Antiques Roadshow 2007

[Music] welcome back to the ancient and atmospheric cathedral of rochester setting for charles dickens his last novel the mystery of edwin drude the organ here has nearly four thousand pipes roughly the number of characters in the average dickens novel let me show you something else that's very interesting that i've found here have you ever wondered why a cathedral is called a cathedral it sounds so grand and yet it all boils down to a chair admittedly a very grand one it's the bishop's chair the latin word for this impressive object is cathedra and apparently the purpose of a cathedral is to house the bishop's seat this is rochester's i would ask john blair to value it but he's busy in the nave with the rest of the experts well it's a bit rough isn't it but yeah yes yes where has it been it's been in the sheds for two two and a half years dear oh dear so tell me the story behind it from a sort of junk shop secondhand furniture and sort of junk shop uh let's buy some more practical furniture some chests of jaws right and uh this caught my eye uh trying to negotiate a better price for the uh the chest of doors and the chat sort of sort of threw this in as a bonus as opposed to moving on the price for the chest of doors this was your discount this was a discount really yes yes what's your best prize that is my best price but i'll give you this sidebar yes yes well it looked like this obviously this bit broken off and if you put that up there we can't leave it there but that starts to make it look something and in fact this was when made an extremely expensive bit of furniture this cost a lot of money imagine making that the wastage of material to make that and these doors i mean look at this look at the depth there you've got it's like a vase it's three-dimensional this thing fabulous fabulous that's a hugely important piece of furniture of its time and its time was 1860. it was very expensive very exclusive and if you look they didn't want to spoil those doors by putting a keyhole anywhere so they put the keyhole and a secret little opening around the side so it looks immaculate fantastic quality and a waste of huge amounts of material to make it trays in one end celeret here for the wine that's right yes phenomenal oh for the wine yeah oh yeah you put ice in there but that's what it was for you don't need to do much to this i mean it wants mending and it wants nicely lightly cleaning do not have it polished have it nicely waxed it'll look wonderful and it's worth two and a half grand is it real yeah absolutely absolutely oh that's good news there certainly is good news thank you cheers most people who have three works of game birds basically are fanatical shots can i ask you are you a wonderful shot no not at all don't shoot at all i don't until now you're so how come you've got three wonderful works in your collection if you don't shoot all like the country very much well um my dad uh his stepfather was a bricklayer right and he done a job for somebody yeah who couldn't afford the payment for the job so um the guy gave my dad set for other days as part payment for the job do you know what the debt was no no no guess a few hundred quid yeah probably about that yeah yeah so tommy do you like these pictures um i think they're okay i mean i'm not a big fan of paintings really painting full stop no not really you know do you hang them in your house or do they sit in under the bed or no my mother hangs them in her house until about 10 years ago they were just wrapped in brown paper and then we thought well we'll put them into a frame and um they've been on our walls for about 10 years do you know anything about these works uh no no no no no well you can see very faintly in the corner of each one there's the artist's name who's george edward lodge and he actually was an incredibly important painter of animal and bird life he was a great naturalist and his best friend was the greatest of these naturalists called archibald thorburn and they paint very much in the same sort of style so very realistic very almost photographic um portraits of birds now there's a big hierarchy in purchasing a bird now songbirds not very desirable really i mean you know they're okay but robin's very sweet and all that a thrash not so easy a styling not very commercial but game birds are always commercial the great thing is they're alive they're not dead game birds as well so we have three fantastic works by george edward lodge what do you think probably painted around 1900 1910 so they got a bit of age to them so let's look at the top one partridge in a sort of meadow really beautifully done and you've really got the atmosphere that nice low country side and then below we have two pictures of pheasants um the most important thing is have you any idea what you think they might be worth uh no not at all so if i gave you a thousand pounds for the lot would you be happy oh he's tempted yeah well we can't do that on the bbc of course but i think i think they're absolutely wonderful i would say they were worth between fifteen hundred and two and a half thousand pounds each so even by my mess that's quite a lot of money it is yeah well done i mean you know for a small debt or maybe a big debt yeah you've made a big investment so congratulations enjoy them thank you thank you my pleasure why do you think it was made in black i don't know the story goes it's something to do with queen victoria's funeral actually it goes back before that rather before she died it's actually after the death of prince albert in 1861 and it became almost a fashion accessory to have a black clock as a symbol of mourning most of them were very few nereal very austere indeed and now are not particularly commercial no but this is rather nicer than average thank you firstly it's made by the top man yes and secondly as i'm sure you know