Antiques Roadshow S43E16 - Antiques Roadshow Season 43 Episode 16

[Music] today the antics roadshow is in a county renowned for its dreaming spires and regattas on the river in the gentle rolling countryside of oxfordshire this is stoner park near henley on thames the stoner family who've lived here for over 800 years take their name meaning of the stone from the remains of a prehistoric stone circle within its grounds the stones were deposited here during the ice age now these ones obviously didn't land in this rather convenient circle they've been placed here but it's recently been discovered that they're made from the same hard sandstone used to construct stonehenge so we have our very own prehistoric monuments for the antics roadshow coming up wow what a day i love medals and what a selection you've got [Music] well that's pretty incredible because what you're telling me is this boat was built by the tsar of russia it's something that you've obviously loved and you're going to keep wherever aren't you my grandfather inherited this toolkit from florence nightingale who was his great aunt cheers george [Music] this is a very sparkly jewel when did it catch your eye it was in 2013 um in an antique shop at woburn abbey and we'd gone there for the day and just happened to just stumble across it it was decided that it was then going to become a wedding present so we were getting married a couple of years later so what attracted you to it the color the color yeah the color of the yellow most people think that if diamonds are not white then they're not so attractive but you're absolutely right to see the beauty in these yellow diamonds many many years ago i was a diamond sorter in rough diamonds and when they were yellow diamonds the yellow diamonds in the rough went into the industrial pile and the white diamonds went into the gem pile then in the 70s a young lawrence graf at the time who has these a wonderful shops all over the world he understands diamonds so well he saw these yellow diamonds in the rough and he took them and cut them and made yellow diamonds almost famous so what you have on the reverse you have k and then 18 and that is a foreign mark so that's implying that it's been made in europe and that's saying that it's 18 karat white gold do you know who might have made the pendant i think it might be italian or i'm just not sure it is really very very special because of the yellow diamonds and may i ask how much did you pay for it paid 500 pounds you paid 500 pounds for it in an antique shop in 2013. yep i think you've done very well actually that's well spotted because i would say at auction you'd be looking more in the region of about 1500 pounds wow wow fab so what we have here to all intents and purposes just appears to be a kind of fairly mundane little um box or or caddy and it has an inscription on it the gift of stella to dean swift before we come around to that can you tell me where you got it from and why you bought it well i found it in a little antique shop i got it home and i went straight onto the internet and put in stella and dean swift and i wasn't expecting to get anything right but i did dean swift we know full well is jonathan swift the great satirist and anglo irish writer of course who wrote gulliver's travels so let's look at the object itself it appears to be as i said earlier perhaps a little tea caddy this handle is a little bit odd it looks to have been added later in fact and it has this pineapple finial and the pineapple finial in fact actually denotes uh friendship and hospitality it's very much an 18th century kind of symbol but the gift of stella so tell me about stella so stella was the name that he gave to a girl called esther johnson that he'd been a tutor for i think when she was eight years old and they remained friends but he called her stella now jonathan swift died in 1745 he was the dean of st patrick's cathedral in dublin hence he was called dean swift that adds up sounds quite good stella died in 1728. now sheffield plate the material that this little caddy is made out of wasn't invented until about 1743 so how could stella have given this box to dean swift she couldn't have done it's as simple as that so all in all what we've got is a very old object that's underneath on some alterations it's got this inscription on it which is not engraved in fact it's been stamped on it and so someone has created something that has this story behind it which i'm afraid in the case of this object just is not true it's probably worth 20 30 40 pounds as an object but there's still that interesting and intriguing story connected to it well that is interesting and it's still got a story yeah and it still has a story it's a different one so thank you thank you for bringing it thank you thank you was hoping of course that it was going to have belonged to jonathan swift and i've had the most amazing few months since i bought it looking up exploring and trying to find out more about it so it's been an incredible journey and i'm so glad to have got to the bottom of it but at the end of the day it's a sweet little box and i know a little more about jonathan swift and a little more about stella we've got a tool kit here in a leather roll and it's not a professional one i'd have said it's a sort of good amateur toolkit used by a sort of a hobby carpenter and is that your link with them no my grandfather inherited this toolkit from florence nightingale who was his great aunt in the photograph here who are we looking at so florence nightingale is in the middle and then my great grandfather sahari veroni at the back here and these are her a group of her nightingale nurses with their matron from thomas's hospital so let's just think about florence nightingale herself and there she was she was born in 1820 she