A GLAMOROUS STORY
According to Orpen’s story, Frida was granted a last wish – to wear clothes of her choice for her execution. She chose a magnificent fur coat and, when the order was given, she dropped the coat and faced the firing squad completely naked, perhaps in the hope that the soldiers would not be able to carry out their orders. Nevertheless, she was shot. Inevitably, the truth came out, and Orpen ended up in trouble with the War Office. However, he recovered from this setback and continued to work as a war artist, not only throughout the duration of the war but also at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Now called The Refugee once more, this portrait of Yvonne is among over 130 works by Sir William Orpen in the collections of the Imperial War Museum.
Once all this had been established, the owner decided to sell the painting. At first, it was going to be sold at auction, and then it was sold privately, and is now in a private collection in Australia. The price paid was in the area of Rupert’s revised valuation.
Sometimes objects are brought to the Roadshow and, although they do not have any significant financial value, they offer an unusual and often personal insight into great moments in history. Inevitably, many of these tell stories about global conflict in the twentieth century. A typical example occurred at Lincoln Cathedral in 2009, when a man brought in the stub of a cigar purportedly smoked by Winston Churchill.
Throughout the Second World War, a series of international conferences was held by the leaders of the Allied countries to determine strategy, to plan future action within the various theatres of conflict and to plan the postwar peace. There were over twenty people involved, some of whom are household names, intricately and enduringly associated with the shaping of the modern world, while others languish in obscurity, remembered only by specialist historians. One of the most important conferences was held in Casablanca, North Africa, in January 1943. Churchill (the British prime minister), President Roosevelt of the United States and General De Gaulle of France were present, along with teams of military and civilian advisors. Among the decisions made were the declaration of the doctrine of unconditional surrender, the invasion of Sicily to take place later in 1943, the commitment to an invasion of mainland Europe in 1944, the ongoing support of Russia, greater support from Britain for the Pacific war and the creation of a Free French force under de Gaulle.
The owner of the cigar stub revealed to Fiona Bruce that, while serving in the British Army, his grandfather was employed as a butler during the ten days of the Casablanca conference. At some point, he had collected one of Churchill’s cigar stubs, along with place markers bearing the names of important people attending the conference, including Harold Macmillan (later a British prime minister), Lord Alexander and King Peter of Yugoslavia.
Churchill, famously, was a great cigar smoker and around the world there are many cigar stubs and, indeed, whole cigars associated with him. Fiona pointed out that the provenance was all-important, as it is with all objects connected to famous people. The owner replied that he only knew what his grandfather had told him, and saw no reason to doubt his word. Given that the Churchill connection seemed definite, and the historical location important, the cigar stub was valued at £600–£800.
‘I got such a shock. I just couldn’t believe it. I just rocked backwards and forwards. It’s better than the stock market.’
This was the reaction of a Melbourne lady who had just heard that her teddy bear was worth $200,000. In 2005, the Roadshow visited Australia, with two locations, Sydney and Melbourne. The first programme was filmed at Sydney University, the second in Melbourne’s great exhibition building, a remarkable legacy of the International Exhibition of 1880, and the oldest building of its kind in the world still in regular use as an exhibition centre. Both shows had a ticketed attendance of 2,000, and both days produced some extraordinary and unexpected items, many of which were only indirectly connected to Australia’s history. Among the most exciting was this black teddy bear. The catastrophic loss of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 was commemorated in many ways, but one of the more unusual was the decision by the German toy maker, Steiff, to produce a black, grieving teddy bear as a memorial to those who had lost their lives, especially children. A small number were made, perhaps around 600 in different sizes, and the bears were distinguished by their black mohair fur and red-rimmed eyes, the latter to underline the grief affecting people around the world after the loss of the ship. It might have been more logical for Steiff to have produced a white polar bear toy, but it was believed at the time that a black, grieving bear would have greater appeal, and be more directly sympathetic to the disaster and its global impact.
TEDDY BEAR FEVER
Steiff, a Stuttgart company set up by Margarete Steiff, in 1880, was well known internationally as the maker of the world’s first jointed plush bears, invented by Margarete’s nephew Richard in 1902 and introduced at the Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903. Hitherto, most animal models and toys had been presented on four legs, but Richard’s breakthrough was to design a bear that stood up on its hind legs. In 1907, Steiff sold over 970,000 bears and teddy bear fever had gripped the world. By 1912 the teddy bear, named after the US President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, had become one of the world’s most popular toys, with manufacturers in many countries following Steiff’s lead. However, Steiff had carefully developed and maintained its reputation as the maker of the best bears, underlined by the famous metal button label to be found on the bear’s ear, which had been introduced in 1904.
Early Steiff bears can be valuable, with the best examples fetching £100,000 or more, but everything is dependent upon the condition. Most bears have, understandably, been much played with, often by more than one generation of children in a family, and so very few have survived in anything that might resemble their original, mint condition. It is not known how many Titanic bears were sold or how the public, and children, responded to a toy with so sad a story. It seems likely that the few survivors in good condition may have spent much of their lives at the back of cupboards or the bottom of trunks, forgotten from one generation to the next.
The Titanic bear shown at Melbourne was the first to be seen on the Roadshow. Others had appeared on the market – in 1990 a bear in excellent condition had sold at Christie’s in London for £91,000. This gave expert Hilary Kay a benchmark figure for the Melbourne bear, which was brought in by a teddy bear and doll enthusiast who had first seen the bear some years before when she sent one of her bears to a restorer. When the work had been done, the restorer had sent her a photograph of her bear seated beside a black Titanic bear, something she had heard about but never seen. A year later, the restorer had called her to ask if she was interested in buying the black bear. Realising that she would probably never get another chance, and that it might be the only one in Australia, she agreed to buy it for $40,000. So, when she came to the Roadshow, she really wanted to find out whether she had paid the right price, and hoped that it might now be worth $60,000.
When the owner had recovered from her shock at hearing the $200,000 valuation, Hilary asked her if the bear had a name.
‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘I hadn’t called him anything, he just sat on top of the cupboard.’
In 2012, to mark the centenary of the disaster, Steiff reissued the Titanic bear in a limited
