Auctions, the preserve of pensioners?

[Steve]

We visited Fieldings Auctioneers of Stourbridge over the weekend as they had a strange and eclectic mix of stuff on sale. Unfortunately we were perhaps too casual for our own good as it was a bright and unusually fine day and we enjoyed the short trip out at leisure. However, we turned up just as the last lots were going under the hammer! (unusually the auctioneers were in a hurry and knocking down over 150 lots per hour! )Okay, it wasn't far for us to travel to although at several points I must admit I thought I had been dropped off in hell. Stourbridge is a bit of a depressing place, if you don't know, but at its heart, it has a three lane ring road which is designed to get tourists and other strangers to drive around in circles all day not knowing where they are going. Or is it simply for the drag race to get out of there? But why weren't any of the Black Country dealers out in force? Have they all retired or died? Or do they ONLY buy records now?

I am now formally advising auctioneers on how to get better prices. Just dump a box of Don Watson's rejects into any sale and you're guaranteed to get the record bores out in force!

Imagine our surprise when we saw John and Pauline Cully from Barnsley, South Yorkshire, loading up their car very casually, without hurrying or looking over their shoulders, with the ENTIRE gramophone quotient of the sale! What, no ring presence? Is that a first? Should I take more notice of Black Country auctions in hell spots? The only times I've ever gone to "local auctions", when a solitary machine has turned up, I have normally been greeted by a well known dealer walking in about 2 minutes before the item comes up for sale. So were the Cully dealers just lucky? £484 is cheap for an HMV Junior Monarch with superb (correct) black MG horn and the right original elbow, even if there was a small bit of damage to the cabinet. Are they the pensionable equivalents to Bonnie & Clyde of the gramophone world? Who needs a pension when everyone stays at home and let's you buy everything at "we've got to get out of here quick" prices? As dealers, it must give you a considerable boost to your dismal State Pension.

[epigramophone]

Only 150 lots per hour?

My local auction room averages 180, but I am rarely there to see this rapid progress as I usually go to the preview and leave a generous commission bid on any lot which interests me. Only if I was desperate to win something would I attend on sale day, but as a pensioner I have the spare time to come and go as I please.

Auctions which are not local are a different matter. You need to arrive early to view the lots, and carry away any purchases at the end. Somerset to SAS, for example, is a full day out.

I have never believed in the existence of a "ring", apart from Wagner's and Tolkein's, but to humour anyone who does I have a question.

How can an auction "ring" operate in competition with telephone and internet bidding? Anyone who attended the Roger Thorne sales could see that much of the serious money was being bid via the internet. I saw no "ring".

[Steve]

How can an auction "ring" operate in competition with telephone and internet bidding?

The straight answer is: it can't and it hasn't done effectively for quite a few years now. A "ring" can only work in those back street auction rooms that don't advertise on the internet (are there many left?) or, it has to be said "private auctions" like the one the CLPGS holds every autumn. If an auction is unknown to a member of the public who is not a member of CLPGS and everyone else has to be in attendance on the day, obviously some potential buyers are left out and the best prices never realised. In a less accessible auction like this it is easy for two to three dealers to get together to carve up a few of the choice items. It happens and we all realise this.

But where auctions are open to everyone and have been well publicised and offer internet and telephone bidding, then from a technical perspective, a ring can't operate as effectively. Of course rings "operate in all auctions", whether there is bidding via the net or phone so long as two people who might normally bid against each other, decide to come to an agreement to allow only one of them to bid.

A "ring" has done its job if the price of an item sold to one of its members is considerably cheaper than it might have been had all of the parties been involved in the bidding, irrespective of whether all the interested members of the public were in attendance and bidding.

BTW, 150 lots per hour is good going. I have always worked on the basis of 100 lots per hour. Most auctioneers will give you this guide fairly reliably.

[epigramophone]

I don't think a "ring" would stand much chance at a CLPGS auction, where the dealers are vastly outnumbered by knowledgeable private bidders with money to spend.

In our hobby "OAP" often stands for "Old and Prosperous". The mortgage is just a memory, the kids have long gone and there is plenty of time for hobbies.

A dealer who bids must always keep in mind his potential profit margin, but no such considerations need bother the determined private buyer, who should always be able to outbid the trade.

[Steve]

A dealer who bids must always keep in mind his potential profit margin, but no such considerations need bother the determined private buyer, who should always be able to outbid the trade.

That's true in general but taking the CLPGS auction as an example for a moment (and not in any way to single it out as the main culprit), in my experience a lot of the ordinary members are actually quite tight with their money when it comes to bidding on machines. I agree that some go berserk over records and the prices can be quite high. But looking at some of the machine auctions it has held (and dealers do not attend to buy records, let's be honest), the prices realised were well below that of a high street saleroom that advertises on the internet and offers internet and phone bidding. I would have to say that some of the buyers appear to live a somewhat closeted lifestyle and appear to have had little access to mainstream auctions or experience of buying machines at fairs. This has been true for years. I recall having a conversation with some members 20 years ago when someone was hoping to sell an HMV 194. A price of £7-800 was talked about when Christies (where Christopher Proudfoot was then head of Mechanical Music)had recently sold another example for £3000. No one appeared to be aware of this or accept it as the current "market price" that could very easily have been achieved. I remember being somewhat taken back by their surprise.

Similarly, when I attended a Phono weekend about 8 years ago I had a French G & T Monarch with travelling arm and large nickel plated zinc horn on show (the equivalent of the Victor MS). A collector asked me how much I paid for it and when I confessed to him that I was not a lucky dealer who picked good things up relatively cheaply or someone who was offered things on a regular basis, I told him how much it had cost me. He practically fell off his chair, having clearly never been "exposed" to the wider outside market. It then occurred to me that a lot of members ONLY buy from other members and from within the ranks of the society. If you're buying a machine directly from someone who bought it for 10 shillings in 1970, then it is more likely that you'll "snag a deal" as our American friends put it as that person had little financial investment in it and more likely a far greater personal investment of time in its cleaning and restoration or preservation. Now that does make some sense. Or at least it used to. When I saw how shocked this gentleman was, I politely suggested that he might want to consider buying up other similar machines he saw at "his price" and I would gladly take the lot of his hands giving him a large profit. He then confessed that he'd never seen another example, thus proving that "his price" wasn't actually based on any real contemporary event but more on a collective supposition!