was named florence because she was born in florence and of course girls at that point were not really expected to have an education florence's father was very forward-looking wasn't he yes that's right she persuaded her father didn't she to allow her to go to germany to study nursing which she did and then of course the crimean war broke out in 1853 and florence went out gathered together a group of nurses so we know that florence went to the crimea in 1854 does this in any way fit in with that date and the answer is yes because on one of the gouges we have the name holtz apfel and code the company holtz apple was certainly in the prime of their production in the 1850s perhaps the rolls-royce of tool makers so the tool set actually you have here a universal handle uh nice ebony carved handle on the end there and then you have the tools which slot into place you tighten up this lovely nut and there you have your gouge ready to attack fabulous bit of kit so i've got this image in my mind of florence with her crinoline tucked into her drawers and a pencil behind her ear as she sets two in the hospital you know restoring this gouging that chiseling that with the equivalent of a sort of 19th century black and decker toolkit it has to be but the family link is good and the date is good as it is it's going to be worth about 200 pounds if we can make a paper trail to florence nightingale then we're going to be talking about five six seven thousand pounds who knows it would be a major find if you can find that bit of paper so i would encourage you to go through the family records yes thanks so much for bringing it in thank you very much the prehistoric stones here at stoner which lent the estate its name are not its only natural marvel in the 17th century the park's vast woodland and its rich sediment provided the perfect raw materials for a burgeoning new industry timber from the beech trees and sand from the stoner estate was shipped to the nearby river thames and then on down to london to make glass that was a valuable income for the stoner family one man who used stoner's raw materials was a young entrepreneur from cambridgeshire named george ravenscroft seeing great new possibilities in glass making ravenscroft had set himself up as a merchant in italy where the very best glassware was to be found after a stint in venice trading with some of the finest glassmakers in the world ravenscroft returned to england in 1666 and set up his own glassworks bringing back a couple of supremely talented craftsmen with him drawing on the techniques he'd learnt in italy raven's croft sought to improve the standard process of melting sand to make glass and this he did just down the road from stoner at a new glassworks in henley on thames that meant he was near the raw materials provided by the stoner park estate and also he was away from the prying eyes of london and why did that matter because he was trying to crack a secret that had eluded the finest glassmakers a thousand years to find out more about ravenscroft's secret formula i met up with our glass expert andy mcconnell who brought along some glassware from the same period glass is a fantastic kind of alchemy isn't it it is i mean most people find it extremely difficult to work out that that is 75 sand so what was it that ravenscroft was uniquely trying to do he was trying to create a brand new form of glassware that had never previously been successfully made which was effectively lead crystal what became lead crystal what ravenscroft was after was a glass that contained about 25 to 30 percent pure lead as well as the sand in order to create this lustrous glass why was lead crystal so sought after lead gave glass a more refractive more robust quality venetian glass you tip it over shatters very very fragile so how easy was it for ravenscroft to be able to produce this new well i'm sure it was extremely difficult i mean it was extremely difficult because their first efforts were seen to grizzle and decay in the language of the day so that's all this marking here so this is a crizzled glass and it's really horrid and in certain examples beads of liquid come out of the glass making it appear that the glass is crying so they persisted by persistence we arrive at perfection how rare are surviving pieces by ravenscroft then how valuable are they there are certainly no more than 15 intact sealed pieces of ravenscroft around the last one to sell was a positbolt that was 15 years ago went for 110 000 pounds wow so in terms of the history of british glass making then how critical is ravenscroft it all starts here this is the foundation of the british glass industry from henceforth we have our own unique material which for at least a century afterwards nobody else made we're the only people pick it up and ping british lead crystal well if these were glasses we would raise a glass to ravencroft wouldn't we well i'm going to anyway cheers george [Music] so it's a wonderful thing i absolutely love it i i must say i've never seen anything like this on the roadshow and when we look at it it's actually a very complicated jigsaw it's quite easy to do but once you've done it and you start reading about it it's really quite a puzzle in itself but first of all what about you where'd you fit in with this uh when i was a child and went to stay with my grandparents this was something that i was given to do really from the age of about nine or ten and when i got into my early twenties she gave it to me and i've kept it ever since oh that's wonderful we can see down here a date and i think that says 1807 and what's happening in this puzzle is that these children are being led through a path aren't they as you put the puzzle together the path becomes clear so they go through this gate the gate of languages so it's