Montacute House 2 Antiques Roadshow

Welcome back to magnificent Montacute House in Somerset.

On our last visit, we saw the place through the eyes of the characters

in Sense And Sensibility, but the real-life residents

of Montacute and what happened here would certainly have caught Jane Austen's imagination.

The Phelips family were separated from their fine ancestral home

in 1911 - reckless gambling, mental illness and sheer misfortune

all played their part.

A number of tenants followed,

including Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India.

He pointed out the decayed state of Montacute and had the rent reduced,

agreeing to install electric light and to redecorate at his own cost.

This task he entrusted to his mistress,

prolific writer Elinor Glyn, the woman who coined the term "it"

as a 1920s euphemism for sex appeal.

Elinor's notoriety was enhanced by her eccentric ways

and a fondness for exotic furs.

The furs came in handy as she endured arctic conditions,

climbing up ladders in large unheated rooms like this long gallery.

At a staggering 172ft, it's the

longest of its kind to survive and it's been through the wars.

Locals remember ponies being

exercised here, which is rather surprising because...

we're on the second floor!

One morning, alone at breakfast, Eleanor came across a notice in

the Times announcing the engagement of Lord Curzon to Mrs Alfred Duggan.

This, it has to be said, came as a bit of a shock.

Curzon offered not a word of explanation.

Elinor left Montacute at once and burned nearly 500 of his letters,

in the process destroying any evidence of their detailed plans for Montacute.

Four years after Curzon's death in 1925, the lease expired.

The house was valued at £5,882

for scrap and put on the market, where it lingered for two years.

It was eventually saved from demolition

and presented to the National Trust.

And today, as so often, they are the Roadshow's hosts.

A little model of a kneeling camel,

but when you look at the head there forming a spout

and here's a handle, of course, it's a teapot,

but what a bizarre teapot it is.

What do you know about it?

Well, I remember it from my early childhood.

It belonged to my Aunt Annie who was born in 1860.

-Oh, right.

-And so I knew her in the 1950s, it was in her house.

I suppose actually, I couldn't really imagine...

How do you use it for tea?

Supposing you're going to pour it from the handle,

there's the little lid, and it's nice having the lid remaining with it

and inside you put your fine tea leaves.

Imagine putting the water in there and trying to pour it out through the spout.

-Do you think they ever used it?

-I can't imagine they would, would you?

-I wouldn't have thought so.

-But of course it's...

I mean in theory this is a functional teapot and really quite

an early teapot because we think of

novelty teapots, silly teapots, being perhaps a 1930s idea, but they

started way, way back and this was made somewhere round about 1745-1750.

-As early as that?

-So, back in the middle of the 18th century...

Yes.

..when a design like this was really quite outrageous, it was totally new,

totally stunning design, made in the Staffordshire Potteries.

You've got a piece here of English salt-glaze.

-Oh, right.

-And salt-glaze is a very difficult material to make and cast.

You glaze it by literally throwing salt into the kiln and it forms a

hard surface reacting with the clay and it's very durable,

it lasts a long time, but it shows the modelling quite well underneath.

Here we've got the work, probably of a potter - Thomas and John Wedgwood.

-Oh.

-Some of the early Wedgwood family, started out making these

salt-glazed teapots around 1750.

So, what is the design?

On the howdah here that he's wearing,

there is some sort of strange Oriental temple I suppose that is.

What strikes me holding it is how light it is.

-Yes, yes.

-Incredibly thin and light, it really is.

And that is really to me the star piece because it's still here.

So rarely do we find camel teapots

and other thin teapots like these, I haven't seen many of them,

but to find one with its top as well and fitting so well...

So, it's really quite a special piece of rare pottery and

think in terms of a value about...

..£7,000.

Blimey...

that's a lot.

-Did you buy this?

-Yes.

-When did you buy it?

The late '60s, in the late '60s, and my husband and I went to

an antique show in Kent and while we there I saw this

and, being an amateur sewer, this was very important to me,

but...

..it was quite expensive for me.

We were courting at the time

and my husband very kindly bought it for me.

Oh, right, well, I must ask in that case, how much did it cost?

£35.

What was that as a proportion of income then?

