A working life: The auctioneer
September 11, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Two minutes into my tour of Willingham auction house in rural Cambridgeshire, and already I have made a mistake. Among the polished jumble in this tastefully converted old barn is a battered kitchen dresser, an LCD television, a spindly little table known apparently as a “torchère”, an exercise treadmill on its end, five digital radios (boxed) and, ahem, what I thought it would be safe to describe as a “fairly cheapish sofa”.
“That sofa, actually,” Stephen Drake corrects me, a Biro tucked behind his ear, “is a Marks & Spencer sofa, and it’s about six months old. If you’d gone into M&S to buy that it would be about 600 quid. Now it will probably make a hundred.”
Keen to improve my opinion of his stock, he leads me on towards the posher stuff, past wind-up gramophones, reclaimed pews, garden furniture, “… a nice bureau bookcase, partner’s desks, longcase clocks, fine paintings …” He proudly unfurls the list in his rich, sonorous voice, like a man recording a department store commercial. And we haven’t even reached his department yet.
“What I sell is books, militaria, art, collectibles, ceramics, jewellery, coins, ephemera, rugs, all the rest,” he explains, as we enter the adjacent building, where hundreds of these objects are on display. “And that can be a complete minefield. The worst is rugs.”
What’s wrong with rugs? “Well, you see that rug at the end there?” It is at our feet, very worn, but quite a nice old thing. “It’s probably about a hundred years old,” he says. “It’s got a pink-crimson ground; it’s got a central medallion; and it’s got a foliate triple border. That sounds really professional doesn’t it? If you saw that in a catalogue somewhere, you’d think, wow, that’s really good. But estimate it.”
Unprepared, and with no knowledge to draw on, I plump instinctively for £150, before doubling it to £300 in recognition of the item’s age. “Well,” he gathers up the kind of voice you use for letting people down, “I’ve probably estimated that at £50 to £100. But it could make a thousand, or it could make £50. I don’t know … We had a rug here that came out of one of the [Cambridge] colleges. Massive great thing it was, full of holes. I didn’t know how to estimate it, £200 to £400 maybe. And it sold for £9,500 … As the price was going up and up and up, people who were standing on the rug were backing away … You get these things that you just can’t imagine what the price is.”
He sighs, in happy bafflement, eyes gleaming behind his rimless specs, and the irony of his work is there for all to see: though a lifelong fascination with nice objects brought him into auctioneering, it is what Drake does not know about them that makes it so much fun. “I love it,” he says, our tour completed, as we settle down among the next sale’s paintings in the auction house cafe. “Although I’m always nervous before I get up there, shaking like a leaf sometimes. It’s like being on stage really.”
And so it should be. Auction houses make their money by taking a percentage from both buyer and seller, so to keep the saleroom bidding, and its commission rising, the auctioneer has to keep them entertained. “You …
Read the original article at Guardian