Knebworth House Antiques Roadshow

This week, Antiques Roadshow is at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire.

Its romantic exterior is, in fact, a disguise -

beneath is a red-brick house dating back to Tudor times.

Knebworth was bought by the Lytton family in 1490. Sir Robert Lytton was a favourite of Henry VII

and fought alongside him at the Battle of Bosworth. The family have lived here ever since.

Each generation has adapted the house.

In 1810, Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton demolished three sides of the quadrangle,

added towers and battlements, covered the red brick with stucco,

and altered the windows to a Gothic style.

Her son went further - adding domes, turrets and gargoyles to ward off evil spirits.

Elizabeth was a formidable lady. When she arrived at Knebworth,

she had a row with the rector, who wanted to claim a tithe on the produce that came from the estate.

The dispute became so bitter that Mrs Bulwer-Lytton refused to go to church and held services at home.

She even set up a screen of trees around the church so that it couldn't be seen from the house.

Finally, she built her own mausoleum in the park, so that she would not have to be buried in the churchyard.

When the 2nd Earl of Lytton made his alterations to Knebworth in 1908,

he called on his useful brother-in-law, Edwin Lutyens,

who embellished the house and remodelled the gardens. The lime avenues are world famous

and the herb garden is the work of the famous designer Gertrude Jekyll.

Charles Dickens and Winston Churchill visited here,

but a little too early to enjoy Knebworth's open-air rock concerts.

The first festival in 1974 was known as The Bucolic Frolic

and featured the Allman Brothers band.

Status Quo did their gig in 1986.

# Rocking all over the world! #

All we're hoping is that the weather won't give us "the blues".

They say it's going to start nicely, then become grey, dull and wet.

But it's nice at the moment and we offer a very warm welcome indeed

to the people of Hertfordshire as they join our experts.

It was my mother's aunt's, and as a small child,

we used to go and see her on Sundays, and it stood by the fireplace.

-Really?

-One Sunday we went there, and she put it out in the garden

-and she said, "If you want it, you can take it home." But Mother wasn't very pleased.

-Really?

-But it did come home with us.

-And you've had it ever since?

-Yeah.

-And when we got married, I didn't want it.

-You didn't like it?

-No.

-He had to talk me into keeping it.

-How funny.

-And we've had it for the last 35 years.

-Do you still hate it?

-No, I love it.

-Ah, a conversion.

-A conversion.

Well, as I'm sure you know, it's an umbrella stand.

It's probably Minton.

-Minton was the largest manufacturer of this class of ware, which is called majolica...

-Yes.

..in Stoke-on-Trent. They made a lot of these wares - it was hugely popular at the time.

It dates from about 1870-75, somewhere around there,

so he's pretty old. It's now hugely popular, particularly in America -

the Americans have gone absolutely berserk for it.

-You've got a lot of damage...

-Yes.

-You've got a riveted bottom,

you've got a wing off there...

one of his toes has gone...

we've got this off here, bit gone off there...

Um, so... Oh, and that's been off as well, I see.

That makes a difference. But of all wares, if you have damage,

this is the ware to have, because it makes least difference.

-Oh, right.

-If you did sell it,

what would it make?

-It would make £4,000 to £6,000.

-Oh, really?

-Really?

-Do you like it any more?

-I still wouldn't part with it.

-Thank you for bringing it in. It's a joy.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

Yes, she's my doll. She was originally my aunt's doll,

and I was the only niece and I was given her when I was about 10.

-So you played with her?

-A little bit, but not a lot

-because I was told to look after her.

-Well, you looked after her well.

-She's got such a pretty face.

-Yes.

Now, she is a mould 117a.

Mould 117a means that's she's called Mein Liebling or My Darling,

and the world record, which still stands,

for a bisque doll, or for any doll, for that matter, at auction,

was by the firm of Kammer and Reinhardt. It wasn't the 117,

it was a 108.

I don't want to pick your spirits up too high, because it made...

-£188,000, but yours is not worth...

-I'd rather not...!

So, um, she is by the same make.

She's got lovely sleeping eyes,

and...shall we turn her head? She has a lovely, mohair wig...

-And...there, you see.

-Oh, yes.

"KR" - is Kammer and Reinhardt, then "117a", which is what she is - she's absolutely right.

So she's got ball-jointed limbs,

where they...at the knees and at the shoulders.