Well, my income at that time was £9.50 a week,

so it was about a month's salary.

That's quite something, isn't it, to think of that, a month's salary

going to this? But this... I presume

you know by now, having handled it for 40 years, what this is made of?

We think it's an antelope horn.

Yes, exactly, exactly - and I can date it relatively easily.

You get the same sort of thing in England in the 1810-1820 period

and I always think that Indian things are probably

10-20 years behind time, so let's say 1820-1840, that sort of date.

So, inside, we're going to find

what we call now the typical Indian interior here,

ivory with sandalwood,

this lovely, lovely, it's a wonderful smooth wood,

very, very well polished.

It's lovely to touch, very tactile.

It's quite a luxury item, you've got...

I won't play with all the toys,

You've got a tape measure there which is so sweet!

I said I won't play with it, I'm going to now! It's so sweet.

I love that, and all the sort of little things for a lady's

necessaire, but do you use it today?

No, I'm afraid I just keep it so that it doesn't get spoilt.

But did you ever use it?

-No.

-So he bought it for you, all that money, and all that long ago and you've never used it?

-But it's too good to use.

-So, are you going to keep it?

-Oh, yes.

-Even if I tell you what it's worth today, you're going to hang onto it?

-Oh, yes.

Well, today it's worth at least £1,000.

That was a good bit of investment, wasn't it?

-Sounds like a good relationship!

-Yes.

Now, what is Clare Leighton to you?

Well, it must have been, I would imagine, in the late 1970s.

I was in a bookshop, always had a love of books, and

picked up the Four Hedges book,

didn't appreciate the significance

of it at the time but, when I started looking into her work,

I realised how powerful and how significant her images were.

But was it just her, or wood engraving as a whole?

Wood engraving as a whole.

I was particularly struck by the...

Around the '20s and '30s,

there seemed to be a plethora of female wood engravers,

people like Agnes Miller-Parker, Joan Hassall, Gertrude Hermes...

But I suppose, to me, Agnes Miller-Parker perhaps finer in detail,

-but I just like the absolute power of Clare Leighton's work.

-They're very strong, aren't they?

-They are.

I think that's what appealed to me, as I say, the Four Hedges I certainly

knew when I was very young, I've still got a couple of copies of it.

Yes, that's my favourite book because I'm a gardener.

-Oh, well, it's perfect for you.

-You know, I love gardening.

This is, in a sense, as it says,

it's The Gardener's Season, so she was a gardener, and so

as one goes through the book you find this mixture of beautifully drawn...

-They are, yes.

-..and then wonderful scenes like that of...

And what has gone in to make that picture is always

behind, you know, wonderful skill.

Yes, it's the skill of the engraving

of the wood, but it's also the strong, rich contrast

between the black and white and I think that's why wood engraving appealed so much.

She was a very determined woman, she wrote her own books, she'd engrave

books as illustrator for other publishers.

Erm, emigrated to America in 1939, she became an American citizen in

-1945 and lived the rest of her life there until she died in 1989.

-Yes.

And when she was in America of course

she could take further this ruralist, this strong country tradition.

-Typical I think are these Wedgwood plates.

-Yes.

Now these are a set of 12, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Produced by Wedgwood in the early 1950s, the basic industries

of New England, and it's things like the grist mill, erm, ice cutting,

it's a whole range of rural industries and, of course,

we're at a period when there was a romance about these, many of them

were disappearing, mechanisation was taking over and I think her voice is

not saying, "Gosh," you know, "it's all going to be awful."

She's simply saying, "This is what we have,

-"let's record it, let's remember it all."

-Yes.

Now, what do you pay for things like this?

If we go back to the first book,

-erm, I probably paid I think about £2 or £3 for it.

-Yes.

Back in 1977.

And now what are you paying?

Because there is a greater awareness I think of her work

-I tend to pay more. The plates probably about 20 or 30 each.

-Yes.

Which is not much and also the difficulty is,

you don't get them very often in the UK.

-No. Because they were made for the American market.

-Yes.

I mean, as you know, I mean you're probably as au fait with

values as I am, you know, a good signed edition like that is

probably going to be about £100, possibly more, the plates, as you

say, can be bought for £10-£15 each and this is great collecting

and I think you've done very well, I'm very envious of some of these.

