Diggory Hadoke of VintageGuns.co.uk talks to Charlie Jacoby about Mitchell’s three-day Country Sporting Sale on 17-19 April 2024, and the future of gun sales at local and regional auctioneers.
For the lots they talk about, visit https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/mitchells/catalogue-id-srmit10224
For the lots they talk about, visit https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/mitchells/catalogue-id-srmit10224
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 I do make a habit of looking at stuff all over the place. The sale room, I find, is a really good
00:06 resource for that point of view, because if you happen to be looking for a Rigby or a
00:10 Stephen Grant, well, you can just type in Rigby or Stephen Grant and it pops up anything with that
00:17 in the description in the country. So if something's hidden in a little provincial auction,
00:21 which things sometimes are, then that's a good way of getting hold of them. So it's a really
00:26 good resource. It's my bedtime reading. I mean, you know, I just before I go to sleep, just
00:32 flick through. I never buy anything on it. It's just you kind of imagine yourself with that thing,
00:36 you know, whatever it is. I wonder if I would be able to. And then you sort of flick on and go,
00:41 oh, what about that? Early earrings? No, not for me, perhaps. Unfortunately, I do buy an awful lot,
00:46 well, an awful lot, a fair amount of junk. But I have to say, you know, I get some quite,
00:51 it's a good way of finding some interesting things as well. But I was talking to an American
00:58 journalist today, or a chap who works in the gun trade in America,
01:03 who's getting into journalism and was writing an article for one of the American magazines,
01:08 trying to explain to Americans of his generation, he's in his early 30s,
01:14 the benefits of buying English guns in England and taking them over to America, which of course
01:21 is something I've been involved with for 25 years. But to him, it was a new, exciting thing for him
01:28 and his friends to consider. And of course, it made me start to think about how the world of
01:34 guns has changed in the last 20 years or so. And it has changed what people need to pay attention to
01:43 when it comes to buying stuff in auctions in England, particularly if you're in America,
01:50 because the American dealers are so greedy. They put such massive premiums on everything
01:56 that it's very off-putting for people who are coming into it for the first time. The dealers
02:03 and the auctions a lot of the time, they want a profit on what they paid for it 20 years ago.
02:09 And it's not worth what it was worth 20 years ago, particularly if they bought it from somebody
02:14 from an expensive shop. And a lot of this stuff is probably worth two-thirds of what it was worth
02:22 20 years ago, and they want twice what they paid for it. So there's a real blockage in the market
02:27 in that respect, which is why I think some of these chaps are again, looking at the likes of
02:32 British auctions and thinking, "Well, I can get a bargain here," which of course, sometimes you
02:40 can. But I also have to temper my American friends' enthusiasm somewhat, because they look
02:48 at this stuff and they get very excited, and they'll bid for something and then have it sent
02:52 to me after they've bought it without asking me, and then ask me to tell them what I think of it.
02:58 Often the news they get is not the news they wanted, but in for a penny, in for a pound,
03:04 they've now decided, "Well, they've spent some money on this thing. They may as well spend
03:08 three times what they just paid on it to get it up and running, because otherwise,
03:11 it's just money down the drain." And so they end up with a £2,000 bill for a gun they paid £500
03:20 for, they thought was a bargain. When in fact, if you had a budget of £2,500 and went out shopping,
03:26 you could buy a better gun. Are they affecting prices in the UK market,
03:30 or are they still a very small group of people? It's hard to know. If you spoke to one of the
03:35 auction houses about how the market distribution is among buyers, then it's about 50% UK still,
03:48 and about 25% US, and about 25% the rest of the world.
03:53 Or even buying guns? Yeah. So there's still a lot going on in the UK,
03:58 but the US is a significant market. You've got to think about exporting the thing once you've
04:06 bought it. So that'll put off a lot of people, although some of the auction houses will help
04:10 with that. But my biggest bugbear with where this vintage guns hobby, if you like, is affecting
04:22 people is that 25 years ago, when I got involved with it, a lot of what I then considered old boys
04:28 who were probably our age, were in their late 50s, early 60s. And now, 20, 25 years later,
04:38 just do the maths and you can work out the ones that are still with us are not in the finest
04:45 fettle, some of them. And a lot of them are retiring or certainly scaled back, and some of
04:50 them have totally packed up. And the younger generation, one, most of them don't understand
04:57 old guns, because they didn't grow up in the 50s and 60s, learning on guns that were made in the
05:02 1880s and 1890s. They've grown up making component parts into functioning firearms.
05:10 And so they don't understand the nuances of a Lancaster wrist breaker, or, you know,
05:20 a Woodward single trigger. And when faced with the problem, they can't be bothered to,
05:25 frankly, research for nothing, how to fix it, spend lots of unpaid time on the phone to old
05:32 farts, who can probably just about remember how one works, and then tell them all the various
05:39 strange bits of metal and things that they need to try and get to fashion the broken part out of.