you've got the addition of the calendar thermometer and barometer yes yeah what do you reckon this case is made of i don't know it feels like stone or some slatey stuff oh absolutely right it is actually slate it's called the black marble but this is black slate and with this high grade french movement this is almost certainly going to be belgian slate does it still work worked very well everything works on it perfectly it has some the visible broco escapement and i can just set the pendulum moving and we can see that at work but you're obviously well used to it the two ruby pallets are releasing the escape wheel here and i called it a brokeo escapement because he designed this not only did he design this a statement but he's also signed it yes on the enamel dial yes do you know why this is only the second clock i've actually seen signed on the dial by broco oh really what nationality was well we consider this to be a french clock through and through oh right yes yes so we come to value my old friend simon bull who is one of the other clock specialists doing the antiques roadshow he knew somebody that actually made a wall out of clock cases like this because at the time going back to the mid 70s it was cheaper than using breeze blocks i'm not doing that with that good because things have moved on and i'd be happy to say that once cleaned and in a good shop you'd be paying at least two and a half thousand for this oh what a character yes he is how did you how did you come to have him well um it actually belonged to a well-known magician and children's entertainer called david hallett and um it passed through to me through his widow really via another magician uh because i'm a magician i was going to ask you are you a magician well i am yes and i actually collect mechanical toys and um and this guy he knew that i collected them and unfortunately it was broken when i got it what did you have done uh well his head was off right and of course he wasn't talking naturally and uh and there he is in fine fettle he certainly is yeah he he doesn't there's no music coming out of it you mean he plays silent night exactly exactly now um should i just turn him off um what you've just done is wind him up with this key that's it now the key the wrong way around but it actually says rd correct which stands for et decon and that is a french company in paris and right through the late 19th century through into the 1930s they were making all types of musical automata animals smoking monkeys they had uh rabbits in a lettuce that would come up and go like that his sort of uh what do you call it american hair hairdo i think it's rabbit fur don't you possibly yes he's probably 1920s he's more valuable to you than he would be on the commercial oh yes yes i mean i wouldn't think of selling it but i would be interested to know his value well i should think we're probably talking about an auction value would probably be somewhere around 500 to 700 possibly a little bit more oh right okay disappointed no not at all no no it's uh it only cost me 150 pounds i've been repaired so thank you very much it's been my pleasure thank you and what have we got here franklin and mack carp a token of esteem from their old comrades 1935 the fifth london field ambulance and our amc royal army medical corps of course so what's that all about well this was my father's and uh after the first world war uh his little uh group as you might say the first field one they used to have a dinner every year and uh every year they had the dinner the cup was put on the table filled and passed around at the end of the meal good times i don't know i never got to hear about that my father being teacher must have been anyhow so and then i suppose it would be early 60s my father was living with me by then my mother had died and he came to me and said the association was disbanding because they were all getting old and they traveled long distances obviously and they wanted to get rid of the cup and we could have it for 12 and six twelve shillings which was a lot of nice 60p yes it's not about 60 p's worth i think it's very good but and so it comes out on family occasions christenings weddings and why not why not because the cup itself in fact was made in uh we've got the jubilee mark there 3435 jubilee oh i see so it's absolutely off the period value today at least 500 pounds i know and i find that totally bewildering it really amazes me you haven't walked the necessary to fill it so we can no i'm sorry i've never now although this looks like a fantastic radiogram i actually know it's more than that yes as you do now let's see what we've got here let's open it up so what appears to be a radiogram is actually much much more yes because we've got the gramophone we've got the radio yes but most important here we've got the television now my memories of television start like so many people in my generation in 1953 watching the coronation yes but when when do your television memories start i would think they go back to um because i was a war baby and i grew up with this so i would think in the 40s mid-40s late 40s and onwards right was this working then absolutely right yes my father bought this brand new from harrods and he paid 101 guineas for it right he was married in 1936 so it was to actually celebrate my parents wedding right so in a sense it was like a grand celebration of a great occasion yes yes you play the record player all the time all the time my father was always playing opera there edmundo ross caruso i can remember when i was a teenager putting on elvis presley and so elvis has played on here absolutely on the old 78 yeah because you'd put it it's only a 78 grammar phone yes yes maybe we should look a bit at how this works the problems with early televisions was the screens were tiny and so very cunningly in this particular design they arranged for