Antiques Roadshow: 40 Years of Great Finds. Paul Atterbury
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as an exhibition centre. Both shows had a ticketed attendance of 2,000, and both days produced some extraordinary and unexpected items, many of which were only indirectly connected to Australia’s history. Among the most exciting was this black teddy bear. The catastrophic loss of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 was commemorated in many ways, but one of the more unusual was the decision by the German toy maker, Steiff, to produce a black, grieving teddy bear as a memorial to those who had lost their lives, especially children. A small number were made, perhaps around 600 in different sizes, and the bears were distinguished by their black mohair fur and red-rimmed eyes, the latter to underline the grief affecting people around the world after the loss of the ship. It might have been more logical for Steiff to have produced a white polar bear toy, but it was believed at the time that a black, grieving bear would have greater appeal, and be more directly sympathetic to the disaster and its global impact.
TEDDY BEAR FEVER
Steiff, a Stuttgart company set up by Margarete Steiff, in 1880, was well known internationally as the maker of the world’s first jointed plush bears, invented by Margarete’s nephew Richard in 1902 and introduced at the Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903. Hitherto, most animal models and toys had been presented on four legs, but Richard’s breakthrough was to design a bear that stood up on its hind legs. In 1907, Steiff sold over 970,000 bears and teddy bear fever had gripped the world. By 1912 the teddy bear, named after the US President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, had become one of the world’s most popular toys, with manufacturers in many countries following Steiff’s lead. However, Steiff had carefully developed and maintained its reputation as the maker of the best bears, underlined by the famous metal button label to be found on the bear’s ear, which had been introduced in 1904.
Early Steiff bears can be valuable, with the best examples fetching £100,000 or more, but everything is dependent upon the condition. Most bears have, understandably, been much played with, often by more than one generation of children in a family, and so very few have survived in anything that might resemble their original, mint condition. It is not known how many Titanic bears were sold or how the public, and children, responded to a toy with so sad a story. It seems likely that the few survivors in good condition may have spent much of their lives at the back of cupboards or the bottom of trunks, forgotten from one generation to the next.
The Titanic bear shown at Melbourne was the first to be seen on the Roadshow. Others had appeared on the market – in 1990 a bear in excellent condition had sold at Christie’s in London for £91,000. This gave expert Hilary Kay a benchmark figure for the Melbourne bear, which was brought in by a teddy bear and doll enthusiast who had first seen the bear some years before when she sent one of her bears to a restorer. When the work had been done, the restorer had sent her a photograph of her bear seated beside a black Titanic bear, something she had heard about but never seen. A year later, the restorer had called her to ask if she was interested in buying the black bear. Realising that she would probably never get another chance, and that it might be the only one in Australia, she agreed to buy it for $40,000. So, when she came to the Roadshow, she really wanted to find out whether she had paid the right price, and hoped that it might now be worth $60,000.
When the owner had recovered from her shock at hearing the $200,000 valuation, Hilary asked her if the bear had a name.
‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘I hadn’t called him anything, he just sat on top of the cupboard.’
In 2012, to mark the centenary of the disaster, Steiff reissued the Titanic bear in a limited edition.
A small wooden cupboard, surmounted by a carved recumbent lion, was an unexpected find when the Roadshow visited Poole in 1998. Roy Butler, the militaria specialist on duty that day, knew exactly what it was. ‘It was a great day for me. I’d heard about Waterloo chests and seen photographs of three, but I’d never seen and handled a real one until the owner brought this one to me.’
The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was an event of crucial importance. It saw the final defeat of Napoleon, ending twenty-three years of war between Britain and France, and also made possible the shaping of modern Europe. In a famously long and hard-fought battle, the French army was overcome by a coalition of British, Dutch, Belgian and Prussian armies under the command of the Duke of Wellington. The outcome was, as Wellington famously remarked, ‘a close run thing’.
Soon, the battlefield, and the buildings and other features on it, became a site of pilgrimage, attracting visitors from many countries. Booths were set up to sell souvenirs and relics from the conflict. A large elm tree, under which Wellington sheltered while his armies were readying for battle, was a particularly popular spot, and visitors flocked there to touch the tree and take away pieces of it. Soon, so much bark had been stripped off by souvenir hunters that the tree began to die. In 1818, an enterprising Englishman called John Children bought the tree from the Belgian farmer in whose field it was growing. From its timber, a throne was made for George IV as well as a number of chests and other, smaller souvenirs. Roy Butler explained that all the chests seemed to be similar, with two doors set with laurel wreaths and the lion on top representing the Lion Mound on the battlefield, above the word Waterloo.
The owner had acquired the chest from her father who had owned it for years and never liked it. Not realising its significance, he had been about to consign it to the coalshed when she had rescued it. It had been restored and she began to research its history. She discovered the connection with the Battle of Waterloo but, with no idea of the cupboard’s rarity and importance, was very surprised when Roy valued it for £25,000.
One of the challenges facing Roadshow experts is the need to be aware of changes in fashion, taste and patterns in collecting, and the resulting fluctuation in values caused by these changes. Values quoted ten, twenty or thirty years ago, while accurate at the time, may now be significantly different, and they can have gone up and down.
The area most affected by these changes is furniture, and there have been major drops in the values of most eighteenth and nineteenth century pieces. One of the most important examples of nineteenth century furniture to be seen on the Roadshow appeared at Wisley in 2003. This was a magnificent credenza, or dining room sideboard – one of the best pieces of Victorian furniture that John Bly had ever seen. He pointed out the lavish style and decoration, made from over twenty different types of wood, and with details in ivory, and said that such a piece was a triumph of the cabinet maker’s art and was either a special commission or was made for one the great international exhibitions.
The owner said it had been given to her as a wedding present about ten years before by a great aunt who had emigrated to South Africa, leaving the credenza in storage for twenty or thirty years. She said, ‘It just arrived on the doorstep well after our wedding, I had no idea what I was getting.’
John explained that the key thing about important furniture, particularly of the nineteenth century, was the identity of the designer or maker. He went on, ‘This was a period when design and craftsmanship were all-important, a time when traditional skills were being augmented by the intelligent use of machinery. There was also a demand among the newly wealthy industrialists and others for the best, and this is the best.’
The owner had been able to establish that the original owners were the Baird family from Kelso in Scotland, and their initials inlaid on the front of the credenza matched the initials on the still-surviving gateway to their former house. George Alexander