Well, a relative had died in the family and we were left the house,

it was left to me parents at that time, and, er,

when you're youngsters, you go out into the back garden and you start

digging stuff up and playing around and, erm, I found that along with

various other pieces of silver, and it was all in the back garden.

-Just buried?

-Just buried in the back garden, yeah, but it turned out that

my great-grandparents were actually some form of antique dealers

and stuff like that, but I think they went a bit eccentric,

come the end, and... and just put it in the garden.

Good heavens! What a wonderful story!

-Yeah.

-And how old were you at the time?

I must have been about 15, 16, I would say.

Right, and did you then clean it up yourself?

I had a bit of a go at it, yeah,

and it's been basically in a box and it's moved from one garage to

another garage over the years and then I've been meaning to come to an Antiques Roadshow for many years.

Well, you can probably tell by what's engraved at the bottom here -

"Brandy" - that it comes under

the general name of a wine label, even though it's actually a spirit.

-Yes.

-But what you might not know is, this is one of the rarest wine labels I have ever seen.

-Mmm.

-In fact it might well be unique.

Not only that, it's beautifully marked on the front here,

it's got a date letter here for 1838, it's got a maker's mark over here,

"WE" for William Elliott.

-Right.

-But I think one of the nicest features of all

is that, if we turn it round,

on the back here,

actually got the name of the ship, the "Blenheim", and "60 guns".

-Right.

-Have you made any attempt to find out...?

-I haven't, no.

No, I should think if you contacted the National Maritime Museum or

some institution like that, you'd get a pretty good idea to find out what

this ship was and if it was involved in any major engagements.

-Can you imagine if it was involved in Trafalgar or something...?

-Well, yeah.

It would be a very different object altogether.

As it is, this is a very, very special piece.

-Right.

-Very special.

It could well be a one-off wine label.

It's not a converted piece because - do you notice at the bottom,

the sea is actually cut away?

-Yeah.

-Where they've left a space for the name to be engraved.

-Right.

I presume from the age of 15 onwards you've never had it checked out.

I haven't, no, it's just...

I just imagined it went

on a decanter and it would have been like brandy, maybe port or something like that

and there were probably four of them there.

-Possibly.

-And that was one of the four, that's what was in my head.

-Quite, quite possibly.

-I've never done any research into it.

-Well, I think you might need a big swig of brandy in a moment.

-Right.

I think this is worth between £3,000 and £4,000.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

This is any collector's dream. It is an absolutely must-have wine label.

Well, what a fantastic clock!

I'm sure,

I'm positive that a clock like this must have a fascinating history.

Yeah, I've been given a letter by my mother-in-law which details

the history quite comprehensively and we believe that it was gifted

to my late husband's grandmother.

-Right.

-By one of Carl Faberge's sons.

Carl Faberge, the famous Russian jeweller?

Yes. And it was brought to London from Russia,

prior to its being given to her.

So, Carl Faberge must have...his son must have settled in London and...

We believe so, yeah, and he was about to move

house and didn't have room for it.

That would explain how a clock like this came over to England.

Well, it all figures, it makes perfect sense because

it is... I've been doing clocks for an awful long time,

and it is a difficult clock to place.

It's only when you take the movement out

that you realise that it is in fact made in Russia.

And I have had a word with Christopher Payne

in the furniture side, and he tells me that this is birch wood.

-Right.

-Which is harvested from the Karelian Forest in the Baltic

and it looks exactly like mahogany. I could have sworn it was mahogany

but Christopher tells me absolutely not.

We wondered if it was German.

Well, it does have a very German overtone, this architectural pediment

and this lovely reeded decoration,

this is absolutely lovely,

-but it is in fact almost certainly made in Russia.

-Right.

What I love about this case, what is really special, is the way, although

it's quite a crude construction, it has one secret little catch to it.

If you press this button on the top here, it releases the door

and it's beautifully made and it just releases, away it goes.

And in order to get it back,

you put it gently back in there

and click, straight back into place, beautifully made.

It's probably, it's the best part of the whole case, it's lovely.

We've got a gilt metal bezel that goes around the dial

and what we call a regulator dial,

where the seconds, minutes and hours are all separated out,

-and was most often used for astronomical observation.