the image to be projected onto a mirror which was a way of actually seeing it larger it also meant that the cathode ray tube which is very big would be could be arranged vertically rather than having a hugely deep cabinet behind and so you'd sit over there as i imagine you did oh i did and you'd watch it in time i've got something to show you thanks to the wonders of the internet yes here is the catalogue of this particular machine it's the model 703 television six valve four-way band radio receiver and automatic gramophone and it had the wonderful title of the marconi phone master grab marconi were one of the pioneer television producers there were others they made 13 different models between 1935 and 1939 and of course by 1939 it all came to a stop because of the war but in 1939 there were about 19 000 televisions in britain so it had taken off in quite a big way even though viewing was very limited so your father was a real pioneer now what this also tells us is that it cost 120 again yes i thought he said 101 but it could have been 121 or something so that's what it was so it was a very very expensive thing i mean that was the price of a car so if you were buying a television today it would be in equivalent terms of about six or seven or even eight thousand pounds really it was very very expensive now i gather that this is a very rare machine i think in the world at the moment there are only about four or five of these known really now when it was new it cost 120 guineas or five or six thousand pounds well things have changed in a sense this is useless you know you can play the radio you can probably play the grammar phone you'll never watch the television again without fiddling with it beyond reason so what's it worth i think a collector's going to pay somewhere between three and four thousand pounds so not quite what it was worth when it was new yeah getting there no well thank you very much thank you thank you william stephen coleman w s coleman and it's dated 1905. right he's a very interesting artist because he started life officer training as a surgeon oh really and then he turned to art and both his sisters painted as well as well he also worked for the minton factory designing designs for tiles and pieces of ceramic beautiful signs and i'm very used to seeing his oils and watercolors which are of egyptian girls young girls so roman scenes with marble very classical so he's quite a prolific not that prolific you see a lot of pictures and a lot of prints of his work he did a lot of reproductions but when he does something like this which these country garden scenes they are just superb there's a lot of detail oh yeah and i prefer these to the oils and when you look at this you've got well you've got irises here you've got poppies so soft and he's very very like burkitt foster in some ways yeah but actually almost more loose and impressionistic right wonderful picture have you ever thought what it might be worth um i must admit the thought has occurred to me i mean i have no idea well given the subject matter and the strong color i mean that would make at least three to five thousand pounds at auction really yeah and maybe four to six it's a really really good image everything good about him is in that picture so you want me to tell you what it says on here i expect yes i can't read it it's in chinese but the text on that side is almost certainly related to the scene we see on this side which is of two young ladies reading i guess some sort of a romantic story from their book on this table yeah beautifully painted do you know approximately what sort of year it was actually yeah it's about it's about 1860 that you can date it almost from the the style of the painting of the faces yeah that's a really good clue and then these under glazed blue boards it's a nice little teapot and i want to know do you actually use it nice it sits at my mum's still on top of a wardrobe do you go for picnics yes but wouldn't take something like that not for a picnic no why not too scared of damaging it it's just because my granddad brought it back from the navy at the dockyard and this is something we've really sort of looked after my mum wouldn't sell it i wouldn't sell it it's just saying that we'll stay in the family forever but it is a picnic teapot oh that's what it is for yeah well you've got the original padded box and and in fact you could almost say that the the padded box is almost better than the teapot itself it's a wonderful thing look they've they've even left a little nozzle for where they spout of the teapot sits and once you've brewed up your tea you stick it in there and it sits nice and snuggly in this lovely little wicker basket it's basically a sort of 19th century thermos yeah but even today in china you can buy kits like this i mean it's an age-old design it's absolutely timeless it's a really nice object well the teapot on its own is really actually not worth that much money um let's put the whole thing together the teapot with its container probably worth somewhere between a hundred and two hundred pounds that's great yeah i'm not selling it time for abrams yeah yeah i'll see if she wants to take you to a picnic but i don't think she will deep in the roadshow is a small but very select club it has only three members simon ball david betty and roy butler apart from being all b's they're the only experts who've been with the show in every series since it began 30 years ago but philip hook is an art expert you did a very respectable 25 years i did yes and i i remember the beginnings the fact that first series how we were making it up as we went along really i mean we just didn't know what was going to happen we we would anyone bring anything in would anyone turn up what would they bring in and you were a very young expert well i'm absolutely staggered looking at the footage of those of