19th century dolls house featured on BBC Antiques Roadshow could fetch £20,000 at Newbury auction

SAS has an interesting auction of Dolls and Teddy Bears this week.

The lots include an important mid-19th century English stone painted wooden dolls house which was the childhood dolls house of Katherine Jeffray (1841 to 1929) which is estimated to fetch £15,000-£20,000 when is goes under the hammer in the Teddy Bear, Doll, Dolls’ House and Traditional Toy auction at Special Auction Services in Newbury on 21st and 22nd June. This two storey house is being sold with original furnishings and decoration and provenance - the house and contents has come directly down a female line of the family from Katherine and it appeared on the BBC Antiques Roadshow in Dorking in 1998 and Homes & Antiques magazine in December 1998.

Other highlights in the sale include four important Polish Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp 1945 Liberation Red Cross cloth dolls (estimate £1,000-1,500), part of the Jackie Wyartt Collection, a Birmingham collector who has amassed more than 500 antique dolls in 70 years of collecting.

These dolls were made by Polish women/girls and six of these dolls were gifted to Red Cross nurses one of which took them to the vendor’s grandmother in 1953, who ran Birmingham's Dolls' Hospital. The vendor Jackie inherited her grandmother's doll collection. Rarely have these dolls been seen in public, for a short while they were toured around England by the Women's Institute (approx 1956-60) and Jackie also showed Anne Frank's father, Otto, in the late 1970s.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated on the 15th April 1945 and there was a party of British Red Cross nurses and doctors who stayed and nursed those they could, back to health, so they could leave the camp. They were slowly reintroduced to food and as they gained their strength and the women were given scraps of cloth and made this type of doll.

The auction also comprises the first part of the Lynda Fairhurst Collection of Antique, Vintage and Artist Teddy Bears. Linda’s is one of the largest collections sold by SAS in many years and it comprises more than 1,000 teddy bears and accessories. Lynda, a collector from the Longleat in Wiltshire, has been collecting for approximately 58 years and has amassed a very impressive collection, she is not giving up collecting completely and is retaining a smaller, more manageable collection, but wants to find homes for all her beloved teddies.

The auction will take place tomorrow (Tuesday, June 21) and Wednesday. https://www.specialauctionservices.com/

SAS auctioneers is based at Plenty Close, Newbury.