Neil Lanham is the author of ‘I Bid You Farewell’ – which captures the drama, wit and wisdom of a lifetime in the antiques trade. Here, the retired Suffolk auctioneer explains why he wanted to chart an era of remarkable change in Britain’s auction houses
From starting out at the age of seventeen in a cattle market, to building a rural auction business from scratch and achieving over a hundred worldwide record prices for fine art, it would be fair to say that Neil Lanham has had quite the life as an auctioneer. And it is all detailed in his book, I Bid You Farewell, which came out at the end of last month and chronicles a lifetime in the antiques trade, showcasing the evolution of Britain’s auction houses from post-war austerity through the 1980s boom against the backdrop of Suffolk’s rural landscape.
The 87-year-old, who is ‘Suffolk through and through’ and lives in Hartest near Bury St Edmunds, grew up at his grandfather’s, Red House Farm in Kersey, where the old farm workers as good as fostered him. ‘My Father died when I was five,’ says Neil. ‘When father died, I went into a shell – I became a very nervous little boy.’
He loved the farm workers’ unaffected traditional Suffolk countenance. ‘Everyone in the family seemed to be storytellers,’ he recalls. It was a time when ‘there was no TV (or idiot box) in the corner.’
His widowed and almost penniless mother had to pay for him to become an articled pupil, and when he was just 19 years old he was told that he was to start selling in the next sale for Grain and Chalk (now Cheffins) of Cambridge which held the largest sales of farm machinery in Europe. ‘I was about as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs but somehow got through.’
Neil hated working at a large firm with eight partners, but then Spears (Now Clarke & Simpson), a small firm with a weekly Cattle Market sale in Campea Ashe in Suffolk, came to the rescue. ‘It sold everything,’ says Neil. “It was 50 years behind the times but in my book 50 times more beautiful, with livestock and all manner of lots often arriving by horse and trap and us hand-writing each account out the same night if we could!’ Sometimes he’d still be working at midnight, but he adds: ‘I loved it down there.’
The company was vibrant with constant humour. The title for the book came from that time, with Neil recalling a conversation that went something like this: ‘Can I bid sir?’…‘Yes, of course you can bid, Charles’…‘Then I bid you farewell’.
Neil was based at Campsea Ashe for just under three years before he was offered a job with a view to a partnership with John Boardman at Haverhill. The place was almost derelict and the Clerk, Jack Webb, had been at the form since 1898! ‘I loved Spears but was told that there was no chance of a partnership so off I went with poor Mr Boardman, who died after I had been there only six months.’ This was in 1962. ‘It was so far-gone that no one wanted to buy it, but they let me manage it and the following spring I bought it to have my own Chartered Surveyors/Auctioneers business at the tender age of just 23.’ He would go on to run Boardmans for 40 years.
‘I was as green as they come and made many mistakes, but youthful enthusiasm survives. I increased the Estate Agency many-fold in this small London overspill town then sold it off to concentrate on our antique sales which were my first love. We had held sales at the Town Hall in Clare occasionally but from the mid-60s booked the hall each month.
‘We stopped selling general household gear to concentrate on antiques and paintings and our first major success came when we sold a late 17th century French boulle chest for £33,000 without even having a phone in the hall. ‘It was a world record price.’ The highest price before this had been £20,000 made by a London Auctioneer.
‘Many other successes followed now that I was doing this important job full time. We made many other world-record prices that I tell of in the book giving the whole ‘What and Why and When and How and Where and Who’ behind the price (Rudyard Kipling’s poem, I Keep Six Honest Serving Men, which explores those fundamental questions, has been a constant inspiration to Neil).
For example, there was the sold 17th century Dutch oak cupboard from a Cambridge College, sold for £32,000, which almost doubled the highest London Price. And there was the chest that had been bought in America for £10,000, sold back to an American phone bidder for over double the price at £23,000. In the book, Neil unveils much of the psychology behind collecting.
He makes the point that it doesn’t matter if an auction takes place ‘in a sleepy little town as long as you let the right people know…advertise it in the right places.’
He says that probably the most interesting lot was at a 1940s ‘wartime’ themed sale at Rede Hall Farm Park when he sold a stationary engine at its low pre-war stabilising price and everyone who wanted to bid above this then put £5 each in the auctioneer’s hat with the proceeds being sent to the Red Cross for our soldiers in enemy hands.
Over the years, by being on his own and using his personal observation, Neil was able to speedily change course to rapidly unfolding new markets caused firstly by Prime Minister Harold Wilson devaluing the pound by 14 per cent in 1967 and then Margaret Thatcher selling off ‘the family silver’.
Following the devaluation, Neil had recognised that this gave dealers from Europe a 14% advantage so, advertising in European magazines, he found that he could tap into a new level of auction prices achieved from Dutch, German, and Belgian dealers who would bid against one another, causing in many instances prices to double.
The demand was mainly for Oak and early pieces and he was soon holding the largest sales of these goods in Europe. He still loves oak furniture ‘because it shows everything that has happened to it.’ Has he got any at home? ‘I have got a chest of drawers,’ he replies.
I Bid You Farewell is a true insight into the secrets of the auctioneer’s mind, with Neil sharing the secrets of the trade while documenting a vanishing world of traditional market towns and autonomous local businesses. It transcends personal memoir to become both a celebration of auctioneering and an important historical account of Britain’s antiques trade during transformative times.
How does it feel to have a book published in his late 80s? ‘There is a lot of interest in it. It’s had excellent reviews and it’s selling well,’ says Neil. And it doesn’t sound as though he’s not going to take a rest from writing anytime soon. ‘I’ve got two other books in the pipeline!’
I Bid You Farewell -The Life of an Auctioneer, by Neil Lanham is published by White Fox and is available to buy from Waterstones and Amazon (RRP £24.95).
Feature images – supplied
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