that first program 30 years ago and how young i did look it's been the cause of great amusement to my daughter who's seen the footage um and rather ironically i remember at that time thinking oh if only i had grey hair people would take me more seriously as an expert and now of course it's a different story between two and three hundred pounds now at auction i think another interesting difference was that in that first series no one knew very much when they came in i think the antiques ratio over the past 30 years has really educated people has educated the public with the result that people now come in knowing more and perhaps with a greater degree of expectation so in that first series we were giving more people very happy and pleasant surprises and what was it about the show that kept you coming back year after year apart from being asked well it it was the objects of course but it wasn't just the objects that people brought in it was the people bringing them in it was the owners they were such a wonderful mix of characters and i remember one great garage owner who brought an ls lowry in in manchester three years ago i was doing a job for a chap in london on an e-type jaguar and he was short of a payment of about 250 pounds and he asked me what i like to take this paint and i took the painting and that's how i recommend it and when i had to tell him that uh this ls larry was not actually genuine he was a bit crestful and then he brightened up and he said well it didn't really matter because the car repair had fallen off the next day anyway it's all with ezra what's your own personal favorite find well there were many wonderful things that one found over the years but uh i suppose one particular one sticks in the mind it's it was uh at a north london road show we did and the owner wasn't actually intending to come that day but he was sitting in a cafe outside the venue having a cup of coffee watching the queue get sort of slightly less and then suddenly on a whim he got up nip around the corner back to his house he was an american guy and he picked up a a picture that his father had left him and he didn't know what it was what it was worth and when he brought it in and i was able to tell him he was absolutely flabbergasted down in the corner here we've got the signature here t fujita here we have the most important japanese painter in a western style of this century well i suppose i suppose how can i put it um i think you should probably insure it for 50 000 and um i'm sure there are plenty of japanese uh lurking around the corner who would probably pay you even a bit more for it because he's the most desirable name to japanese [Laughter] and then one thing that the cameras didn't get at the end was um him turning to this little old lady in the in the audience just next to him he'd never met before in his life and he said wanna marry me now now i have to say this looks like a very simple ring almost like a wedding ring is it a wedding ring from your point of view or what's the story behind it no um 25 years ago i was digging the garden digging the potatoes up talking to my next door neighbour and my mother was with me and she bent down and picked something up and she just opened her hand and there sat this ring oh do you know anything about the people who were living in the house who might have owned the garden going back a few hundred years no because originally it was a cherry orchard um before we had the bangalore put on it and what have you done with with the ring since well i used to wear it because i had it valued and they said it would be about seven pounds seven pounds yes so i thought well i might as well wear it um if they said it was worth seven pounds first of all did they tell you what it was made of um no so from your own point of view this is the first time anyone's really seriously studied it yes well although it does have an appearance of a rather simple gem ring there's something slightly more interesting about it because it is in fact an old morning ring and it's if it was seven pounds you would assume it was made of something like base metal but of course it's very high carrot yellow gold it is so that's the first good thing to say the second thing that's quite interesting is that um using my lens i can see right into the hoop itself and there is an inscription and um inside the hoop is engraved as follows william back william back yes died 7th of november 1780 yes in other words we've got a ring here that is nearly 300 years old so does one assume that it was lying there forgotten in your potato patch yes for all those years well okay the top of the ring is set with a blue stone and it is not contemporary with the ring what's the story there do you know anything about that well i was having a driving lesson and i think i must have hit the under on the steering wheel and it was like crystal and it fell out and i couldn't find it so the jeweler that would figure because these old morning rings were mounted with little crystals at the tops that often contained a little lock of hair underneath and that's dropped out and so a jeweler's put this little blue lapis lashley stone in so it must have been really small because i i didn't see a hair at all so it must have been really small well you're lucky finding your potato patch you've been told it's worth seven pounds i think it's probably worth something like three to four hundred pounds now that was a good find i'm speechless and i used to wear it well these are items of war but we're standing here in a place of peace rochester cathedral and this is your cathedral so tell me how they got here well i can't answer for my ancestors but uh back in the 17th century amazingly the cathedral employed six militiamen and those militiamen were kitted out with muskets and swords and they were told to keep the peace we don't know whether just