Many years since I've been to a Car Auction. Back in the early 80's my first three cars were all auction buys. I needed a cheap old banger, so trundled down to Brands Hatch. The first lasted 3 months, after flogging it for scrap I lost 50 quid. The next two were more successful, a Fiat something did the job for 6 months & then sold on to a mate to break even. The last buy was an old Volkswagen Caravenette, an impulse bid. I had it for two years & 60000 miles later it blew a gasket. Shoved it back in the auction & made £10 profit on original purchase price.
Those auctions were great fun, full of Arthur Daley's. Your right about the breakfasts Red, the cafe was always jammed, the smell of fried bacon & steaming mugs...happy days.
Auctions ftw. I rarely lose money on the cars I buy.
BTW- My "Diary" and "Conversation" type posts are getting lost among all the quiz crap. Do you think the quiz should go on a seperate thread?
Agree Red, I love auctions, all human life is there, full of intrigue & skullduggery, great fun.
I've spent most of my working life in auctions, they are the life blood of my trade.
New thread is a good idea, I'll be over later after I've got some work done.
More about your trade please Mr T.
When I say Trade, that may be misleading, its just the way I make my living.
After leaving College, qualified as a semi professional Architect (I never completely finished the course, & was therefore unemployable).
I moved back to London with no real idea on what to do next, other than I did not want a 9-5 type job, & I wanted to be my own boss.
So what to do…I needed to pay rent, eat, pay off debts…
Well I had always been a collector & hoarder of stuff, I was going have to start selling. So I load up the car & head off one Sunday morning to Greenwich Antiques Market, rent a stall, unload, set up & start selling. I manage to off load most of my junk, & turn a pretty decent wedge of cash, in fact it seemed I had earned a weeks wage on just the one day trading, lovely job. I was hooked.
Now of course I needed more stock for the following Sunday. Chatting to the other stallholders had revealed they all haunted the local auction houses. To cut along story short, that was to be the beginning of my working life. I started buying at local auctions, & selling at Greenwich Market on the weekends. I was learning the Antiques trade by trial & error, meeting the most interesting & eccentric characters. Rich & poor, crooked & honest, forgers & scammers, experts & charlatans, all wonderful in there own way.
Most Antique dealers well have a good overall knowledge of antiques, but the best will have a speciality. They will have an expertise in a certain area of the business. For some it will be Georgian Furniture, another maybe Silver. For me, my speciality became Antiquarian & Rare Books & Photographs.
I would regularly attend Phillips auction in Folkestone, it was a gold mine. Just that too far from London for the big dealers to attend. Phillips had cleared a large Country House & were selling the contents at short notice. Sale day was foul, cold horizontal November rain, & only a few dealers had made it down to the Sale. Briefly I ended up buying a few hundred lots, including the complete Library of ten thousand books, I was the only bidder. It was punt, but the best punt I‘ve ever made. I spent so much at that auction, that as I wrote the cheque out to the auctioneers at the end of the sale I knew it would bounce. But I also knew with a bit of luck I could sell enough over the weekend to get out of it. I got lucky, in fact that Sale set me up. I managed to pay in enough cash into the Bank on the Monday morning before the cheque cleared through the system. The Library of books turned out to have some extremely rare titles & a collection of vintage photographs. That collection so fascinated me, that it became the core of my “career” (if you can call it that).
Over the years I have probably been to most auction house in the country, from Sotheby’s & Christie’s in London to up to Scotland, Ireland, a far number in Europe, & a few in the States.
Nearly 30 years on, I’m still punting at Auctions, but now with a little bit more knowledge!
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