presumably learning to read and write i suppose they're going through all sorts of trials and tribulations and they have to keep themselves on this central path up the middle don't they yeah so this is a kind of educational toy isn't it of the sort that perhaps we wouldn't give to our children now i mean it's it's quite a moralistic game yeah i think and in the end can you see they end up this thing called the temple of truth and it's on the hill of science and then what's great is that you also have the box in its original form a wooden box with a printed paper wrapper on the top i think it's a an interesting piece because it tells us something about childhood 200 years ago and it's a really interesting period of childhood in about 1800 up until about 1800 children really weren't thought of anything more than small adults towards the end of the 18th century the beginning of the 19th century we get this whole idea of childhood as being some special kingdom and children should perhaps be dealt with differently and receive an education and perhaps even be given toys and a whole market springs up of toys and games and books for children does it have a value i think it does certainly because you've kept it in beautiful condition and also very importantly you've kept the box i think this is going to fetch 800 to 1000 pounds at auction goodness is it goodness it's so tiny small but perfectly formed i love it lovely thank you very much well this is a really nice example of a quintessential colonial australian parlor or desk piece this was a trophy or an heirloom that was handed down to us from our great great uncle this was made i would say between 1870 and 1880 okay and it's made from an egg which you probably know is an emu egg yes on the egg itself you've got a very fine cameo one like this in auction would be estimated at six to eight hundred pounds really josh [Music] you've come to stone owner rather wet day today miserable with this ball yeah which obviously means something to you yeah so what's the story it was given this to me by a late friend he probably from the charity shop do you know what he paid for it ten pound so what we've got we got a bronze bowl here with these very decorative champlain enamel panels running around the outside of the hexagonal shaped body yeah it looks like late ming right but actually it's not lightning it's honoring that period but it's not from that period date wise we're looking at 18th more like 19th century from china value-wise two to three hundred pounds sorry for a tanner not that retaining quite a good investment and a nice way to remember your friend that's a tinder lighter it's definitely made by twig because it's got twig written on it bit of a giveaway that one i'd put that about 17 70 1780. yeah so where did you find your tinder lighter i used to go to various car boot cells i said how much and they said 20 pound that's a cigarette lighter this is made out of steel yeah does it work look at that how much did you cough up for that one ten pounds okay yeah i could see that making 20 or 30 pounds yeah now let's address this one shall we say 700 pounds good investment so this is one of the largest and most puzzling pictures i've seen on the antiques roadshow recently there are two questions really that come to mind firstly who painted it and secondly what earth is going on in this picture any ideas well as to who painted it and know what's going on it's a complete mystery i mean i look at this painting every morning when i wake up and every night when i go to sleep and every time i look at it i get new ideas about it well it is the sort of painting is that the more you look at it the more you see i mean i'll tell you what i see i see a figure here in the middle turn to their right the hand is in the pocket with the thumb here and they're in an interior of some kind maybe i mean on the wall you have this image here and i may be going completely mad but this to me looks like there's two figures with a shield and a spear and so how did you come by it i bought that in an auction in london in 1982 i only bought it because it was big it was colorful it was interesting and it was i'm quite certain very cheap so the only clue that we really have is a tiny label on the reverse which says the property of e m fry and jane drew they were very prominent and respected 20th century modernist architects and they were right in the middle of that sort of bohemian artistic circle so they would have hang around with all these sorts of friends barbara hepburn ben nicholson winifred and henry moore they were all part of that same friendship group so presumably this was painted by someone who they knew well infuriated me they didn't sign it but it must be painted by someone good so obviously it's very difficult to give evaluation on the painting where you don't know who the artist is so i suppose i should probably value it as a decorative picture and i think along those lines if this were to come up at auction it would probably sell for figure in the region of a thousand to 1500 pounds the trick now is to find out actually who did paint it well hopefully in time we'll we'll manage to find out who paints it but for the meantime it it remains a mysterious picture a mystery well thank you for bringing it in you're very welcome thank you well it's got to be probably the wettest day of the year so far so it's just as well you've arrived with a really good waterproof wristwatch yeah a rolex submariner yeah now before i ask you all about it i'm just going to tell you one or two things lovely this is the submariner date and was introduced in 1967 right and it had the word submariner written in red which is why collectors today call it the red submariner right nine ten years later all that writing was in white when did you get