for the cathedral or whether that was for rochester as a whole and this is part of what they were equipped with and these were found recently they were found in the crypt we don't even know when they were found in the crit but they've been they've been passed on to the museum who look after them for us at the moment okay well let's let's look at them in a little bit of detail and talk about them they're both uh civil war items from the english civil war um this is a what is called a mortuary hilted back sword it's um it's called mortuary hilt because if you look at the the hilt here you see it's got these masks i don't know if you can see there i can see mask heads there now that's supposed to represent that the severed head of king charles how nice and that's why it's called a mortuary hilted sword what interests me about this however is the fact that i think this is composition i think this has been put together now this hasn't been put together 400 years ago 300 years ago this has actually been put together i suspect in the last 50 to 80 years really so that doesn't matter it's still a nice object and it's an early object and it's certainly mid-17th century let's go to the musket first next because actually this is more interesting although this is scarce this sword is rare the musk is itself is as rare as hence teeth this is called a dog lock and it's a dog lock musket from the civil war period and they are incredibly scarce really they are incredibly scarce they would have been used of course i mean these are objects of all they would have been used in in battle i suspect you mentioned six militiamen who were here during the civil war in theory you know it's pure speculation there's no reason to to uh suspect that they weren't actually using these very weapons that were found in in the crypt but you know cathedrals are used for so many different things so what what was the cathedral used for during the civil war well again it'd be nice if we had a film a documentary of what was happening there but we we know for instance we think we know that horses were stabled here during the civil war some people have said that's in the crypt but there are lots of steps down there so i suspect it might well have been up here in the nave now as a matter of interest you've got them in the museum do they have them insured they do okay they need to have an insured for quite a substantial amount of money you're going to tell me how much well i saw three or four muskets like this selling for at auction last year made a lot of money so um let's start with the sword the sword you should ensure for three thousand pounds the musket you should ensure for 10 to eleven thousand pounds right so these are nice objects they're very nice objects and i hope the museum does often i think they do as well especially in the light of what i now know well he was thought on a sunday at tea time that i'd be promoting paperback cover art a lot of it very lurid but just the sort of thing i think before we go on to the scotch now tell me about this how many have we got here well my collection consists of about 12 000 of these paperback books i suppose that 95 of them have got hand painted covers well that's amazing well we're only the tip of the iceberg then here michael we'd have needed a dumper truck if you would have brought the lot that's right so what started you on these covers um well the book collection started in 1952 when i was working in the west indies right in the navy and the ship i was on didn't have a library so the sailors made a collection of about 200 and i went to shore into nassau and just picked books off of bookshelves and we had a library and it was mostly this sort of thing yes so look here's a rare one this um is a first edition in paperback yes of the pan edition of casino royale correct fleming and am i right considering that quite quite a valuable item yes i bought it about 19 years ago for a hundred pounds and it's now worth about 500. that's amazing yes that's amazing so that was a very good investment and then i rather like these spoofs on the bond theme that's correct agent zero zero zero eight yes uh this x-ray i think possibly that's a little bit too much for um for sandy um look at this the kiss of death it's horrid every girl he made love to was marked for violent death by a vicious unknown killer yes appealing to the basis of instincts i suppose that's it it's quite incredible this is a really naughty one now is this one valuable that's about two thousand pounds two thousand two thousand and the story that makes it so valuable is the the girl on the front on the e fly page her name was printed and her father objected to it so every book had the fly page torn out have we got it no it's not here no if the flyer page was there it'd be worth 4000 pounds that's a lot for a fly page yes absolutely amazing um this is rather a nice one yes that's my favorite cover of all the 12 000 books i've got now who was princio i haven't got a clue to be honest you don't know he was an artist in the 1950s and he would probably have painted 60 of them a month that's incredible yes two a day yes and probably be paid ten dollars for his commission that's ridiculous that's not much is it but we're in the world of pulp fiction where publishers brought the artwork and stories very cheaply and sold them in vast quantities to young men and women who were keen to read racy thrillers and say what are you going to do with this collection well i've almost given up collecting now the plan is to sell the whole collection to a guy from america for america because this is this is where the market is absolutely yeah now what do you reckon you're going to uh make from this collection do you reckon well i've been offered 50 000 pounds for the collection 50 000 pounds that's a hell of a lot of money but one big smack over the hands it's