Cumbria

"Lot 132. A 19th century mahogany box containing a quantity of 19th century photographs: 15 small images of stonework on metal, 50 images of buildings on metal, 70 small images of buildings on metal and 14 of buildings on card. Box poor condition, many images poor condition."

By and large the Cumbrian antiques trade were counting their blessings last week after escaping the worst of the floods that engulfed the region.

ISAAC ROSENBERG had produced just two small pamphlet collections of verse and a play before he was killed in action on April Fool’s Day, 1918, but his reputation is now established as one of the finer war poets.

GOOD standard furniture sold well enough at Mitchell's (15% buyer's premium) July 15-16 sale and included a locally made Jacobean piece.

FAIRS two weekends running at opposite ends of England make for a busy programme for the Harrogate organisers Galloway, beginning with their Naworth Castle Antiques Fair at Brampton, near Carlisle in Cumbria on August 20 to 22.

A FOUR-page, colour illustrated feature in the April 25 issue of The Sunday Times Magazine will have done nothing to harm the saleroom prospects of a collection of 13 love letters written in the period January 1881-June 1882 by the actress Lillie Langtry, “the adored pin-up whose affairs rocked Victorian Britain”, and on May 13 Cumbrian auctioneers Mitchells of Cockermouth sold the lot for £5000.

RETRIEVED by a porter from a box of kitchenalia sent for sale from Northumberland, this early 18th century Staffordshire slipware mug proved the highlight of the sale conducted by H&H King of Carlisle on June 7.

TWO BOX files of Ford manufacturers’ catalogues, advertising material and other ephemera of 1920s and ’30s motoring interest brought a bid of £1550 in a May 19 sale held by Thomson Roddick & Medcalf and the only other lot to reach four figures was a collection of some 370 postcards relating almost entirely to Ulverston and Furness.

GOOD-quality mahogany and oak furniture took most of the better prices in Mitchells' (15% buyer's premium) 1566-lot May 13-14 auction which totalled £325,000.

RONALD W. Coleby of Houghton in Cumbria, who died last year, just a week after completing the memoir of his wife that had occupied much of his time in recent years, became a full-time bookseller in 1972, specialising in hunting, shooting and, above all, fishing.

THE chances of finding good-quality tribal material in the remoter parts of Cumbria may be slim but a local vendor furnished Mitchells' (15% buyer's premium) 1294-lot March 4-5 outing with a 19th century African carved wooden headrest.

NORTH Yorkshire-based organisers Galloway Antiques Fairs continue a busy summer from August 29 to 31 with their fair at Naworth Castle, Brampton in Cumbria. Space limits this event to just 28 dealers but they obviously do business as a good many of them have been with Naworth since the first in 1996.

THE move towards better prices for silver took Cumbrian auctioneers Penrith Farmers' & Kidd's rather by surprise at their 1125-lot quarterly catalogue sale on March 26 (15% buyer's premium inc. VAT) – although it was a wine-related item which did the honours and these do have their own buoyant market.

WORK has started on restoring the Victorian listed building occupied by Cumbria Auction Rooms, in Lowther Street, Carlisle to its former glory. H&H King, the Fine Art, Antiques and Furniture division of the H&H Group, will temporarily be conducting auctions from the old Furniture Hall at Borderway Mart, Rosehill, Carlisle, during the month-long first phase of refurbishment, due to end in the third week of May.

ONE of the more expensive lots in this Cumbrian sale at Thomson Roddick & Medcalf on 6 November was an 1881 [Philadelphia] limited edition of the Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman. An ex-library copy in well worn cloth and bearing a typescript note that it was bought “...at the sale of the library of the late Lord Rosebery”, it made £920. Some copies are signed, but the catalogue referred only to a manuscript limitation statement.

THE private collection of the late Lake District hoteliers Brian Sack and Francis Coulston provided some choice pickings for collectors with a decorative bent but a limited budget at Thomson, Roddick and Medalf on 9 July.

Buying art as an investment has always been a perilous business. Back in the 1920s during the so-called Etching Boom speculating collectors were prepared to pay hundreds of pounds – ie more than the price of an average London house – for single prints by ultra- fashionable artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey.

STRONG private interest from well beyond the local area meant the trade, drawn mainly from the North and across the Border but also including dealers from Kent and as far as Holland, faced stern competition at this 1100-lot Cumbrian sale at Mitchells on 6-7 December.

THIS 582-lot sale at Cumbria Auction Rooms on 25 June was quieter than the Carlisle rooms are used to, a fact which auctioneer Howard Naylor attributed to a strong pound and the way dealers are not buying second rate furniture adding: “It’s all down to quality and condition.”

Foot and Mouth continues to ravage the businesses of Cumbria, but local private buyers and dealers had the capital to make a sizeable contribution to this monthly sale on the county’s west coast at Mitchells, Cockermouth.