire helps out in the office alongside staff, answering phones and jotting down details of absentee bidders.”
And sale day is only a part of it. Nick, visits places across Scotland “from castles and country houses to small, incongruous, unassuming houses” offering valuations and advice, taking inventories, photographing items and putting them on his website.
During one such visit, to a property in Blairgowrie, he discovered 26 bottles of 1940s Glenfiddich whisky, some of them still wrapped in their original tissue paper.
These fetched a staggering £30,000 at auction; working out at around £1,153 a bottle.
Then there was the time he found nine bottles of Petrus wine from the 1950s stashed away in a garage. They netted £10,000.
Another highlight was the discovery of Indian Company School watercolours, which Nick went on to sell for more than £100,000.
A collection of oil paintings by John Maclauchlan Milne sold for £90,000 and an 1820 Chinese blue and white Daoguang period vase fetched £55,000.
In 2007, a pair of life-size 18th Century Italian white marble lions bought in Venice and erected at the gates of Clunie Power Station near Pitlochry went under the hammer for £75,000
An Elizabethan spoon found in the Tay Estuary and stored in a spare bedroom, sold for £3,000.
And last year Nick sold a portrait of a boy for £12,000 after it had been dismissed by another auction house as being worth less than £500.
“Sadly, some things do end up in the dump because people don’t think they hold any value,” says Nick, who boasts an honours degree in fine art valuation.
“But it gives me great pleasure when an item fetches a higher price than anyone might have imagined.”