the way that they are presented in these plastic things um they are not um they're not inert they're they do have some acidity in them yes and i would say that the best way of storing them was without these well i'll have to go home and take 11 000 books out of plastic covers a rather battered box what have you been doing to it well that's how it came to us um because i think what it did it came out of russia and then it was moved to france um miles up in the alps but it lived in a wardrobe under a load of shoe boxes because the person that owned it then felt that it nobody would take the shoes and they wouldn't find the box so there aren't any shoes in here there are no shoes no shoes okay but of course what we've got is this fantastic fitted flatware service of all this not its original case so when do when did it come out of russia well i i i i guess sort of you know the revolution time i'm i'm i'm thinking now we've got a clue here because if you look on the box itself the box is savory and sons yes now savories were a very important london firm that ended in the late 19th century so it has to have come out of russia before the revolution right okay so we're looking at the victorian period right but it is quite an amazing service it's not unusual to come across russian spoons like this and it's a particularly good russian spoon because we've got this decoration here which is known as niello workers was basically what they did was to carve the surface with that decoration what you see as black was carved out then they put the niello powder on the surface and they fired that in but the whole surface then would be black okay then they rubbed it back until they got to the original surface and that left the black in as an infill so let's have a look and see just what date we're looking at 1837. it's earlier than i thought yeah 1837. and we've got the mark for moscow which is from george and the dragon because st george was the patron saint of moscow and we've got really everything going on here these knives are interesting as well because again we've got the same decorative scheme but that is not a russian blade and what we see there is savoury so they were re-bladed when they came to england and why would that have been probably because the original knife blades were already worn out okay does that detract from the quality of the the fact that they've been replayed not really so many knives were ablated at some stage i mean clearly it would be that much nicer if they were the absolutely original knife but to get russian knives like this is so unusual so what a service now it's an extraordinarily difficult set to value because odd spoons do come on the market i cannot remember a set like this ever coming on the market but of course the russian market is a very good market at the moment a lot of money in russia with certain individuals and of course they absolutely love and want pieces like this i mean this is absolutely right for the market i would not be surprised this is a guesstimate uh that this might sell for about 15 000 pounds really because of the russian russian market paul rochester cathedral is is becoming the spiritual home of the antiques roadshow with so many people claiming connections but yours is the most important i think i can claim the best one ever france is attibury bishop of rochester we're actually descended from his brother so it's collateral not quite but it's a pretty good claim i think bishop of rochester yeah well he was actually quite a guy and he was born in the 1660s he was a cleric all his life he became a bishop of rochester in 1714 the trouble was after that he became dean of westminster and then he got into trouble as you might say by backing the wrong side he became a jacobite or he has always been a jacobite and he was seen as a rebellious cleric and when george the first came to the throne he was actually sentenced to death for you know saying the wrong things and was exiled to france where he died so he simply made a bad choice at a certain point and whether i've inherited those trays i don't know but you've certainly inherited something very noble hooter of the attributes there oh you mean the the big conch let's be honest about it the attibury hooter the favor distinguished yes he's in a sense my only claim to fame because when i was a child we were often taken to atterbury street in london by my grandmother which is beside the tate gallery and she always used to say that street is named after your however many great great great uncle it was and though there are photographs of me standing beside atterbury street at the side my children standing beside attitude street the side and so it goes on rochester's cathedral choir have been in fine voice this weekend and where better to celebrate the coming of christmas than the place where charles dickens drew inspiration for his heartwarming novels as full of convivial and sprightly characters as any antiques roadshow with that let's wallow in seasonal nostalgia as we welcome the cheerful ghosts of programs past he was my father's who was born in 1907 and he's been um looking after our christmas trees as a family for 90 years so every single year and was he used this christmas this last christmas yes well he's got his little christmas tree here and he's dressed in what would have been a bright red coat and maybe in the foam as you can see it's a little bit brighter than what it's faded to now now the first group of scars invented by a man called henry cole in england and i think it was 1849 late 1840s and so all the nonsense we go through in the rituals today are part of our victorian legacy and the cards like this i think are the most wonderful mirror of what the victorians thought about it particularly desirable are these ones with pierced paperwork fantastically complicated in their technology what fascinates