05:44 Yeah, it's much better, much easier for them to just stand at their bench and be sent
05:50 new guns to stock, finish, checker, whatever, from the London trade, of which there's plenty of work,
05:58 and get paid properly for doing an easy, relatively easy and straightforward job.
06:03 Because if you work with your hands, there's only so many hours in a day, and you've only got one
06:09 pair of hands and one gun on the bench at a time. So all your wasted time on the telephone and head
06:14 scratching and thinking is not paying your mortgage. Let's look at Mitchell's. It's not
06:19 the only one. I mean, there's, you know, what I find amazing is it's a three day sale of sporting
06:25 kit. What stood out to you? Well, they start off with air rifles, don't they? And air rifles,
06:31 like obsolete calibre firearms, are a little bit of an outpost on their own, because obviously,
06:38 unless it's over 12 foot pounds, you don't need a licence. So that, and also, we're getting to an
06:46 age now where, you know, the sort of nostalgia market for 1970s, 1980s and 1960s air rifles is
06:54 pretty strong. Because the people who had those as kids, or who wanted, lusted after a BSA air
07:03 sporter when they were 13 and couldn't afford one, you know, now they can find one. And
07:10 Mitchell's have one of those, for example, a nice 1976 model BSA air sporter in .22 calibre with a
07:19 small scope on it. And back in its day, that was, yeah, that was a well made expensive air rifle
07:26 that a lot of my friends, you know, couldn't afford. It's not just the BSAs, which are,
07:35 you know, these days, a mass market item. The guns which people really, really want in the
07:41 airgun market are things like the Virox. And they're selling those as well. I mean, they have,
07:46 they have everything from the enthusiast who remembers the word BSA or Webley, right through
07:53 to the modern technical air gunner who wants a Viroc or a Theoband or something like that.
08:00 That's right. I can see it. You know, lot number 10, for example, is a Viroc HW97 in .177,
08:06 you know, fitted up with a scope and all sorts of things, thumb hole lever,
08:11 you know, very high tech looking air rifle, estimated at 200 to 250 pounds. You know,
08:18 a lot of these air rifles, you know, new, they're 1000 pounds when they were bought.
08:22 So those things represent pretty good value. You know, the air sporter, for argument's sake,
08:29 you know, there's another one, a lot nine, another two, two made about 1970. You know,
08:36 it's in at 70 to 100 pounds, which seems pretty, pretty low. And I think, you know,
08:41 I've seen these things make upwards of 200 pounds. But 70 pounds is probably more than
08:47 it cost when it was new. Airguns are a definite plus. This sale, I mean, in order to make it run
08:55 over three days, it has got pretty well everything you could possibly want, either before you go
09:00 hunting, shooting or fishing, or when you come back from hunting or shooting or fishing. It's got,
09:04 it's got the whole range, hasn't it? Where do we go from airguns?
09:06 Yeah, well, it's got airguns, then we run into the modern, what I'd call modern sporting and
09:12 target rifles. You know, a lot of the what I call bread and butter farmers kit,
09:22 that people used to use a lot before you want what I call modern technical stuff came in. So
09:27 there's a lot of the guys out there now who are buying new rifles, they're using laminate stocks,
09:32 and stainless steel and modern looking stuff. Not that long ago, the quality in that sector
09:41 of the market for your gamekeepers and your farmers and your sporting shooters,
09:47 things like Parker Hales, there's a Parker Hale Safari Deluxe there in 243. Once upon a time,
09:54 that was a high spec rifle. If you go back to the 70s and 80s, those Parker Hale rifles were
10:03 at the top of what I call the mass market. There's one here at lot 51 in 243,
10:10 with an estimate of 50 to 80 pounds on it with a scope.
10:15 I must say I've singled out on my little list of three things I quite like the look of,
10:22 is a ticker M595, which is a slightly old fashioned ticket, not quite the same as the modern
10:28 version. It's in 243, it's a bolt action, it's screw cut for moderator. It even comes with a
10:33 pretty appalling looking moderator on the front. But on the basis you can, you know, you can change
10:37 the barrels on those things terribly quickly. And it's estimated at maximum 180. You know,
10:43 that's a third of the price of anything approaching a new one. Yeah, looks like a bargain,
10:50 has a little scope on it, but it's got with a rails for a scope. Yeah, well, of course,
10:54 what you've always got to remember with auction valuations is there is no maximum, you're looking
10:59 at an estimate, the low estimate is generally the reserve. So if it doesn't make the low estimate,
11:06 it won't sell. And then the high estimate is just a guess. And so anything decent, you know,
11:14 you can, if you're serious about buying it, you need to think about bidding significantly more
11:20 than the high estimate. Because if it looks cheap to you, it'll look cheap to somebody else.
