Sunday 14 November 2021
As generations fade away
We tootled off to an antiques centre today - further than we usually go so an all day trip. We didn’t buy anything and didn’t expect to – it was just a day out and very pleasant too.
Something we have noticed over the decades is how the furniture and bric-à-brac we grew up with have been absorbed into the antiques market. Ercol furniture, sputnik lamps, Thonet chairs, Whitefriars glassware plus all kinds of stuff we always thought of as cheap and cheerful at best, or outright crap just a notch or two below that.
It’s quite odd at times. Good quality furniture with many decades or even a century of useful life left in it may go for a few tenners. It is often cheaper than modern versions bunged together with staples, glue and hardboard.
What we do see now is some of that old furniture painted to give it a more modern look. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. We have a set of Victorian pine drawers which has been well painted and to our eye it works. We’ve seen much more that doesn’t.
Often, certain styles appear on the antiques market in significant quantities over a period of a few years. Ercol is an example of that. There is something sad about it because much is obviously from house clearance as generations fade away.
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I had to look up Whitefriars glassware, but that really took me back. Where I grew up, homes that had that sort of stuff belonged to skilled ("time-served") men and foremen who all worked at Vauxhall Motors.
Thinking about how that used to be thought of as modern,aspirational and sophisticated fills me with a sort of wistfulness that is different from nostalgia, and doesn't really have a name in English.
Sam - I think I know what you mean about the wistfulness that is different from nostalgia. I don't have a word for it either. Maybe a sense that things could have turned out better but with no desire to turn back the clock.
We still have some Ercol chairs, they do their job and we have no interest in getting any different ones. Not really into glassware but vases and stuff around the house ranges in age from before I was born passed on through the family to modern, in various styles. Basically we don't follow fashion and I have an old-fashioned view of sustainablility, if it works then you keep it, maintain it and use it, and most old furniture was built to last generations. The results may not impress an interior designer but there is a sense of stability, comfort and security in retaining and using things that parents and grandparents used and cherished and that have a place in early memories. Even down to the bright yellow 70s Anglepoise that started life on my first ever office desk at work, and now graces my retirement den, albeit with LED bulb.
A couple of years ago after my mother passed away the family home needed to be emptied. There were many treasures, that's is relatively worthless items which were treasured. The auctioneer told us that brown furniture just doesn't sell, upholstered furniture which doesn't have the latest safety tags can't be sold. The hundreds of books were taken by the house clearance people, probably for pulping but I hope they had a second hand book dealer in mind.
I contrast that experience to similar events I witnessed during my childhood. When a home was emptied the contents were often left in the front garden or left in place for a few days. After which time there was little left. Many of the items I cleared were obtained in that way. The lesson to me is that we have been encouraged to dispose and consume, nothing is made to last. I threw away some old saucepans, old as in three or four years old. I replaced them with some old pans rescued from my mother's house, over fifty years old. Do couples today move into their first home with just a few sticks of furniture and build from there? I doubt it, they will have everything in place, all brand spanking new.
There isn't much left to connect us to our past, niknaks to evoke memories, to bring back lost people and lost ways. I think that it's us, here and now, who are lost.
I've done pretty well buying at the local auction room. A solid oak table and six chairs for less than £300. The wood alone would have cost twice that. Enough office furniture for my home office and more to spare for less than 200 — high-end stuff, probably from a fashionable architects office forty years ago.
Very apposite for me at the moment as I and my partner are clearing out my family home after my Mum died. Some things invoke memories, particularly if not seen since childhood; mimentos of when we lived abroad in the early sixties; things the parents bought in the Seventies and Eighties, it certainly invokes wistfulness. A collector friend paid me hansomely for their ash blond Ercol sideboard, dining table and chairs though. It's terrible to see one's parent's possessions disposed of. Wrings my heart out.
Woodsy - Ercol certainly seems durable if the antiques market is any guide. We don't follow fashion either. My mouse mat is resting on a century old Indian tripod table as I write this and you are right, there is a sense of stability, comfort and security in retaining and using things that parents and grandparents used. Not that we have much of that - they didn't leave much.
Andy - I agree, we have been encouraged to dispose and consume and not much is made to last even if it could be made to last. We are slowly downsizing, but don't see much real progress.
djc - today we saw a nice solid oak antique table and four chairs for just under £1000. Like you the dealer will have paid no more than £300 for it at auction. Possibly much less if it had to be restored significantly.
Tammly - we didn't inherit much worth selling or keeping apart from the houses themselves. A few odds and ends which bring back memories such as photos, medals and a few ornaments but not much else.
For many years, my dad cherished and nursed half a dozen Wedgwood pieces from around 1850, believing them to be very valuable.
I asked an auctioneer what they might fetch the other day, and we might just as well use them for flowers etc., as they are almost worthless now!
Scrobs - although Wedgwood is very good quality it was also a large scale manufacturer and a huge amount of it is still around. Very early pieces from the eighteenth century can fetch high prices though.
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