She's got her original, lovely little velvet coat and dress

-and this little hat. She's absolutely enchanting. I think she's one of my favourite dolls.

-Yes.

Original shoes, and I see you've got some original clothes here,

so you've a wonderful little doll. Have you any idea of her value?

None at all, except you read books and you know that she might be worth £300, £400 - I don't know.

Add a nought.

-Oh! No wonder I haven't given her to my grandchildren to play with!

-Thank goodness you didn't!

A friend of mine died, and her husband gave her trinkets to me

to sell for a charity we were all interested in, at a car-boot sale.

I sorted through them and I looked at that one, and I thought,

-"That's too good for a car boot. I'll find out what it's worth."

-You've got gimlet eyes, haven't you?

If the sky wasn't covered in clouds right now, this would be blazing.

-I think you suspect that this is made of diamonds.

-Yes.

-You're right.

I'm looking at the quality of them - they're rather marked,

but, nonetheless, they ARE diamonds and probably really rather valuable.

-It's part of a much bigger jewel - it's from an Edwardian necklace.

-Ah.

At a car-boot sale, what would you have sold it for?

-Well, 50p, £1.

-£1, OK.

-Well, what about £2,500?

-That's more like it!

-Much more like it!

-Thanks you.

-Thank YOU.

-Lovely story. I'm gonna follow you around.

-Oh, do!

I'll point there.

-What does that say?

-1580.

-1580.

-Really?

-No.

-Oh.

-It's an imitation. Made in the 19th century,

copying the 1580 style. And it's called a schnelle...

a drinking tankard.

And it's worth about...£30.

Really?! I'm not surprised!

-A genuine one would be £1,000 plus.

-Oh, right.

-Oh, well, I can pretend, can't I?

-Have a drink - console yourself.

-Yes. Lovely(!)

Well, you have a hat to go to Ascot, you have a hat to go to Chelsea,

why not have a hat to go to the Antiques Roadshow?

-What a wonderful way to think. Is it an antique?

-No. I made it in half an hour yesterday.

-Really?

Well, the experts might have something to say about those items.

-Well you've certainly brightened our day! Good luck.

-Thank you.

I'm from a mining village in Durham,

and all of my family are from Tyneside.

-Much of this was in my grandmother's house.

-They're all inherited?

-Bar that big one.

-Yeah. Which came from?

-That came from my husband as a birthday present.

-So you're now turning into a collector?

-Probably!

It's all Maling ware, Tyneside pottery,

and Maling was producing pottery right throughout the 19th century.

-This 20th-century lustre-ware is getting more popular.

-Right.

It's an interesting process - it's partly printed and partly painted,

and Maling's quite difficult stuff to date, they used over 40 marks,

and it may be a one-word difference on the mark which changes it.

-Most of these are from the 1920s to 1940s period.

-Right.

You've no idea how much Maling is?

I know it's getting more expensive, but when it's handed down, you don't think about it.

A pair of vases like these two here, which are in very good condition,

-would fetch about £500 themselves. Really?

-Oh, gosh.

This one is a bit later, but if you start totting these up,

-it's going to amount to quite a lot of money.

-It is.

I bought it off a friend who got it off an art teacher at a big school.

-And where was he keeping it at the time?

-He had it in his dining room.

-In his dining room?

-Yes.

-And where do you keep it now?

-In my front room.

-Oh, do you?

-Yeah.

-It's a big enough room?

-Yeah.

It is the most fantastic tableau.

In the bottom right-hand corner, right down here, it says,

"WJ Cole, naturalist and plumier" I think Mr Cole probably wasn't...

a taxidermist as such, but he obviously dealt in feathers,

so he had contacts around the world sending him exotic birds.

And one always wonders whether he, perhaps, had a catalogue -

he was producing large cases and this was a sort of Rolls-Royce case,

-because you've got a fantastic array of birds here, haven't you?

-Yeah.

I think it's about the 1880s.

It's an interesting example, really, of what was known in the world at the time as well,

-because we've got very little from Africa.

-Yeah.

In the 1880s, South Africa was fully colonised, as Northern Africa was,

but there's a big gap in the middle. At the time, in 1859, Darwin had written The Origin of the Species,

and whilst it probably wasn't taught in schools because it was considered revolutionary,

there is a finch here,

and a lot of Darwin's theories on evolution were based on the development of the finch's beak,

so one wonders whether Mr Cole was putting these in

as a hint that Darwinism was very much of the day.