-Right.

People who observed the stars needed to know the exact time keeping.

What they really wanted to know was the position of a star

going from one point to the next and they timed the star

going from one point to the next using a regulator.

And I suspect that this clock, being in a very flashy case,

was probably used by either an amateur astronomer

or it could have been the house regulator.

It would have been the clock in the house that told the most perfect time.

As you walked out of the front door, you took out your pocket watch,

checked the time from the best quality time keeper in the house,

corrected your watch and strode off to work.

They were very expensive clocks to buy at the time,

around 1840, that sort of period. Value is extremely difficult.

Um...I've never had to value one before.

Have you got it insured?

No!

-No.

-Well, many times people don't have them insured.

I think it's fantastic,

and I can see that at auction it could easily fetch...

Because the Russian market has gone from richer to richer

and there's an awful lot of Russian money around at the moment,

I can see this clock fetching anywhere between £10,000 and £15,000.

-Right.

-So, you need to take good care of it.

Insurance, you probably ought to insure it

-for as much as £20,000-£25,000.

-Yeah.

These give the impression of not having been assembled recently.

No, I've inherited them from my parents who inherited them

from my mother's aunt.

-Right, so you...

-So, that would have been in the '20s and '30s.

Good time to be buying. A lot of good things were available then.

Yes, I think they were lucky.

-So, you've got them at home?

-Yes.

Must be quite difficult housing them!

I mean, these are not sort of little dishes, are they?

We've got these on the top of quite a big buffet.

-Oh, right.

-And the rest are scattered round the house.

Right. OK.

There is one that sticks out

as not belonging to the rest.

Which is it?

Erm, I would imagine this one.

Wrong.

They're all Chinese...

-except that one.

-Ah.

-That's Japanese.

-Ah.

That is Seto porcelain.

That dates from around 1880,

and that would fetch

somewhere in the region of £300 to £400.

Now, in the 18th century,

Chinese porcelain was flooding into Europe in huge quantities,

brought over by the East India Companies.

What the East India Companies liked...

..were objects like that,

because this is heavy

and you can pack it tight

in the bottom of the ship, right?

So, square objects - good news.

Bad news - complex objects like teapots.

And even more bad news - huge objects like that.

But these are extraordinary.

These dishes would probably have come with a dinner service,

but were not part of it

in the sense that they would have been used.

They were buffet dishes, just as you've got them,

you're doing exactly the right thing,

you've got them on a buffet,

-they are for display, they're to show how wealthy you are.

-Right.

Because you invite your smart friends in to dinner

and they come in and they say, "Wow, look at the size of those dishes!"

And they know you've paid a huge amount of money for them.

Because to get these landed in England in good condition

in the 18th century...

And I say 18th century,

I mean, we're talking about 1745-1755 for these.

..was not easy.

In fact, that one is cracked,

but this one is in good condition.

Do you know, that's fascinating.

Rule of thumb...

if you've got spur marks

where the thing was fired on the bottom of a dish, it's Japanese.

Oh, right.

-You don't get them on Chinese.

-Ah.

But this one was so large, they had to put spur marks on, otherwise it

would have sunk in the kiln, so here is an exception to the rule, but that

red colour - absolutely characteristic of Chinese.

So, you've got a pair of dishes, one with a slight crack

but the other perfect,

which is extremely unusual.

I've got a feeling that if those were in auction,

you'd be looking at...

£3,000-£4,000.

Good grief!

Well, I've seen people arrive at Antiques Roadshows

on a lot of different types of machine,

but this takes the biscuit, it's wonderful. Tell me what she is.

It's a 1901 Locomobile steam car.

She's just glorious.

Listen to that, a whisper, nothing in the background practically.

Now, are you the proud restorer of this machine?

No, I regret I can't claim restoring it,

but I bought it because somebody rang me up and said, "Would you like to buy a steam car?"

-So what does one do, but buy a steam car?

-Absolutely.

Well, I remember steam cars, I used to do the London to Brighton rally in a previous life

and I was driven on a 1902 Pannard Lavasser and this thing

-always broke down and do you know what always sailed past?

-A steam car.

-A blooming steam car!

