The author is a historian and public speaker
Holkham Corridor, 130 miles north-east of London, is the 18th-century house to the earls of Leicester. The primary earl populated his good-looking, four-winged mansion with historic Roman statues and canvasses by Canaletto, Rubens and Van Dyck. Subsequent generations have garnished this opulence.
However in February it was time for a clearout. Tom and Polly, the current earl and countess, offloaded 400 of Holkham’s lesser treasures: “Now we have gadgets there that haven’t been used for one, two, three generations — 100 years — and actually it’s time to say goodbye,” says Tom Leicester. “It’s fairly cathartic.”
Punters paying £20 for a list wandered by Holkham, inspecting a variety that one supplier informed me was, “frankly, a bit skinny”. However importantly, it had selection: Roman marble fragments, 18th- and Nineteenth-century busts, Victorian china, clocks, “mixing high-value items with extra accessible gadgets that seize the spirit of a basic attic sale”, in accordance with the brochure.
Pushed over the previous 50 years by the good public sale homes, and peaking across the flip of the century, attic gross sales have been warmly welcomed by house owners of money-pit historic houses who all of the sudden discovered themselves with proceeds that enabled them to purchase, say, a chunk of up to date artwork so as to add to the ancestral haul — or, no less than, to show up the heating. Held at Fort Howard, Eaton Corridor, Raby Fort, Syon Home and Woburn Abbey, they grew to become a means of offloading “non-core” belongings to consumers excited at securing chattels with a uncommon provenance at an reasonably priced price.
The primary such sale happened when Britain’s Labour authorities in 1974 made a spectacular misjudgment. The seventh earl of Rosebery inherited Mentmore, a Victorian mansion constructed by the Rothschilds and filled with priceless chattels, and supplied it to the nation for £2mn (£18.6mn right this moment), in lieu of 85 per cent property obligation.
Labour forwent the possibility to achieve a surprising and intact museum by way of a tax credit score, and three years later Lord Rosebery instructed Sotheby’s to public sale every little thing inside the home. The Mentmore sale garnered frenzied publicity and made £6mn.
Sotheby’s produced 4 Mentmore catalogues — Work, Furnishings, Porcelain and Works of Artwork — earlier than sneaking in a fifth, Normal Contents of the Home, as one thing of a tidying-up afterthought. However costs achieved for these odds and ends have been astonishingly excessive.
James Miller, for 25 years accountable for Sotheby’s attic gross sales, says: “This didn’t go unnoticed by these with historic homes who had plenty of bog-standard stuff knocking about.” Certainly, when, in 1991, Miller was requested by the house owners of Fort Howard to pick one in all their footage for disposal, he advisable an attic sale as a substitute.
It was all cleverly curated. Fort Howard had achieved fame because the setting for TV collection Brideshead Revisited, primarily based on the Evelyn Waugh novel. Aloysius, a lead character’s teddy bear, grew to become the motif of the sale, and the current urge for food for aristocratic Englishness — recognized and commercialised by Ralph Lauren — was deployed by Sotheby’s advertising division.
The behind-the-scenes actuality of the Fort Howard attic sale was somewhat much less refined; some tons have been hoicked out of their fort cubbyholes on the final minute. Miller remembers how “the ceramics got here out final, have been shoved into an industrial washer, then handed down a line of my assistants, some wielding a hairdryer, others a glue gun”, earlier than being offered on the market.
The important thing to profitable gross sales was discovered to be conserving estimates cheap. Slightly than telling folks they have been anticipated to pay £1,000 for a damaged chair, usually inexperienced consumers have been lured right into a stately setting, the place they have been quickly preventing for a chunk of historical past. Costs flew.
Success meant attic gross sales unfold overseas, particularly to Germany. House owners usually couldn’t afford to dwell in large schlosses, filled with the contents salvaged from former household mansions taken over by communist regimes in japanese Europe. When the prince of Thurn und Taxis died in 1990, after a long time of hedonism, his widow, Gloria, tackled a few of his $500mn money owed with a glorified attic sale, organised by Sotheby’s, of the property in Regensberg, Bavaria.
The Holkham public sale used all of the confirmed attic sale techniques with ability, putting the objects of their historic context and welcoming the general public to see tons in situ. However Holkham is a uncommon profitable reprise of old style auctioneering: the sale was carried out not by Christie’s or Sotheby’s however by an area home, deploying a list that lacked the gloss of the good attic gross sales of the previous. It’s onerous to compete with cheaper on-line auctions, whose chattels now not should be transported to a saleroom or proven in pricey marquees.
Britain has additionally moved on from the Brideshead days, when ancestral mansions have been seen as bastions of a distant however nonetheless related previous. Now, lots of the nice historic homes have little to promote: their attics have lengthy been cleared out.
