All about auctions
By Manohar Malgonkar

AUCTIONEERS were as much a recognisable feature of the Raj landscape as, say, the quilted sun helmet. All towns were either civil stations or cantonments. I don’t know about the civil stations, but every cantonment just had to have its own auctioneer, and every Sunday there was an auction.

Auctioneers served a special need of the times, as did the furniture contractors. The empire was vast. Those who manned its services were frequently transferred. An O.H. M.S. envelope arrived, sending you from, say, Chakrata to Cannanore, or from Quetta to Dhaka. Those were the days of bungalow living. You had acquired a few possessions, a carpet which was a bargain and even a piano. There were some books, and odds and ends such as a campcot and folding table, a gramophone with a brass horn. What you did was to send all the things you didn’t want to take to your assigned posting, to the local auctioneer instead, to be sold off on the ensuing Sunday.

I remember that, when I started service, my first posting was to Jabalpur, within two weeks of arrival, I was living in a comfortable furnished bungalow. The furniture had come from the furniture contractor, and the odds and ends from two Sunday attendances at Mr Bellamy’s auction house which was also a cinema theatre.

Bellamy’s in Jabalpur, Dadabhai’s in Kamptee, DeSilva in Belgaum. In time they had grown to be treasurehouses, Old curiosity shops crammed with unsold goods. I remember as a young man, a student in Belgaum, spending hours in the gloom of DeSilva’s crumbling showrooms Ornate Victorian lamps, kitchen utensils of brass and copper, pairs and pairs of ammunition boots, battered uniform trunks with stencilled names in which only the ranks had been repainted from Capt to Major to Lieut-Col antlers of deers and face masks of bisons ravaged by white ants but, in a corner all to themselves, a pile of books, leatherbound and worm-eaten volumes of Punch and Blackwood’s Magazine.

Cassel’s Illustrated History of India by James Grant, is a coffee-table book crammed with old drawings. I don’t know how old it is, because the part of the title page which might have indicated its date of publication has been eaten by moths. I couldn’t have paid much more than eight-annas for it, or half-a-rupee which was the top price for all of Mr DeSilva’s books anyhow.

In the same manner, from the auction-house in Jalandhar my wife bought some old China and porcelain and framed Victorian prints — all of them are today prized decorations in my house.

Auctioneering must be a peculiarly English profession; anyhow it is the English who seem to be the world’s most famous auctioneers. America’s biggest auction houses are the branches of English businesses: Christy’s or Sotheby’s. The others are, at best, also rans. Why, it is these English auction houses that periodically send out their B teams to hold auctions in Mumbai whenever M.F. Hussain has a new batch of Madhuri Dixit paintings to offer or when some ex-maharaja wants to sell his ceremonial stagecoach which had gold headlamps and seat covers made of crocodile skin or some old Parsi dowager wants to sell her family’s treasured Stradivari violin.

The first newspaper in India was the Calcutta Gazette and Oriental Advertise. It was started as a weekly in the year 1784, almost with the purpose of carrying notices of coming auctions. But there were auction houses in the East India Company’ Indian domains even earlier, and there are references in the Company’s records to the household effects of dead employes being sold by auction as early as the year 1701; that is more than 50 years before the battle of Plassey. On January 2, 1702, the effects of a Mr Vincent Bloom were put up for auction.

Dram bottle and small box.

A cotton bed and curtain.

A black coat.

Cannary 38 bottles.

A cask of tobacco.

Shoes six pairs; slippers two pairs.

Three pairs of britches and nightgown.

A long old wigg.

A palanqueen.

Those 38 bottles of Cannary, which must have contained some sort of wine, must have been snapped as perhaps the palanqueen too. But who would have wanted to buy the three pairs of britches and nightgowns? Or, for that matter, the "Long old wigg"? These items must have remained in the shop, mouldering, for years before being consigned to the rubbish bin.

The reason why people bought things at auctions was because they were inexpensive. To be sure there were such things as books and paintings and flower vases, too, but by and large the items most in demand were useful household goods, campcots and lamps and kitchen knives.

But no longer. Nowadays the main business of the major auction houses seems to be precisely the sale of such things as britches and nightgowns and even ‘long old wiggs’ or, at any rate, their modern counterparts. Souvenirs are big business and things such as britches and nightgowns have become valuable. If they belonged to some national hero, say, Napoleon or Nelson or George Washington, they would be all but priceless — star items of sales catalogues.

The relics of celebrated people are in great demand and fetch high prices. For instance when the Duke of Windsor died, his widow continued to live in the house they had hired in Paris for many years. It was only after the Duchess herself died that the house was sold and with it, all the things that the Duke had possessed and which were still in the house. That was where the auctioneers came in. They sorted out every single item and divided them up into ‘lots’ to be auctioned. Among those lots were such things as the Duke’s Irish linen handkerchiefs, carefully darned, and bearing the Royal insignia, corroded fountain pens, sets of table napkins, even old dog collars and warped golf clubs and golf balls gone sticky with age.

Every single item found a bidder.

In 1996, Sothebys auctioned off Jacqueline Onassis’s knick-nacks which included such things as old shoes and hats and dresses. Two years later, the American auctioneer Guernesey’s held an auction of literally hundreds of things that had once belonged to President John F. Kennedy. One of the items was a diary he had kept for the year 1951, another was his Hermese briefcase with gold fittings. Even the late President’s longjohns were sold at this auction.

The desire to possess something that had once belonged to some sort of a celebrity grows. Elizabeth David was a well-known writer of books on cookery. She died in 1996. Two years later, many of her belongings which had still remained unsold to eager collectors were put up for auction by Phillips of London. Julian Barnes, who had himself admired Ms David as a writer even more than as a cook, describes some of the items: "chipped jugs, stained colanders, battered sieves, old cookbooks, bashed-up wooden spoons." The sale of these throwaway items brought £ 49,000.

Remember the film Bonny and Clyde? It was based on the real-life story of a pair of dare-devil bank robbers who had run away in a car and were finally caught up in a shootout with the police. Both were killed and their car was shot full of holes. Well, the car that was used in the film to depict the scene of the shootout was sold in an auction for about 50 times what it must have cost when new. There seems to be a brisk demand for cars wrecked in famous accidents. I don’t know what a Mercedes 280 costs. Say, around Rs 90 lakh. The wreck of the Mercedes 280 in which Princess Diana and Dody al Fayed were killed in Paris — if it is ever put up for auction — must be worth at least a cool million dollars: more than Rs 4 crore.