And, of course, people today will probably think, "Gosh, it's a pretty horrible thing, this,

"all these birds have been killed and stuffed," but at the time,

this wasn't considered bad taste, and, you know...

it is a wonderful period piece. Do you have any particular favourites?

-I like the blue bird.

-What is it?

I think it's a blue jay.

And I like the parrot - he's a bit roughed up. We call him Woody

-after a friend who's losing his hair in the same sort of way, you know.

-Perhaps that's why I like it too!

-So you bought it recently?

-18 months, 2 years ago,

-something like that.

-And what did you pay for it?

-£400.

-Really? Right.

Well, a case like this in this sort of condition, today,

-would make £3,000 or £4,000 at auction.

-Right.

-So quite a nice turn, really.

-Yes.

Great English houses of the 17th and 18th century often contained Oriental lacquer cabinets

which were brought back from the Far East or made by English makers.

This tradition went on into the 19th century.

Lacquer scenes - flowers and people, traditional, but of its own time.

-Where did you get it?

-Well, I seem to have remembered this all my life.

I spent my childhood out in China,

and both sets of grandparents worked out in China,

-my parents were born out in China.

-Where were you?

-I was in Shanghai.

-There was the Japanese invasion.

-That's right.

-Was that '38 or '39?

-I can't really remember.

-The Japanese took over Shanghai?

-They did.

-You were there?

-We were.

We tried to come home, but we couldn't, so they interned us for the duration. My father, who...

He was a civil servant, and the first thing, when we got into the camp,

-he was put straight into the cookhouse.

-Oh.

And my mother, I can remember her in her fur coat,

scrabbling around in coal piles trying to get enough coal together

-to make coal balls to put on a chatti.

-Which was a little heater.

It was like a tin -

-which was the only form of heating.

-Have you got any records of this period? Or is it all just memory?

Mostly it's memory. I've got some in this film here. Those are negatives.

Have you had them printed?

-Yes, well, a friend tried to, but not...

-Let's have a look.

So we've got various images here. Let's look at some of them...

-They're corrugated huts, are they?

-They were wood.

-Wood?

-Yes, they were all identical.

-And each hut was one family?

-Yes. Rows and rows of them.

-What an extraordinary experience.

-And that one?

-And that is the last day, when the Japanese were leaving.

-They were piled into a truck.

-And driven off?

-And driven off.

-They weren't terribly happy. That one there was in tears.

-What, at leaving?

-Yes.

-You'd built up relationships?

-Yes. They liked children and there were an awful lot of us kids in that camp.

-And the Americans relieved you?

-Yes.

Images of this sort of period are so unusual.

It's extraordinary the way it brings to life something that is history.

Now, the cabinet. This you didn't take with you into the prison camp?

-Oh, no.

-So how did it come back? Did you get the house back?

We were lucky again. We had a high-up Japanese official living in our home

and he actually respected it.

It's a very nice cabinet and, in Roadshow terms, worth about £1,000.

But it's taken us into this extraordinary story

-and I'm so glad you could bring it and tell us about it.

-I'm glad you were interested in it.

-Thank you.

-OK.

It came from my husband's side of the family -

his father and his grandfather before that. More than that we don't know.

-So we go down four generations into the 19th century.

-Yes.

Well, in the 19th century, there was a huge fad for this sort of object,

and this was produced in Germany on the Rhine.

The Rhine had ample supplies of stoneware clays,

but the colour, this brown colour, is achieved

by dunking the actual material in a wash of iron oxide.

Very, very popular in the 19th century - the Germans were producing huge quantities of this,

and the style of this piece is very 16th century.

-Can you tell me what that says?

-Never looked that closely at it. There's little flowers,

-then, "S84"?

-1-5.

-Oh, 1-5.

-1584.

Now that's the period in the 19th century these German stoneware potters are copying.

Now, the nice thing about yours is it's not a 19th-century copy,

-it's a 16th-century original.

-Good heavens!

-So that is actually...

-I've never actually looked at the date.

That is actually the date of the piece, and considering that it's over 400 years old,

-it's not in a bad state.

-No, I suppose it's survived pretty well, really.

It's known as an Enghalskrug - a narrow-necked flagon.

Very often, when they come to England, they are mounted in silver.

They were highly prized in the late 1500s, 1600s, sometimes they're even used for Communion.