this it was my dad's watch right he bought it for himself in 1972 when i was seven and me my mum my dad and my brother went to birmingham to buy it my dad passed away in october and he gave it to me a couple of months before he passed away it means absolutely everything to me it's part of my dad very very special watch that isn't and and will be forever good watch collectors particularly rolex collectors are really let's say pedantic yeah and within that 10-year period this watch was made with six different types of dial right but the important thing to see is that yours has feet first the first three dials it was meters first right and we refer to those as marks one two three right yours is a mark four dial right it's the first of the three different dials with feet first okay it's a lovely watch and this looks like the original invoice and receipt yep that's right yeah 132 pounds 32 pounds a lot of money we've got two straps here because this clearly is not the original so he had the straps changed yeah yeah he had it serviced a few times the reason i think that this could be the original strap or one that was fitted with it's quite simply because you've got a date on there okay and it says 271 right second quarter of 1971 right and this might well have been another strap that was changed some years later and this one's a bit later 4 72 so obviously made later than the watch was bought fantastic to have those two straps and on their own they're worth a chunk of money anyway submariner one of a 10-year production with a mark iv dial with the receipt and the straps and i hope you guys are going to be really really pleased with this it's going to be around the 20 000 mark you happy with that so it's something that you've obviously loved and you're going to keep forever aren't you and it was your dad's and i think that's a lovely lovely lovely story and a great inheritance my dad he left this program and he would have been very proud to see it on here but uh he wouldn't have cared what it was worth really it was his watch and yeah he would have liked the idea that it was worth some money but would have meant nothing he was just giving it to me or my brother people may recognize these as fractals and they decorated student bed sits from the 1970s into the 80s and beyond so did you have these up in your student bedside no i didn't i inherited these from my auntie and she was given these by professor amanda brock okay so we're talking about professor benoit mandelbrot born in 1924 died in 2010 and a world renowned mathematician and his mandelbrot set that he developed his algebraic formula really has applications across everything across the universe from sort of mathematics through to computing through to the chaos theory believe it or not financial markets and even technology his discovery really changed the world yes yeah fantastic i believe a basic understanding of this is you take a number you feed it through his algebraic formula and you get an output another number and then you feed it back through constantly constant iterations as i believe he called it and he began to see pictures building up in this algebra was something that he said and he used computers to map the results and map the results of feeding these numbers through and taking the output and feeding it back through again to create these incredible patterns which in 1975 he called fractals the closer you magnify the closer you get the more detail you see and that is infinite it goes on forever you brought quite a lot of different things here uh with you today and obviously quite a lot of it we can't get out because of the terrible terrible weather which is doing its best to prevent it you've got these pieces that were printed out here with the mathematics underneath you've got larger versions in here and larger versions framed as a graphic designer and now web developer i love them they have a fascination not just with the figures but as the actual imagery as well so we've got inkjetol.matrix printhouse let's assume let's be positive i am an optimist they were produced by him they were directly connected to him so i think you've got about sort of 25 to 30 inside this folder my question would be would a mathematician or a software developer pay 500 pounds for one of those a piece of mandelbrot's own work by mandelbrot himself i think they would so if you've got 25 to 30 plus a few other bits in the folio as well then my next question was would they pay a thousand pounds for one of those to hang on their wall i think they would so that means we're probably looking at 25 maybe even over 30 000 pounds but you've got a lot more work to do before then you need cast iron proof that these are from and by mandelbrot that's going to be quite difficult to to acquire but would be interesting finding out proving the true origin of an item or its provenance can often mean the difference between hundreds or thousands when it comes to its value and we all like a good challenge especially when it comes to our game [Music] so we're playing basic better best this week the theme is pearls and shells and i've got to work out from this which is the most valuable down to the least valuable so tell us all about it so we often think of pearls from oysters and mussels and mussels and mussels so pearls come from mussels as well they do okay but you also get pearls from gastropods or sea snails and clams and they are incredibly rare let's just be clear how the pearl is created it's a reaction to an irritation exactly it is a foreign body that's got inside and they try and get rid of that foreign body if they can't get rid of it they will protect itself by forming a pearl sac around the irritant and that becomes the pearl these ones have fibrous crystalline structures perpendicular to the surface