September saw the second part of Mark Baldwin’s library auctioned in London. The first part consisting of books was auctioned last year but this years sale consisted mainly of paper ephemeral items, canal acts, prints, posters,tokens, magazines & postcards etc.
Some items which caught my attention were – A group of badges belonging to Eily Gayford who was an early recruit & subsequent trainer of the famous ‘Idle Women’ recruits to the boats of the Grand Union carrying fleet of WW2. The lot consisted of the famous & very rare ‘Idle Women’ grey plastic badge, two cloth GUCC badges and a brass GUCC collar badge as issued to GUCC police together with several wartime periodicals.
The plastic IW badge alone had to my knowledge achieved a record price of £311 at auction in 2015 with many bidders so the £380 (£456 inc buyers premium) achieved for this group of badges was probably a good buy.
A large film poster for this 1964 film (Lots of period working boat action on the G Union, if you ever get a chance to see it) made £120 + buyers premium.
If you thought that Waterways World was the first magazine devoted to Inland Waterways you would be wrong as predating this by over 50 years a collection of 30 issues of the monthly ‘Canal’s & Waterways’ from 1919 –1924 fetched £160 + 20% buyers premium.
Commercial prospectuses for individual waterways rarely appear in the great library collections and are quite hard to find. Two different examples from the Aire & Calder Co and dating from the 1920’s fetched £80 +premium.Worth a mention – The complete auction catalogue for this sale and also for part1 of Sept 2015 and prices realised can be found on Chiswick auctions website- www.chiswickauctions.co.uk/sale-results/
‘ People off the bank turning to commercial boating and recording their exploits’----- This topic started with at least 3 or 4 of the Idle women recording their wartime work in book or magazine form in the years following the conflict. Further books have followed over the years from authors such as David Blagrove and Tom Foxon but two of the earliest ‘landlubbers to turn to boating in the early 1950’s were Tim Wilkinson who authored ‘Hold On A Minute’ and John Knill whose life as a ‘No1’ was recorded in his ‘John Knill’s Navy -Five years on the cut’ published many years after his carrying days.
I have remarked in a previous post on the rarity of this book caused I think by the fact that it was privately published by Sir John in 1998. Probably produced with a limited print run and without the distribution facilities of commercial publishers, these facts have ensured its rare appearance in booksellers catalogues or at auction. A previous auction price of £32 was I thought pretty good going for a relatively recently printed paperback as was the price of £80 being asked by a bookdealer elsewhere (It sold very quickly). However I was absolutely amazed by the final auction price of £142 on Ebay which only goes to prove the old auction maxim – that you only need two people to really want an item for it to sell well but £142!!!?
So if you are lucky enough to have a copy – treasure it well. For those still looking – good luck. It is a really good read with lots of period photos and anecdotes and deserves to be reprinted.
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