Paul Atterbury - Antiques Roadshow - 40 Years of Great Finds

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2017

Text © Paul Atterbury and Marc Allum, 2017

Photographs © BBC except for those individually listed in the Picture Credits

Design and layout © HarperCollins Publishers 2017

By arrangement with the BBC.

The BBC logo is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence.

BBC logo © BBC 1996

The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

Cover photographs: left second from top: Courtesy of The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent; bottom right, bottom middle: Courtesy of Homes & Antiques / Homesandantiques.com; right middle: Clive Corless for Homes & Antiques / Homesandantiques.com; top left: Jeff Overs for BBC; top right © The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved, DACS/ www.henry-moore.org; left third from top © BBC/Sotheby’s London

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source ISBN: 9780008267636

eBook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008267650

Version: 2017-10-27

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

A William Burges bottle

A Sioux Warrior bronze

Ozzy the owl

A Foujita painting

A Richard Dadd painting

An Album of Filipino watercolours

Paul Storr salts

A Renaissance gold plaque

A Delftware Turk’s head

A pair of Regency peat buckets

A William Orpen portrait

A Churchill cigar

A Steiff Titanic bear

A Waterloo chest

The credenza story

A Francis Souza painting

Mughal bracelets

Scott expedition photographs

The Blue John

Queen Anne’s travelling chest

Buffalo Bill’s gloves

An Alma-Tadema portrait

A cold-painted bronze parrot

Van Dyck portrait

A Stuart table casket

Henry Moore letters

A Märklin tinplate biplane

The Cottingley fairies

Scrimshaw carvers

Newspaper posters

Beatrix Potter drawings

‘The Winner’ enamel advertising sign

The Keel of Endeavour

Sunbeam-Talbot 90 Rally car

Carpathia memorabilia

A Leica II Luxus camera

A Terry Frost portrait

Marc Bolan’s Gibson ‘Flying V’ guitar

Graham Sutherland painting

A Lalique vase

Dambusters’ panda mascot

A plane spotter’s notebooks

A William Burges brooch

A stump work box

Titanic letter

A Saxon gold ring

A Tourmaline ring

A silver duck claret jug

The refuse tip jewellery

An English marquetry commode

Margaret James, poster designer

A William Kent style table

An Audemars Piguet watch

An eighteenth-century dress

Status Quo tapestry

Lawrence of Arabia’s watch

A diamond butterfly brooch

A Steiff Clown bear

The Hiroshima Bowls

The Great Train Robbers’ Monopoly set

A Thomas Telford gate

A Yuan bronze vase

A bizarre fishing rod

A Japonisme Gem

A Suffragette medal

A Lindner portrait

Fiji bulibuli club

The Tory loo seat

A Dolls’ house

An Apothecary cabinet

A Shakespeare notebook

Banksy lovers

An English Rose kitchen

JFK’s flying jacket

Rommel’s cigarette packet

Old Testament figures

Jean Dupas posters

A Chinese armorial dish

A Frodsham mantel clock

A Cartier wristwatch

Mrs Ambrose’s punch pot

Martinware collection

Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund sword

Cromwell’s funeral flag

Jane Austen’s cup-and-ball

The Crawley silver

A George Richmond miniature

A caravan planned by a P.O.W.

‘May the Force’

An L. S. Lowry painting

Bull’s head stirrup cups

Dickin medals

A Lewis Carroll collection

An Indian portrait

An Early doll

A Maria Heathcote portrait

A Weird glass

Special programmes

Index

Picture credits

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

About the Publisher

Familiar Roadshow faces, as they were. CLOCKWISE: David Battie, Eric Knowles, Lars Tharp and Henry Sandon.

On 17 May 1977, a group of antiques experts and a BBC production team came together in Hereford’s town hall to make a pilot programme for a possible new series, to be called the Antiques Roadshow . The idea was simple. Members of the public would be encouraged to bring their own objects for identification, discussion and valuation to a team of experts assembled for the purpose in a large public space, with television crews standing by to film the best bits. On paper, it seemed like a good idea, but no one knew on that May morning whether it would work or not.

The inspiration had come from one of the regular valuation days organised by auction houses, whereby members of the public could bring things along for a free valuation, as a means of generating business. One such occasion was visited by a production team from BBC Bristol, and the idea of developing it into a public event that could also be

a television programme was born. At the planning stage, advice was sought from Sotheby’s by BBC Bristol. For the programme, however, there was to be no commercial agenda.

A PROGRAMME IS COMMISSIONED

Plans were drawn up, Hereford town hall and the expert team were booked, and the event was widely publicised, with the offer of free transport for large pieces of furniture and other items that could not easily be carried by their owners.

A programme about antiques was not a new idea for the BBC. Talking about Antiques , a radio programme presented by Bernard Price, had enjoyed long-lasting success in the 1960s. In 1965 Going for a Song , presented by Max Robertson and, later, Collectors’ World , first broadcast in 1970 and presented by Hugh Scully, brought antiques successfully onto the television screen. All these programmes generated a large mailbox from listeners and viewers keen to find out about their own objects, and so a programme designed to help those people do just that was considered to stand a good chance of success. Thus, the pilot for the Antiques Roadshow was commissioned.

A key figure was, of course, Arthur Negus. After a long and successful career as a valuer and furniture expert with a Gloucestershire firm of auctioneers, Arthur started a new life as a television personality at the age of 62, when he joined the panel of experts on Going for a Song . He was an immediate success, thanks to his relaxed manner and West Country accent, and quickly became the face of antiques on television. Needless to say, Arthur Negus was at the heart of the team of experts assembled by the BBC for the Antiques Roadshow pilot, although it is important to remember that he was never the programme’s presenter.