-Of course.

And it was so infuriating, but I think looking at this machine,

listening to it, knowing what it runs on - it runs

on water with a little bit of petrol and that's it.

It's the solution really to all our transport problems, isn't it?

Provided we're happy to go just a little bit slower.

It is because even with a petrol fuel, the combustion is so much better,

you don't get the nitrous oxide you get with these internal combustion engines.

-Exactly, exactly.

-So you don't have that, you don't have the noise,

you can drive along with this at 20-25 miles an hour if you're brave,

and you can hear the birds singing in the hedges.

-It's wonderful.

-I can demonstrate if you so wish.

-That would be fantastic.

I tell you, I live in the Midlands, so we ought to set off fairly soon!

The quality of this carving is absolutely wonderful.

-What's her name?

-O Mimosasan.

Right, and her history?

Her history is that she came from an aunt by marriage

who was in love with China, and all things Chinese

so when her husband was posted to

Hong Kong, it was just a superb gift and she collected all sorts of bits

and pieces, some from a more senior officer who admired her greatly

and others she collected herself.

-So, she was a China fan?

-She was a China fan.

And she gave her a Japanese name?

I don't know, you're the expert, you must tell me.

-She is Japanese.

-She is?

-She is.

-I wondered whether she was.

The Japanese at this time, what, 1900-1910...?

About 1920 they were out there, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't bought earlier.

Well, I would say it could have been carved certainly as early as 1900.

1920 - it's unlikely. By then the quality was really

going down, but this is superb and it's so superb that the artist has

actually of course signed underneath.

I can't read that because it's in a grass script, but it is beautiful,

a beautiful piece of carving.

I know, you can study her for hours and it's just exquisite.

But the icing on the cake is really the fact that she's

been inlaid with these little pieces of mother of pearl.

At some stage someone's done a bit of a repair job.

These have been glued back in.

-Yes, not very well, I'm afraid.

-Is that you?

-Certainly not.

Er, this is, erm, a technique which we generically call shibayama

technique and it is very, very good, especially on the back of the obi

at the back of the costume, you've a little bit of a loss there.

So she is Japanese, not Chinese,

and she is worth somewhere in the region of, I guess, £400 to £500.

Oh, right. Oh, that's lovely.

So, here's a painting by Jacob Jacob.

I hope I've pronounced that right - probably not.

Dutch, 1844, and it's signed down here by...

Well, it's like "Jacob Jacob".

I like this little white sign here where they've called him

"Yacoob Yacoob", Anglicising it. It's Antwerp.

It's lovely, isn't it?

Yes, it was hung on my husband's parents' dining room wall

for a very long time and then

we were lucky enough to be given it

about 12, 13 years ago.

Yes, I see.

It has this lovely light in it.

It's sort of aqueous that light.

I was looking for a word

and aqueous I thought just had it.

It's like a very thin line of buildings across there, it's a bit

like some artists paint Venice,

or more appropriately Petersburg.

Because this artist spent time in the Baltic and it seems to me to have a rather sort of Danish feel to it.

I love the way that light plays on it as well, especially in the foreground where it's quite golden

and then it gets cooler and cooler as it goes into the distance.

Because it's got such a low line of buildings, you get this sense

of sweeping right back into the far, far distance, that works very well.

No, it's a really lovely thing and you've also brought along

this other picture here.

We'll move over there and have a look at that.

Now this is him somewhere else altogether.

I just love the juxtaposition of

the two pictures because here he is in the near East, he's gone to Egypt

and again he's drawn on this library in his mind,

I think, and painted it in a very Italianate way with these golden

Italianate colours, a bit like the French artist Claude Lorraine, with

this wonderful sort of sunset going on and this romantic picturesqueness,

but I don't think Egypt really looks like that. What do you think?

Well, I've never been to Egypt and it is how I always thought

Egypt would be, very romantic and with lovely

architectural, archaeological features, but I don't know Egypt.

Yes, well, I confess I don't either, but I know this...

-It's got its palm tree.

-Yes, it's certainly that,

but it has got this very Italianate way of looking at it.

I suppose being in the family for so long you've never valued them

-No.

-No thoughts of that at all?