and so you'll see a flame and have any of these got that yes so i want to show you with this one here for instance if i shine the torch you will see this flame this fibrous flame and that's what you're looking for the one at the end there is called the mellow mellow that's a mellow mellow pearl or it is sometimes called the baler shale because if you see it actually looks like you can bail out the water from the canoe and it's found in the vietnamese waters and then you've got the clam they can grow to quite a substantial size and again that has that flame it's very rare and then this is some people say conch i call it conch and that is a delicacy in the caribbean so you've got the caribbean the philippines and vietnam wow they're fabulous they really are fabulous they look amazing they really and i love that all those different rosy yeah these are so exquisite so talk me through what we're aiming for here so you're ranging from 10 000 pounds to 35 000 pounds for one wow i must just mention that you cannot easily take these in and out of the countries they all must have a society's license and that is a protection against endangered species so where do we begin i mean this is the largest so i mean the temptation is to go for this being the best and then this is beautiful but it's pretty teeny weeny it's all about the lustre okay and the fire well i know the one from the what you're calling the conch shell that's the one that seemed to set you on fire most joey so i'm going to say basic better best yeah we've no idea is it that's fair to say is that we are really any idea 100 right yo that never happens well but look tell us tell us why then i think the fact that you got it right is an indication that these are beautiful so that is worth 35 000 that's worth just that teeny tiny and then this one and so this one is worth 25 000 wow and the clam that's worth about 10 000. i don't know about you i thought that was just fabulous they're so exquisite and i knew nothing about all this now i was pretty pleased that i guessed the pearls correctly but joey had a little surprise up her sleeve and another challenge for us i want to show you that gosh that's actually like a little kumquat so that is a mellow mellow pulp and that is over 100 carats and you can see why they're sometimes called the sun pearl there's only about 10 in the world of this size do you want to make a guess of how much this might be any guesses 50 000 65 000 100 oh we're all going for the 100 um i could be two hundred thousand pounds wow if not more carrying that round in your pocket wow [Music] well in case you were wondering why i've set them up in this particular sequence i've set them up chronologically from the first piece which is made at the end of the victorian period to the last piece that was actually made in the 1930s so there's a 50-year period of time passing by between each piece so that gives you a sense of the time of it now tell me a little bit more about the items well these pieces of jewellery were given to my wife on our wedding day by my mother and she indicated that they were given to her on her wedding day by her mother and because there was no daughter in the family it was suggested that should we have any daughters going forward that they could be jewellery could be given to that particular daughter on her wedding day so heat of a very busy day exciting and wonderful and someone hands you a bag what did you think when you examine them even briefly i was taken back very surprised um had no idea at all but obviously because it was my wedding day my mind was on other things so put it back in the box gave it to my mother-in-law and then got them from her when i came back from my honeymoon now if we start with the first piece made at the end of the victorian period this is called a crescent brooch mounted in gold set in silver graduated diamonds from the principal stone in the middle which weighs probably around about a carrot to the little diamond at the back it's a very very typical design at the end of the victorian period the next one along which i which i like is called a target brooch and there you can see just a cluster of stones with the big one in the middle surrounded by smaller white stones this pin is set with a very large green stone and white stones that was made in around about 1910 now what do you think the green stone is i thought it was an emerald i wish it was oh okay it was an absolute fortune it would be worth you know i don't know a hundred thousand pounds but it's glass moving on to this one made in about 1915 you can see it's also set with white stones now what did you say you had hoped that one was hoped it was an emerald that is okay and it's a super stone from colombia that's where the best ones come from it's a really lovely rich bright green color and it's in a diamond frame that's deco art deco is that rectangular geometric linear construction okay it's all good news it is this one is a clip i think that you know don't you that you can actually dismantle it yes to form a pair they're all diamonds again that therefore splits down the middle and you wear one on each lapel of your jacket these are lovely lovely pieces now we're going to move on to the values your pin 10 pounds the diamond bow here um it's small it's pretty twelve hundred pounds fifteen hundred pounds the clip broke that is probably worth around three thousand pounds okay okay a diamond crescent brooch like that one would make between three and four thousand pounds okay three and four okay okay i'm finished yet the diamond target brooch with a a nice big diamond in the middle surrounding dams i quite like that i can see that making three and a half to four thousand pounds now this magnificent colombian stone in the middle that's real that's worth five or six