Auction News: It’s lights, camera, action as Antiques Road Trip rolls into Cirencester

Famous faces and a TV crew called on a Cotswolds auction house last week, as the Antiques Road Trip made a stop at the salerooms of Moore Allen & Innocent.

The TV crew was filming for an episode of the long-running series, in which celebrities pair off with an antiques expert to find bargains they can sell at auction for a profit.

On Friday, the contest featured poet and Cotswolds resident Pam Ayres who took on her long-suffering ‘radio husband’ Geoffrey Whitehead. The two have been appearing together on the Radio 4 sitcom Potting On for nearly a decade.

They were accompanied by antiques experts Kate Bliss and James Braxton, while the bargains they bought at antiques fairs and arcades were auctioned by Moore Allen’s Philip Allwood, another familiar face to fans of TV antique shows.

“Had a brilliant time making this programme today,” Pam later told her 41,000 Twitter followers. “Such a good gang. Only snag was getting up at 04.15 am. Amazing that I look so dewy-fresh.”

The road trip is broadcast over five consecutive days – Monday to Friday. On Day 1 each contestant is given £200 with which to buy antiques. Each day, the profit is spent on more antiques. The contestant with the biggest surplus at the end of Day Five is declared the winner.

Among Pam’s lots was a stuffed bear, believed to be by the Australian toy maker Fideston, some time between 1917 and 1942. It was similar to a Fideston bear sold by Moore Allen for £200 several years ago. Pam’s though was more well-loved, with wear and tear to the paw pads. It carried an estimate of £100 to £150.

Geoffrey’s hopes lay in a vintage fan-shaped Baccarat Guerlain Shalimar perfume bottle, which his antiques expert partner Kate Bliss hoped might make £30 to £50.

Fans will have to wait until the autumn to see how the pair got on.

Elsewhere in the auction, there were some good results in the auction’s furniture section, where the third-from-last lot made the top price of the day. A Regency mahogany framed two seat salon sofa, the frame with reeded decoration had been expected to achieve between £150 and £250, but the hammer fell at £950.

The penultimate lot, a 19th Century mahogany fold-over card table, also performed well, selling for £680 against a £150 to £200 estimate.

In the jewellery section, an 18 carat gold mounted solitaire diamond pendant sold for £750, while in the garden section a pair of composite stone urns on pedestals with egg and dart decorated rim sold for £700 – comfortably within the £500 to £800 estimate.

A couple of interesting medals attracted a lot of interest: a Victorian naval general service medal with Syria bar awarded to Henry Fowler for operations on the coast of Syria from 10th September to 4th November 1840 and the blockade of Egyptian Ports from September to December 1840 sold for £500 – double the upper estimate – while an Elizabeth II silver police medal for distinguished police service awarded to Frederick A Statham of the Gloucestershire Constabulary sold for £420: well above the £80 to £120 estimate.

In all, more than £50,000 of antiques was bought and sold at the auction, but the gavel-banging was far from over for auctioneer Philip Allwood, who conducted a charity auction at Berkeley Castle that evening.

The annual black-tie dinner of the Nelson Trust, which helps addicts recover from alcohol and drug addiction, was attended by hundreds of supporters.

Among the lots in the charity auction were a day’s shooting with eight guns at the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton Estate, which sold for £10,000, a day’s racing for 20 in an exclusive box in the Princess Royal stand at Cheltenham, which made £4,400, and a week’s hind stalking in Ross-shire, which raised £3,000.