Now, a 19th-century copy is not really worth a great deal of money -

it's worth maybe £40-£60. But yours is original,

it's really a museum piece and if you were to put it up for sale,

I suspect you'd get a price somewhere between...

-£1,000 and £2,000.

-Which is a lot for a small brown pot.

It is.

Now, each generation at Knebworth has made its changes.

-Lord Cobbold, what have you been concentrating on?

-Well, on restoration rather than innovation.

We decided early on, 30 years ago, that we would try to preserve the Gothic fantasy element of Knebworth.

I don't think there's another house in England like this, whereas there are lots of red-brick Tudor houses.

And that is an expensive option, because these gargoyles are... They fall off after a while.

Most people think they're stone, but, in fact, they're plaster.

This is an old one. They were a mixture of plaster on brickwork,

and they fixed it to the brickwork with these cast-iron nails,

and once the water gets in, the cast iron rusts and then the gargoyles fall down.

What is the appeal of gargoyles? What do they mean?

Bulwer-Lytton, who was responsible for them all, was into the occult,

and I think there are quite a few occultist references. The four big dragons on the top of the pillars

are supposed to be warding off the spirits of the night.

A lot of the smaller... There's a lot of bats on barrels.

I think the medieval French for bat is lyt and ton is another word for barrel,

so it's a play on the Lytton family name. These extraordinary figures

on the top of the balcony are again bats on barrels.

They'd long since gone

and we've had to remodel those from 1880s black and white photographs

-which we then blew up.

-And cost - enormous?

-The cost is horrendous.

Since 1984, we have had a private charitable trust here.

The charitable trust has spent, on this particular phase, £1 million,

and English Heritage contributed £700,000, which was wonderful.

Just under half the house is done,

and we're looking at £3.5 million to £4 million to do the rest, but we'll have to wait a while for that.

Henry Edward Tidmarsh was my great-uncle

and he made his living as an artist and book illustrator.

He obviously had a great love of painting,

because many of his works, such as these,

were never offered for sale and consequently are still in the family.

That's true, because I'm not used to seeing his work on the market.

I know him as a book illustrator and you occasionally see drawings,

but they're nothing like these. These are extraordinary and they're in such good condition.

It's almost as if he used particularly colour-fast pigments because... What date are they?

-Are they dated?

-Er, 1909 is this, this one.

-Yes, I see.

He's obviously an artist of record,

meaning they are topographically very accurate, they seem to me.

What's remarkable is that the overall effect is terribly dramatic.

And also, he's got these figures in it.

-They're very convincing.

-The interesting thing is that he painted over a considerable period of time.

The earliest known works of his date from the late 1880s, and he actually died in 1939,

and you can follow the date through his paintings by the changing fashions and the road vehicles

-and the street scenes.

-He's that accurate, yes.

Well, London, this has got to be...

-This is where he really begins to shine.

-Yes.

I just love this kind of view because you're high up,

probably about the same height - 450 feet or so above the ground -

as the the London Eye, the great wheel, you know,

-so you can really see how London has changed.

-The interesting thing is

that there is no vantage point from which this painting could have been painted.

The dome of the Central Hall here is the highest building,

-so it must have been painted from that position.

-So he's either in a hot-air balloon or he's made it up!

-Exactly.

-Well, coming to value...

I think that, that a picture this size, particularly the London one,

I'd have to put between £4,000 and £5,000 on it, perhaps,

for insurance, at least. And then the Italian one...

possibly £2,000 to £3,000 because it's smaller.

These days, you only need two people to get excited and the value will be more.

We went and viewed them and we were in an old cottage and we left bids.

We'd never done it before, so we just left.

We rang up in the middle of the following week and we said, you know, "How did we get on?"

And they said, "Oh, you got them,"

and we said "Which ones?" and they said, "All of them," and so we got 21 chairs

for £112, which in those days was quite a bit.

Two of the Gothic ones and a whole assortment of odd ones. Not this one.

-That came later, did it?

-No, it came from my family.

-Right.

-They're called Windsor chairs.

-Yes.

But they're not all made in Windsor or High Wycombe, the main centre.

These are West Country chairs, and the way to identify them quickly

is the way the arm here is made of three pieces.

You've got the arm there, the centre back rail there, and the same on this one, so it's a three-part arm.

I suspect that one is West Wycombe, rather than High Wycombe.

It's a slightly later back, but you've got this nice wheel splat -

pierced, beech, and then a heart shape at the bottom. Very nice.

