Militaria & Ethnographica: December Sale Results

Tennants Auctioneer’s Militaria and Ethnographica Sale on 13^th December saw strong bidding for groups of medals with provenance, such as a group of seven medals awarded to Flying Officer John Eric Parkinson of Bomber Command, No. 427 Squadron RCAF. Including a Distinguished Flying Cross dated 1944, the medals were accompanied by National Archives copies of paperwork and extracts from the Operations Record Book relating to Parkinson. The lot sold for £2,700 (plus buyer’s premium).  Selling well with a hammer price of £420 was a Hanovarian Waterloo Medal which was awarded to Soldat Heinrich Bostelmann; the medal had been consigned for sale amongst a mixed group of coins and the vendor was unaware of its value.

Of World War II interest was a very interesting collection of twenty reels of German Wehrmacht 16mm Lehrfilm or training films. Demonstrating everything from artillery fire to first aid and the care of horses, five of the films had been digitised and the lot sold for £500 (plus buyer’s premium). A collection of 62 black and white snapshot photographs of the Kubu Orchestra in Auschwitz Concentration Camp sold for £420; the members of the orchestra were Cuban Jewish inmates, and the photographs show them performing on stage. The images are not distressing and were possibly issued as Nazi propaganda. A pair of Second World War German 10 x 80 Observation Binoculars by Jos Schneider & Co, Kreuznach, Germany also sold well at £1,500 (plus buyer’s premium).

A rare Resolution and Adventure medal from 1772 that sailed the globe on James Cook’s Second Voyage sold for £1,700 (plus premium); the second of such medals to sell at Tennants this year, it will be returning to the Southern Hemisphere to its new owner. Also set to return to Australasia is the top lot of the sale, a 20^th century Australian Aboriginal wooden parrying shield that sold for £4,500 (plus buyer’s premium), more than ten times the bottom estimate.

Elsewhere in the sale, highlights included a pair of 18^th century ‘Queen Anne’ silver mounted 54-bore flintlock pocket pistols by Joyner of London, which sold for £2,400 plus buyer’s premium. A Japanese Daisho of a Chisa Katana and a Wakizashi from the late Koto period sold well too at £2,000 plus buyer’s premium.

The sale resulted in a total hammer price of £76,750 for 340 lots, with a 90% sold rate.

We are currently accepting lots for the next sale of Militaria and Ethnographica on 6^th March 2020.

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