thousand good jobs incredible this is a really wonderful comprehensive group of 19th and 20th century jewelry so if you were to sell it 15 to 20 000 pounds it's just just blown away it's it's just been tucked away in a draw i mean we thought they were sort of real diamonds but had no idea of the value thank you very much incredible we came really to find out more about the items because we knew so little about them but to find out the value of it is just a speechless it's staggering that something was almost quite casually given away on a wedding day you know to find out the history and everything about them and what they are is just just staggering it i only wish my mother was here now to to say well why did you really give them to us it's just incredible [Music] here on the roadshow we're no strangers to items that evoke the nation's colonial past british rule over the indian subcontinent popularly known as the raj saw some 300 million indian citizens governed by a small elite from 1858 to 1947 senior officials were dispatched from britain to oversee every aspect of the nation's affairs from education to law order and the armed forces and a newly discovered set of medals provide fresh insight into that period wow what a day i love medals and what a selection you've got who are these people and who are they to you this is my grandfather sir charles cleveland this is his elder brother henry francis cleveland and this is their maternal grandfather's medals do you know anything about what these people did charles my grandfather during the war years 14 to 18 he was head of the secret service in india and he was responsible for breaking one of the spy rings between berlin and india wow you can see why you got so many medals henry was in the indian medical service okay and he became honorary um surgeon general to the viceroy apart from that i don't know a great deal and you know anything about this gentleman not a lot no three incredibly distinguished careers do you know what all of these medals are not all of them know so that is a lovely group of medals from the indian period of raj but almost at the beginning of queen victoria's reign okay now if we look at this one over here he is a soldier who's also fought in india he has this which is called the the most eminent order of the indian empire then this thing on the end here is the delhi durbar medal and that's the one for 1911 so when george v came to the throne he was emperor of india and they threw what is known as a der bar so like a big parade and those men who were on parade that day they were given what is known as the durbar medal this chap is a policeman he has a kings police medal but it's edward vii so it's a very rare then he has the earlier derbar and then the 1911 delhi derba medal as well he's a sir he is a a knight of the most excellent order of the british empire and he's also wow a knight of the most eminent order of india and that is an absolutely gorgeous thing look at that i mean red enamel gold just beautiful now i know you haven't had them very long and they're a family heirloom but they do have value so as the three frames stand and as a collection 30 000 pounds [Laughter] absolutely fantastic thank you so much i mean that genuinely that really did make my day well thank you very much thank you the valuation was extraordinary well i never thought that at all we've always had my grandfather's medals but to have the other two sets of medals and link the family together was just as important for me today it's been fantastic this isn't a job this isn't a job at all this is this is just me enjoying all of my hobbies all in one go and what a collection that was fantastic medals there that you never ever see only in books and there they all are a whole family's worth of medals brilliant what a great day what a beautiful picture alpine scene on all painting obviously it's signed down here peter ellenshaw uh 1949. yes that's right um he's not an artist you see very often here in the uk but very very popular in the usa and what's interesting about him he's not known as for being an oil painter particularly but he's very very famous in the film industry how did you come by well it was actually a present from the artist to my mother i was a wedding gift in 1953 when she was working at pinewood and believe he was actually working there at the same time so they obviously knew each other well enough for him to give her a wedding present how nice and what was your mum doing there at the studios well she was um a secretary and one of her sort of claims to fame she always told us as kids was that she typed up the arthur askey's duties um but she was also quite friendly with the camera crew and i had this picture of her here when she was working what a beauty is that in the grounds i believe so yes by the lake by the lake i think i love that photograph good thank you great ellen shaw left school quite early he dropped out of school and started working in the film industry as an artist over the years he got better and better and he became what's known as a matte artist which is somebody who does background scenes for the film industry so if you didn't want to take the whole film crew out into this mountain the scene you could have used it and then superimposed live images in front of it and the famous one he did was for disney which was mary poppins in 1965 and you i think everybody will remember mary you know with her umbrella floating across the london skyline and he did all the paintings of the city of london so you've had it for all this time you like it it's up on the wall it has been on the wall and it has been in the loft and it's now back on the wall [Laughter] now i'd love to see if it had been a production mat you know that had been used on disney you've been talking