And very nice with this ash arm with this little attachment here -

typical of that West Wycombe area.

These two are probably late-18th century, very difficult to date, so 200 years old.

The one on the right is probably 1850-80, something like that.

-This one really interests me. This has come from where?

-No idea?

I lived in London. I was born in Notting Hill.

Well, it's a High Wycombe chair - a typical High Wycombe configuration,

lovely yew arms, very nice hoop back here, elm seat.

There's a family called the Prior family, Robert Prior, around the turn of 1800,

making this particular type of chair,

with these three splat backs here, pierced by sticks, and these lovely roundels.

But Prior put these little miniature versions on the side,

and that's almost his hallmark.

What's interesting is that is about the Prior family, but it's unsigned,

and most Prior chairs are signed with a little stamp on the back, but this is not - I've had a good look.

And that probably means that it was his son-in-law who came into the business and made identical chairs,

so this is a new discovery.

So we have to come to value these chairs. This one is a family piece,

the others have come in a motley collection of 21 chairs.

I think... Let me just do a little bit of quick...

You've got about £5,000 sitting in front of us here.

-We'll sit on that!

-All of them together.

-Extraordinary!

But the most value is probably in this one.

This new research about the Prior family is going to make much more interest in these chairs.

-So of the £5,000, this is probably at least £2,000 worth.

-Mmm.

If there's one thing everyone thinks about when they think of Rolls Royce, it's the Spirit of Ecstasy,

-this, I suppose, vision of ethereal beauty.

-Yes.

It's a wonderful bronze.

The original was designed by Charles Sykes in 1911,

which was when the first Spirit of Ecstasy - a much smaller version -

was first put on a Rolls-Royce. Interestingly enough,

it was an optional extra to begin with.

She's commonly believed to be Eleanor Thornton,

who was Charles Sykes' favourite model. Where did you get her from?

We bought it at an auction in New Jersey. We lived there for five years, and we bought it in 1987.

It was an auction of Chinese things, mostly, but this was one odd item there.

-It was not listed as the Spirit of Ecstasy.

-It wasn't?

-No, it was just a bronze figure.

-Well, she certainly caught the eye.

-But very few people at the auction actually...

-Your lucky day.

-Yes, it was.

-OK, what did you pay for it?

-About 800.

-800 in 1988.

-That was about £400.

-Yeah, OK.

Well, it's a wonderful bronze figure.

Bronze figures of this size were actually used by Rolls-Royce for their main showrooms,

as a showroom model. Rolls-Royce, I believe,

only know of about nine or ten of these models.

But the interesting thing here is this particular one is numbered.

-What's the number?

-28.

So it may be that there were more than nine or ten made. I think the records were lost in the war.

The only other thing is that there are a tremendous number of facsimiles around,

not just of bronze, which this is, and you can hear it,

-but also of plaster, coloured to look like bronze.

-Yes.

It's very difficult to know,

without a really good provenance, whether this is an original

that was made specifically for one of the Rolls-Royce franchises, or whether this is a later casting.

If you look at the base here, this black marble base,

it's quite unusual to find these with a rectangular base,

because all of the later castings I've seen, are on circular bases.

-So this is quite a good plus point, I have to say.

-OK.

So you can't just discount that. What about value?

The facsimiles, the later castings,

are not worth a huge amount of money and they can fetch anywhere between £800 and £1,200.

If we were able to prove that this was absolutely genuine, that it came out of a dealer's showroom,

-then the likelihood is it could be worth £8,000 to £10,000.

-Wow!

So it may well pay you to do a little poking about, a little research.

-It might be worth a trip back to the States.

-It could be!

These are called Georgian dummy boards,

and they were made as fire screens

and when they were placed in front of the fire, it looked as if someone was in the house.

They're fine, fine military and naval figures.

-Do you know anything about them?

-Only what my son's partner told me - they belonged to her grandmother.

-Right.

-And she was a maid and her grandfather was a chauffeur,

but what part of the country, I can't tell you.

They've gone on holiday to Corfu and they've asked me to bring them here.

-Right, well, you'll have something to tell them when you get back.

-Yes.

This is a Georgian figure of an officer in the Royal Horse Artillery

wearing his Tarleton helmet.

And on the side of that helmet is two battle honours -

one of the Peninsula, the other one would be Waterloo.

So they wore that particular uniform until 1828.

Now, on the other side here we have a naval officer.