me though is his head because what we have here is a bisque head which one associates with the pretty smiling attractive dolls of the period but this is anything but he's got a very pointed nose he's got lines here on the bridge of his nose he's wrinkled he's obviously an old man and that makes it really quite an interesting dog now these are the most desirable sort because here we have a church saying happy christmas and what you do is you pull the ribbon and it animates it all comes to life and there inside is the church the stained glass and inside the children praying as a wonderful image of christmas now of course in collector terms they're not particularly desirable i mean they range from five pounds to fifteen pounds but that's completely irrelevant for once they're not talking about money okay for the total album it might be two three four hundred pounds but it's not the money it's what it represents about victorian life and santa claus as a figure is actually very widely collected and a little figure like this could easily realize between 800 and 1200 pounds in the right sort of venue um i think next christmas keep him in a parcel rather than putting him on the tree [Music] we have it hanging at christmas at christmas yeah just every christmas since i can remember we just bring it out so you treat it like a christmas decoration yeah yeah it comes out with the decks at christmas well that's extraordinary if i own this i'd want to look at it all year round but how long have you had this about uh 20 years i think my husband actually bought it from a book dealer in edinburgh and when he died his wife wrote to my husband to say how much they loved having it in in their family and we hope we get as much pleasure in our family well it's obviously a watercolor that's charm it kind of generates that kind of personal interest doesn't it yes i think so yeah so do you know about the artist kate green away um a little yes i know she was a victorian watercolor and i think she didn't she paint a lot of children that was absolutely her thing yes i just love that little detail of the child asleep and the way the light is falling on her presumably moonlight it's just caught the features of her face and her lovely eyelashes it's beautifully done yeah it's it's assistant really sweet and i found it interesting that it was bought from a book dealer because it is just possible that this was a book illustration and and then again it occurred to me that it might even have been a design for a christmas card yes well we actually had a christmas card made for yourself for ourselves and sent it out such a good idea well in my opinion it's worth at least six to eight thousand pounds now according to this piece of paper it says wine glass of the first emperor napoleon given to james filer esquire by the count strazaldo governor of elba in 1818 a.d and if we look inside we find that which looks to me precisely like a napoleonic wine glass so what's the story the only thing that i know about it is that my father had it and when he died it passed on to me but i've tried to find out about this inscription and had no success at all right you don't know where he got it no i have no idea until where he goes so he wasn't a friend of napoleon's your father i don't think so it's like an age problem there yes well let's look at the evidence here what have we got before us we have precisely napoleon cipher that's what it looked like that's absolutely correct yeah we're talking about a piece of exactly the right form and eight we have a nice coin disc foot star cup base we have hexagon facets up the stem little marie's here solid bottom bowl weighs a ton surprisingly heavy this is quite heavy yeah heavy lead crystal yeah what do you think a glass like that was used for yes i mean it's you wouldn't drink out of that would you because if i served you wine you're going to be not enough in it so it was for toasting all right so this glass conformed to the etiquette of the period which was that you didn't have the glasses on the table you would toast to your neighbor you would say cheers down the hatch yeah and then the glass would leave the table be refilled and come back to the table that's why it says good so i reckon that's pretty hot bit of stuff but it's ironic is it not that while europe was blazed and was destroyed by napoleon in his armies his little wine glass perhaps the most fragile thing around him has survived to the present day brilliant value i reckon that the auction estimate would start at 3 000 and if it sailed past 5 000 pounds i wouldn't be at all surprised that's very nice isn't it very very nice what a nice man you are can't help it it's born like a well i went to the verger after i saw you with this service and i asked him if we could borrow one of their candles and he's very very kindly obliged but before i um get all romantic over the candle you you tell me about this tea service well i really want to know we know a lot about it but i've taken it to one or two places and i wanted to know really where it was made yep a name for it we're more worried about the provenance than the value okay now your province your your own family you've been using this as a tea service you haven't been using a wall in on shelf okay because look going through it individually piece by piece we discovered that maybe 40 percent of the pieces are damaged or imperfect in in in some sort of way we heard it yeah so somebody obviously enjoyed using it way back and were maybe were a little bit rough with it maybe there wasn't enough light where they were using it maybe they were working in candlelight and tallow light and and so things got a bit chipped possibly yes do you know how old the service is no i know the man john um slade we've chased him back on our um family tree yeah and he bought it he wasn't he didn't inherit it and he was