Well, it's never been really important

because we've just always loved having them

and I know my in-laws loved having them, too.

Yes, yes, well, I'm, you know...

a picture this size by this artist would typically fetch about £8,000.

Would it?

Yes, but again it's bringing a kind of Western way of painting,

it seems to me, to Egypt.

Other painters went to Egypt and painted exactly what they saw,

no frills.

I think that he's been... if we go back to this painting...

..rather more honest in a sense

because this is his homeland and I think he's

found it easier to depict it and it's much more effective in that way.

Certainly it has got more resonance for me and probably for the market,

worth about £15,000, I think.

Gosh!

-I'm a bookbinder, that's my hobby.

-Right.

-And whenever I see a piece of leather

with tooling on it, I get kind of excited.

And that's exactly the kind of box

or case that really you think, "What am I going to find inside there?"

"It's got to be something good," so,

up come the hooks...

And we have a little glass inside, nicely cut, wheel-cut

with a diaper pattern, pearls with a crown above an "A"- who dat?!

Well, my great-grandfather, who obtained it in Paris, I think

around 1867, said that it was Marie Antoinette's,

but I've since had it looked at by somebody who said the cipher's not hers.

-It isn't.

-It's somebody else's.

-It isn't Marie Antoinette.

This is a real bit of social history.

Why do you have a glass in a leather case?

And of course... Do you know?

Well, to protect it while it was travelling.

She took it in rough riding coaches you know, very hard springs.

-Everything would have been thrown around.

-They were travelling the whole time

and they were pulling up into inns

and the inn had got no cutlery,

it had got no glasses, it had got no bedding...

Well, it probably had got bedding but it was a straw palliasse, and unless

you wanted to scratch all the next day, you brought your own bedding.

There was a retinue going on for ever with these people as they

travelled round and yes, that was exactly why you had a case.

I think it might never be possible to track down whose this was.

-Yes.

-But it might be.

I think it's a jolly nice little thing,

it's a sophisticated little bit of glass-making and I think that would

probably sell, depending again on who it turns out to be,

somewhere around £700 to £1,000.

This big red book seems to have been through the wars. What's the story?

Well, it has to some degree. It came out of my great-great-grandfather's

ship, the Africa, which was involved in Trafalgar and it was actually

in the bookcase in his cabin when one of the cannonballs came more or less through the

porthole and smashed the bookcase and it crumpled and smashed the top

of the book itself and because a cannonball in those days was a

very, very hot object coming through, I think this is one

of the reasons why the leather has got so, so pitted and so on.

And the inscription that it's

actually got inside it tells you what actually happened on that day.

It says that, "This book was shivered in this manner by a shot

"knocking to pieces the bookcase in the Battle of Cape Trafalgar,

"October 21st 1805 on board The Africa, 64 guns,

"signed Henry Digby."

This is wonderful stuff. What is the book itself?

Well, the book itself - we always assumed that it was some sort of

weighty tome on the Battle of the Nile and how it was fought and everything else

and my father the other day decided he'd read through it

and it's actually entitled "The Memoirs of the Compte de Grammont".

It turns out that this is actually the equivalent of Lady Chatterley's Lover of the time

and so I think we could almost say that

this is 18th-century pornography.

-A little...

-Very useful in the Captain's cabin, I'm sure.

-Yes, a little bedside reading.

-Yes.

-We'll keep the inscription and close the leaf.

-Thank you.

Luckily for me, they brought this

to me because it's furniture, at least it's small furniture.

It's bigger than treen - or it doesn't quite fit into that.

It's carved wood in the most wonderful style, a mystery object so far.

I want to look at the stand in more detail, so tell me what you think it is anyway.

It's just got a bit of black glass in there, so...

I have no idea, I've asked

lots of people for several years and they have no idea what it is.

-Really?

-I brought it along today to see you could throw any light on it.

I'm very glad you did. How did you find it? Where did you find it?

It was in a box of goodies that belonged to my former husband and I've just had it restored.

Well, whoever did it is to be commended because he did

a first class job. It's what I would call sympathetic restoration, but the

fineness of this is reminiscent of the Bushey School of Art.

Herkomer is the man responsible for leading that movement,

and we look under here, these lovely big fat fleshy leaves which are

beautifully carved, look at the kick in that scroll.