about thousands right but we're not no so to let you down gently if you ever did want to sell it i would suggest it be sold in the states and i think it'd fetch between i don't know 1500 and two thousand pounds all right thank you very nice but uh it obviously gives you joy it's a lovely story yeah well thank you very much no it's not going anywhere i'm always intrigued to learn more about the family history in the locations we visit in the case of the stoners who've been here for over 800 years theirs is the story of a catholic family who endured and survived the violent persecution of henry viii's protestant reformation in the 16th century the current heir william stoner told me more for hundreds of years the catholics not only were not allowed to continue to practice their faith but it was more than that they weren't allowed to be educated members of our family had to to be sent at a very young age to france for their education and wouldn't come back until they're 18. you weren't um allowed to own horses because you could get around the country too quickly to cause trouble you were taxed triple catholic taxes were had to be paid and that carried on for very long for a very long time and at what point do you feel as as as a catholic family that have lived here for hundreds of years that equality was finally achieved the main change was in 1829 when the catholic emancipation act came in which enabled catholics to vote uh to be educated although not actually to go to university until the 1880s and they weren't taxed anymore but it did carry on for for a long time and do you think the fact that your house has remained unchanged over the years is that in part a result of the fact that you're absolutely you had to pay all those taxes no absolutely during medieval times up until the reformation the family had had really prospered they were doing very very well uh trade law many different areas and i think that if they had converted they weren't penalized and hadn't had to pay all these taxes probably the house will have been pulled down and some palladian um building would have been put up so actually this is the you know the wonderful legacy in a way of what happened that we still have this lovely old building well fascinating to hear the history of your family 850 years in this one house you're very welcome thank you for coming [Music] so why do you have these giltwood pieces these were purchased by my mother predominantly she was an avid collector of many different things these just some of the examples of what she bought well let's start with these two figures a pair of angels they're made of lime wood and the carver would have started with a block of wood and probably would have made some pencil marks on the block and started cutting away and then working them into the figures pretty much that you see here with all the the detail to them they then would have had a layer of gesso on them almost like a primer to give a smooth surface so that they could then be gilded and that's why it's called giltwood look at the wormholes lime is very soft and pliable to carve it's also probably quite soft to eat if you're a woodworm now if we were to sort of break one in half the interior would be like honeycomb so how do you rate the quality of these figures in terms of the carving they're a lot better than i can do but i would say they're not entirely detailed if you look at the faces i would say not magical if you see what i mean i'm in agreement with you the faces exactly as you've said they don't really have much detail to them and then the wings and the drapery of the robes is a little bit stiff and sort of lacking in fluidity and then look at those hands they're quite large they're on the chunky side aren't they they were made in the 18th century and in italy but provincially made rather than by a master carver the bases are later so it might suggest that these were decorative elements of a much larger design so not all great news on these pieces but let's now have a look of this this is a really unusual i'm going to call it an oddity i've always assumed it's come off something bigger and it's been then mounted my feeling is that it was made in this form one thing that points to this also being carved in italy and a particular place in italy is this orangey terracotta bowl under the gilding very suggestive of venice and so all i can imagine is that a very rich venetian nobleman would have this right hand carved symbolizing strength and then the ring symbolizing continuity to assert his power i would say that this dates from the late 17th century let's go back to these two angels not necessarily sort of great news on these but still a thousand pounds in that condition this is the bed and then this it's utterly intriguing and i think it's worth two thousand pounds at auction okay very good [Music] well it's not every day i turn up at the antiques roadshow and mistake it for a boot fair and that is kind of what i'm looking at here why are you here with your stalls of decanters this is my great uncle graham's collection he died earlier this year and he's left more than 300 decanters in a small two-bedroom flat and having inherited all these things i was wondering what to do with them so who to ask but andy mcconnell bring him on there's some lovely things here actually we've got good condition no cracks they're the oldest ones so that's 1780 eat british there's a tantalus with three decanters in it which is a locking frame became patent good quality nice i mean the best piece in terms of value is this one this is a wmf um claret jug wrong stopper but with its right stopper that's a thousand quid at auction but you put in a turkey into it and that becomes 300 quid auction from what i can see here 1000 quid or something but you know as far it's