Now, when William IV came to the throne,

he wanted the Royal Navy in scarlet uniforms

and I think they settled for making the collars and cuffs scarlet,

and then when we get into the period of Victoria,

we're all back in blue again.

-I think it was obnoxious for the navy to have scarlet.

-Yes.

They're fine fellows - beautifully painted, and quite scarce and desirable,

-and today in auction, these would fetch between £500 and £800 each.

-Oh, as much as that?

-As much as that.

-That's a nice present for when they come back.

-Yes indeed, yes.

-This is a beautiful contraption. What's its history?

-I bought it about 40 years ago and renovated it,

-and we've been showing with it ever since.

-And how old is it?

-It's just the beginning of the 1900s -

-we found out it was built.

-And does it have a name? What type of...?

-A round-backed gig.

-It sounds like something to do with the Knebworth rock concerts!

-Yes!

-So how much work did you do in it?

-We stripped it down,

undercoated and repainted.

Do you take it to shows?

We've won the Welsh Cob Championship at the British Driving Society Show at Windsor,

and presented to the Queen twice,

and we've won most championships throughout the south of England

in the county shows.

They belonged to my grandmother and then I inherited via my mother,

and these were the ones that my grandmother most wore.

-Have you worn them?

-I've worn the arrow.

I haven't worn the sapphire and diamond one.

The arrow's got a most interesting action called a surete pin -

it has a twisting action. There's a little notch in the end here

which catches into a key mechanism that secures it and then you push the bar through the material

and it looks as if you've been speared with one of Cupid's darts.

It's beautiful. The materials couldn't be more of the period.

Do you know what the black stone is?

-I wasn't sure. Onyx?

-Mm, bang on. Black onyx and diamonds.

A chic combination of black and white in this Cupid's dart.

This one here possibly pre-dates it.

There are five beautiful little diamonds in platinum.

That the settings of these jewels are completely consistent -

we call it "millegrains" - 1,000 grains.

Around the diamonds you can just see these tiny little perforations,

-like the edge of a stamp. Do you see those little...?

-Oh, yes.

-I hadn't noticed that.

-It's very distinctive of that period.

-These are pure and lovely diamonds and...

-I feel it looks ostentatious when I wear it.

-Do you?

-Yes.

English girls are all terrified of diamonds now.

Years ago, they didn't mind, but now it's not popular, which is a shame

-because they're all languishing in drawers.

-Yes.

-It's like nightingales singing and nobody hearing them.

Anyway, this is lovely jewel - a sort of conventionalised blue and white ribbon

made of sapphires and diamonds,

and again we can see the millegrains setting in operation here,

in the drop more obviously than anywhere else.

If I put it up against you... It's a good scale, isn't it?

The diamond moves just as it should to get this lovely return of light.

They're beautiful, beautiful things and with jewellery there's always talk of value -

the subject's almost inseparable, really,

and so we've got to consider it a bit.

I think they are exactly the kind of scale that everybody would like to wear - they're not too large,

so I'm thinking sort of, perhaps, £2,500 to £3,000 for this one...

maybe more, actually. Why not a bit more?

And, and um... I'm thinking this one, too -

very contemporary and amusing

and I do love it, I must say. £2,000 for that one.

-Ouch?

-Oh, dear, they're not insured separately.

-No, no, well, maybe they will be. And this one -

is the most sophisticated one. It's possible that this is made

by one of the great French houses - Cartier or Boucheron or Mouboussin -

or Van Cleef & Arpels in 1900.

The stones are cut exactly for this jewel,

they occupy the space very elegantly and nonchalantly

and it's a lovely thing that everybody would want,

so £6,000. Ouch!

I don't know an awful lot about chronometers.

-No.

-It was left to me in a will by an old drinking pal.

-How long ago?

-Um, he left it to me about six years ago.

-Right.

Let's have a look at the dial. It's signed Parkinson and Frodsham, Change Alley, London -

Very, very nice firm of makers and retailers.

And rather unusually, above that,

engraved into the dial and then waxed in red,

we've got "Frodsham and Keen" and underneath, "Resprung 1891".

Frodsham and Keen, I think, worked in Castle Street, Liverpool,

so, at some stage, this has gone up to the northwest. It's coromandel,

which is very unusual for a chronometer box. It's also fully brass-bound, as you can see.

-Yes.

-And double stringing as well.

This would have been a VERY expensive thing, new.

