Halls Fine Art

An RAF Second World War brown leather Type C flying helmet with goggles estimated at £400-500 in the Halls (23% buyer’s premium) Books, Medals & Militaria Auction on August 21 soared to £3400.

Designed for the Suffragette movement by Sylvia Pankhurst, a 19-piece tea service was the star at Halls’ (20%) buyer’s premium) sale in Shrewsbury.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £2000, including a pen and ink wash by Paul Sandby.

This Arts & Crafts-style necklace, alternating moonstone and chalcedony cabochons set in scrolling silver mounts, is the unmistakable work of the London jeweller Sybil Dunlop (1889-1968).

Before he learnt to paint, Sheffield-born artist Joe Scarborough (b.1938) was a laboratory assistant at Batchelors, the processed food company, then a face worker at the Thorpe Hesley colliery.

The biggest literary impression in a recent Shrewsbury sale that combined medals and militaria with well over 200 lots of books and ephemera was made by poets – famous and otherwise.

Early English oak and yew and ceramics from St Petersburg to Stoke-on-Trent were features of a 250-lot sale which left auctioneer Jeremy Lamond in a quietly upbeat mood after Halls’ (23% buyer’s premium) summer sale at Shrewsbury.

A 17th century oak panel marking the rebuilding of one of the best-known dwellings on the Chester Rows sold at auction last week for £4600.

Eardley Norton, who is listed at 49 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell between 1762- 94, enjoyed a reputation as a skilled mechanic and the maker of complex timepieces, sometimes with musical and astronomical movements.

Characteristic etching is best-seller in appealing single-owner mix of works on paper.

Almost wholly reliant on slavery, the tobacco industry was the subtle target of British Abolitionists 50 years before Britain outlawed slavery and nearly a century before the American Civil War.