When you come down here, you've got this sort of Tudoresque style

with the finest possible little flowers,

and each of those panels is different.

I mean absolutely charming.

Somebody might have suggested, because this is black glass,

that it might be for looking at eclipses, but in fact

it's a "Claude glass"

named after Claude Lorrain,

the artist, OK, and it is for an artist to hold up

to create the view of his picture.

It's an illusionary thing.

-Gosh.

-And if you, if you look in here, can you see?

-Yes.

-Now can you see the background, can you see the trees?

-Yes.

Now there's a perfect oil painting

and that's what he would have in his mind to paint.

It clarified the vision.

Fabulously interesting, beautiful object, just wonderful!

-There, there it is, mystery object solved.

-Wonderful.

Now, value-wise, very difficult.

Its value wouldn't relate to its extreme rarity and interest, but to

a collector today, anything between £800 and £1,200 - that sort of price.

-Gosh.

-Oh, yes, I know, I've got four people

lined up here who'd like to buy it.

This is so exciting for these to turn up today.

EHS - Ernest Howard Sheppard -

an obvious-looking Owlie and Eyore and Pooh,

absolutely fantastic.

Just out of interest, where did these come from originally?

In my lifetime they hung in my grandmother's spare room

at her house when I stayed when I was a kid and I got interested in them.

As far as I know, they've been in the family since my mother's

childhood and she can tell you more about that.

They were in my nursery when I was three in the early '50s.

She had an aunt who bought her all the original books when they first came out, the year they came out.

-The first editions.

-I think they were first editions.

They could have been the second because of the short print runs.

We think they came into the family that way and then it's possible,

that she went to a book signing with that aunt and was given these there.

Well, great foresight on her behalf and she obviously loved the images.

Now I know quite a lot about Ernest Howard Sheppard because

many years ago, in the late '70s, I actually was involved in doing

a studio sale of his pictures.

And of course he was born in the 1870s and of course his early work

-was in the early 1900s - he did it for Punch magazine.

-Really?

And then he started illustrating and he met AA Milne in the 1920s and did,

in 1924, When We Were Young with Christopher Robin

and then, in 1928, did the first Winnie The Pooh book.

And of course in the 1930s he illustrated Kenneth Grahame's

Wind In The Willows.

And when you look at these closely,

you know, when he started doing these figures,

it's not just pen and ink, there is pencil underneath that.

He'd worked out the images freehand and there's so much spontaneity here.

You've only just got to look at Owlie, it's fantastic.

If we come up the top here, I mean just look at this, a fantastic study

because you've got Pooh stuck in

the sort of rabbit hole, being pulled out by Christopher Robin.

Rabbit's behind and then we've got

Piglet there hanging on the back trying to

pull him out, and it's just charming.

I imagine there would have been some writing in here.

They've left some space.

Now the condition, as I say,

it's an original and we've got mould here round the signature.

Now forget about the mould, that can

easily be removed, but it's just so nice because these aren't... He did

rework some of his images in the 1950s and '60s and he died in 1976.

But these are actually from the 1920s and '30s period.

You can tell just by the way that they look.

And some years ago I sold a little picture of Toad

when he came out of jail, dressed in washerwoman's clothes, and we had

an estimate of £5,000-£7,000 on it and it made £10,000, just for one.

-Wow!

-But having told you about Wind In The Willows, of course,

Pooh is much, much more popular.

And so we've got the three here and I look at Owlie and I look at

Eyore and Pooh looking up like that.

I think, what is that worth?

Well, I can tell you they're certainly going

to be worth £20,000 to £30,000...

-Woah!

-..just for those three.

Wow!

So, we come to this one.

Now, I don't know if this is the original from the book,

but if it is, and I know

-that this would make between £30,000 and £50,000.

-Wow!

-That is how popular.

-Wow!

There's a huge interest in America.

Wonderful.

A vote of thanks to Sir Edward Phelips, who built Montacute House over 400 years ago.

The family name lives on in the title of a pub in the village, which I think is a wonderful legacy.

Thanks to the National Trust for opening the gates and to the people

of Somerset for coming through them.

Until the next time, from Montacute House, goodbye.