You can imagine the extra work that's gone into this sort of case,

rather than a standard mahogany box.

This would have probably been on some very expensive private yacht.

Well, we undo this gimbal lock here, move that across,

and if you can imagine a ship pitching and rolling in a heavy sea,

notice that the chronometer bowl should - and is - remaining in the horizontal.

I'll re-lock it

and then to have a look inside, we undo this front bezel...

..and there are various different ways. Remove that, otherwise that's going to fall out,

and then I'll literally just invert the whole box

and out comes the movement.

This is a nice touch - the dust cap,

which has a bayonet fitting on the movement. Pull that off

and there we have a lovely marine chronometer movement.

And you've got a lovely balance,

a superb helical spring - it's all freesprung -

it has the normal sort of escapement, and it should keep time

-to within a couple of seconds a week.

-A couple of seconds a week?

-Better than that, yeah.

So your drinking chum didn't give you any indication of value on it?

Well, he did, because he gave me a receipt from the place where he bought it from, in 1979, I think.

-Right.

-He paid £1,300 for it then.

-That's a lot of money in '79.

-Sounds a lot to me.

-A lot of money. Do you know where he got it from?

-He bought it as Aspreys.

-Ah, well,

that would have been top retail money at the time.

He started a small collection of timepieces of various sorts,

but, unfortunately, a lot were stolen in a robbery and this one escaped.

It's a great piece - very, very commercial in the current market.

If I were selling it at a good antiques fair, I could look towards...

£5,000. It's a good piece.

It'll pay off his bar bill that he left me, then, won't it?

It's a family piece, it's just been handed down through the family, and it's ended up with us.

It's actually Japanese,

and it's popularly called Satsuma,

which is a high-fired earthenware

with a crackled glaze - the crazing is part of it, it's not a defect.

Er...it developed really in response to Japan opening up to the West,

which it did in 1853-54.

The Satsuma type wares - one of the great makers was a man called Sobei Kinkozan,

from a long family of potters. Kinkozan was interesting

because he had this factory turning out this stuff and you could just go and buy a piece and go away again.

If you said, "Have you got any really good bits?" you were taken to his own house

and he had a decorating studio attached to his house where all the best stuff was done,

so it was a two-tier manufacturing process. This a top piece,

this is a really knock-out piece.

It's in the form of a tea canister, but I don't think it was meant for serious use.

On the bottom we'd expect to find - and have got - his mark "Kinkozan",

and the bottom character is "sukuru",

which means "made".

Round it, what appears to be just simply decoration,

but actually, it's in very stylised characters, it says "Dai Nihon" -

"great Japan", and then "Kyoto".

The decoration on here is just breathtaking.

It is just unbelievable that someone

could take a brush with enamel colours on it

and do this extraordinarily detailed painting.

The scenes are absolutely typical -

we've got a woman and her daughter, we've got a mountainous landscape,

we've got a cockerel perched on a blue rock,

we've got a couple of children,

another landscape with figures going up to a...house in the mountains,

and here, which is very nice,

a dog-like character - it looks like a cross between a dog and a cat.

Um, the sort of grey clouds which appear to be up here - up close -

every single dot is painted with the single hair of a brush

and that's actual gold, and that's continued over here.

Now one of Kinkozan's introductions was this dark blue enamel which he then gilded,

and the problem is with it,

the gold doesn't like sticking on it very much and is usually worn off.

Here, it's with very slight wear, it's still in pristine condition.

Some of the panels are actually signed by the painter,

and you've got at least two painters on this piece.

This one is one I can read - it says "Oshizan".

It's, I think, a remarkable find,

-it's as good as a piece of Satsuma as I've seen on the Roadshow.

-Oh.

-Really. Where do you have it at home?

-Stuck in my husband's office.

Whereabout in his office? Offices sound like crashing about -

-telephones, files...

-On a shelf.

-On a shelf. It's safe, is it?

-Um, well, I thought so.

-..I'll put it in a glass cabinet when get home.

-Put it in a glass cabinet,

-because it's worth £8,000 to £10,000.

-Blimey!

Thank you very much.

Thank you for bringing it in.

Well, the rain stayed away, the people came along and there were some interesting stories -

like the jewellery that was about to be sold in a car-boot sale for £1,

was brought along here instead and found to be not paste but real diamonds. That's a happy ending.

We shall be back at Knebworth next week for a closer look inside the house. Until then, goodbye.

Subtitles by BBC - 2000