really ironic but i've been getting a lot more fun out of these than you have come on uncle graham [Music] what we obviously have here is a wooden model of a boat but it's not just any old wooden model is it it has a story attached to it and i want you to explain the basis of that story to me the family tradition is that it was built by peter the great during his visit to london in 1698 and a family ancestor was working at the docks at deptford during that period right okay well that's pretty incredible because what you're telling me is this boat was built by the tsar of russia peter the great came to the the dockyard at the invitation of the king basically to learn naval architecture right literally mastering the art of of boat design right so this boat ties in with that story in a way could he have had a hand in building this well it's a difficult one because looking at this boat it looks to me to be perhaps the boat off of a larger boat perhaps the boat off of a naval frigate right and in which case this would have been um powered by oars and we can see that there are vestiges of paint work on this boat particularly in the inside that also suggests to me that it's perhaps probably 18th century rather than 70. let's put a price on it as a model of a boat that was made in the 18th century probably not by the navy i don't think but maybe as just a working model and i think it's probably worth a thousand pounds okay but if it belonged to peter the great who knows the sky's the absolute limit yes but i'm going to temper that yes for now and thank you for bringing it along it's a great welcome that's fantastic thank you so i read this ladies autobiography about a year ago and it she inspired me so much that i booked a flight in a tiger moth which i know she trained in and one of the many planes that she flew for the air transport auxiliary the ata so who is she to you well she's um jackie mogridge which is my mother and she was born in south africa and wanted to learn to fly basically to show off to her brothers and uh she and not only got her private pilot's license she was the first woman to do a parachute jump in south africa wow yeah she couldn't do commercial um college at south africa so she had to come to england lucy she came over here to trade to whitney aeronautical college in oxford a year a week sort of talking in 1938 so just before that just before she had one year in america college the only girl learning to fly and wall broke out and she wrote to the raf and said i'm going to join the raf and they said oh no no we don't take women fighter pilots so she joined the waff and she became a radar operator and it wasn't until all our pilots our raf male pilots were being shot down and then suddenly there was a absolute need for these ferry pilots to ferry all kinds of planes from the factories to the operational centers to the fighter pilots so that they could take off and it was they used all the men they called it ata air transport auxiliary ancient entire dam and tanked um and they used them up and they then thought well we need other pilots more pilots they even resorted to women and that was my mother's chance well that was a great time for women to actually have the opportunity to fly for their country and we've got a great photograph of her in front of one of the planes that she flew and we have a book here which i always think is like a bluffer's guide to flying it's nicknamed the blue book these are her ata fairy pilot's notes and there literally is a card for each plane that they flew and it said all the takeoff speeds and all the landing speeds that you needed to know to fly you didn't get trained individually on each plane they had to literally pick one up on the hoof what happened to her at the end of the war did she manage to get any uh commercial pilot jobs yes once she'd left the war she'd actually joined the raf volunteer reserves which was working weekends which is this little badge here yeah and then while she was there she got her raf wings but then while she was there she was looking for jobs and eventually she got her channel airways job so what does your mother mean to you and what personal stories you remember with you and your sister well yes she she didn't talk a lot about the wall but she definitely um used to say if you jumped into bed with her in the morning she would say do you want to fly a spitfire she said let's pretend the duvet is the cloud clouds we said hold the joystick and she said this big five such a ladies plane said very delicate she said to fly and her favorite and she just said if you want to turn right you just think you want to turn right and don't move just think and it will turn right now we sort of come to the the very difficult part and i know this is a fraction of the collection that you have of putting some kind of value on this and i know you would never get rid of it but ata or air transport auxiliary items very rarely come up for sale and ata pilots who are female you hardly ever ever see i think if this came up for auction there'd be an absolute frenzy and it could easily make between 30 and 40 000 because she was well arguably one of the most well-known girls and you'd argue the most notable at a girl it's a pleasure [Music] we've seen some remarkable things here on the road as we always do but my favorite you know what i'm going to say don't you is this 200 000 pound gobstopper i never knew things like this existed until today joe hardy's not looking for the antiques proto team [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Antiques Roadshow

Views: 42,403

Rating: 4.8652849 out of 5

Keywords: Antiques Roadshow, Antiques Roadshow UK, Antiques Roadshow Season 43

Id: ZJe3_BECwi0

Length: 57min 54sec (3474 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021