born in 1872. okay this is going to be earlier than that this this takes us back to the regency this is something you might well see um in one of those television dramas about young women usually by jane austen and in the regency period we're talking about the early 19th century the early 1800s it became more and more popular to take tea and one of the things you would do is especially with a service like this you would take tea in the evenings when the light was low and when the candles came out and this particular service really answers to and resonates to to that late georgian desire for brilliance and sparkle you'll see there is absolutely tons of gilding on here acres i should say and the whole reason is if you are if you are taking t by candlelight then it really does show off uh in a way that the the other colors don't the essential idea of this is japanese these radiating semi-circles and circles are what the japanese would recognize as heraldic devices called mon but here the english have made it all their own this is english porcelain if we turn it over you can see that characteristic dark blue rather soapy texture but no markings no marks i've been through every single piece there are no marks we've got this stippling on the foot rim that's also quite characteristic so we know it's english from the the actual color of the paste i think this is by a coldport factory yeah and of course you you know the name coleport's one of the great names of english porcelain is absolutely typical of what they did um this would have been a very expensive service when it was new in around the 1820s this would be state of the art very expensive high fashion high taste so i know that you're not interested in the value but you know antiques do go up and down with time with fashion and and today you could probably buy a service like this for under a thousand pounds at auction yeah so i think it's a superb service and i'm thrilled that the virgil let us use one of his candles i think we offer a little prayer to the verger and uh and thank you for for bringing this huge service i can't believe that two such diverse pictures are being brought in by one person today now how come you've got these two very different pictures well my dear uncle a retired gp in bristol uh has been his lifelong hobby collecting antiques and particularly paintings and he goes to the big auction rooms and purchases and gets catalogues and things and he's downsized from a bungalow to a flat and now he just lives in a room and every time we've been very fortunate that he's allowed us to choose maybe what we like if he doesn't want them to be put up in his room this one is in memory of my grandma who died in 1977. and this was one of them that's always been on the wall which i really rather like the first one up here is really interesting because in fact it's dutch 17th century and it's by an artist or attributed artist called veron brecklitum it i would catalogue this probably a circle of this artist right in the 17th century the dutch were very very keen on doing interior scenes you can look at ostar and tenures you know wonderful detail this is quite good there's very good detail on here but it is a bit thin and it's thin because it's head over cleaning at some time and also it's had the split in the panel but it's a nice painting but we come down to the bottom here and we've got a 20th century picture and it is signed by munnings 1908. i mean i'll just tell you about munnings munning's is is actually one of the favorite artists of mine he is very famous for painting horses he was an equestrian artist later on in life he was born in 1878 this is 1908 and it would have been painted when he was 30 years old but really lively painting and you look at the way that he gets the blossom on the tree and just a few brush strokes to get the water really positive and you know when he was very young he started off working for coleman's muscle doing the design for their cans yes i've seen some of the original designs and then and he was a genius really and then the early 1900s painting like this and then he becomes very famous for doing his horse paintings in the 20s and 30s he actually became president of royal academy and gave a very famous speech in the 50s where he derided modern art and he was not a popular man um but this is fantastic we have to come to values now i hate talking about values because it's such a nice picture but the top one here yeah um i think today if one had this is attributed to reckless i would say somewhere in the region of uh three to five thousand pounds the one down here is absolutely sensational i know that this is worth 20 to 30 000 pounds i thought the top one would be the expensive one and having told you that it could even go on more and make 30 35 000 pounds it's a really lovely picture and he would just be so thrilled to know that that's such a he he bought it in memory of his mum and he'd be so thrilled a day of delightful discoveries including some extraordinary personal links between the roadshow team and rochester cathedral relatives have included one dean one cannon one verger and assaulted members of the choir my own father was born just down the road in chatham but he never achieved high office and he wasn't much of a singer either many thanks to everyone who's joined us today and from rochester and kent goodbye next sunday's roadshow is earlier at seven o'clock next tonight on bbc one a special conversation with prince charles in monarchy the royal family at work and they've cooked up a treat on the ebc 4 why are we so attached to christmas dinner i've forgotten to put the sprouts on you

Channel: OutTHERE85

Views: 21,635

Rating: 4.7303371 out of 5

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Id: ycvwlLwngwc

Length: 54min 54sec (3294 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020