11:25 Who am I likely to be up against for a ticket like that?
11:31 Well, it's not collector stuff. So you're looking at people in a way who want decent stuff, but they
11:40 don't want to pay modern prices for it. And they're not too wedded to modern bells and whistles.
11:44 Frankly, the secondhand market is full of this kind of stuff now. And when it goes into auctions,
11:53 often it's bought up and taken abroad because there's already a market over there. What we
11:59 have over here, of course, is with our firearms legislation, a restriction on the number of
12:05 firearms we can have, and the purpose for which we can have each one. Now in a lot of countries,
12:10 that those restrictions simply aren't there. So it's not simply a case for most holders of a
12:17 section one firearm certificate to go and say, Oh, quite fancy one of those, I'll have that as
12:21 well as what I've got. Well, the police will go, well, you can't have both. You can't have your
12:25 all singing, all dancing, laminate stocked, beautiful, you know, stainless steel, foxing
12:31 rifle, and a nice old one for fun, because you quite like to have something different. They're
12:37 not interested in the nostalgia element of it. They'll say, well, you've got a foxing rifle,
12:41 and you can't have another one. Right now we start to get into shotguns.
12:46 And I never know, Dick, are you more comfortable? Do you enjoy shotguns as a thing more than rifles
12:55 or rifles more than shotguns? Which are you? Well, I would have said, initially, I would have
13:01 said shotguns, you know, shotguns were always more my thing. And, and shotgun shooting, bird
13:08 shooting was always more my thing. But as I get older, I do more and more deer stalking. And so,
13:14 and I've done more overseas hunting. And so I've had to learn a lot more about rifles and
13:23 and how to use those. Having I said, I say that have I grew up shooting rifles before shotguns,
13:28 but they were air rifles and two twos. And my, I suppose my my rifle adventure has gone from,
13:36 you know, stalking rabbits with a two two to stalking deer with something bigger, and then
13:40 stalking, you know, African game with something even bigger, but it's, it's just adding layers
13:46 onto the experience and the and inches onto the calibers. There are a lot of workaday shotguns,
13:53 and this, this list, but there might be one or two gems. What has anything jumped out at you?
13:59 Well, I was having a look through the, you know, the old AYA number twos, and the various
14:06 variations of those are always popular, you know, people that like a side by side often have
14:15 often have a backup gun, because of course, you know, with shotguns, you can have as
14:20 many as you can store safely. Unlike unlike rifles. So things like AYA number twos,
14:29 Webley and Scott 700s, yet relatively modern side by sides, which, which haven't had too hard a life
14:42 and essentially need no gunsmithing. Because if you're buying stuff, going back to what I said
14:48 earlier, if you're buying stuff at the bargain basement, and it needs anything at all doing to
14:55 it, well, you've doubled the double, you've doubled what you pay you spent on it just by having it
15:00 stripped and cleaned and serviced. So if it's if it needs rejoining, or if the ribs are loose,
15:07 or, or if the ejectors don't work, well, again, you know, your, your, your bargain shotgun is
15:13 going to very, very quickly cost you multiples of what you've paid for it.
15:17 You said in the past that the big gun sale rums like Holts and Bonhams are more reliable for
15:26 condition. But I mean, is there any way of guaranteeing that the relatively modern Browning
15:31 I buy from the Mitchell's auction catalogue is going to be fine is going to be okay?
15:37 No, the auctions, the whole point of auctions from a seller's point of view are there are no
15:42 guarantees, which is why auctions have traditionally been a place where you get rid of
15:47 stuff you don't want to see again. If you if you want to sell on a retail basis and have a customer
15:53 relationship with your customer, whereby the customer expects you to stand by what you've
15:58 sold him and take care of any problems. Well, once it goes into an auction, all that's gone out of
16:03 the window. So it is purely buyer beware, there are no guarantees at all, which is why it's
16:08 imperative in my view, to inspect anything in an auction before you buy it. The temptation of having
16:15 a quick look at this, for example, lot 188 at Charles Rosson of Derby, side by side shotgun
16:23 with 26 inch barrels, you could have a look at that, take a view on it, the picture, they give
16:29 you one picture. It only tells a little bit about what it is, you can sort of see it's a fairly
16:35 plain Anson and Dealey box lock, it's got some nice touches, it's got a little shoulder forend,
16:43 it's got a drop points on the side of the stock, a little bit of case color hardening,
16:48 blushing the action. But that's all you can tell. So without actually picking it up, you don't know
16:53 if it's loose. You don't know if the ejectors work, you don't know if they're well timed,
16:57 you don't know if it's filthy inside and will need a good strip and clean. I think generally,
17:01 you can assume anything coming through an auction does. So in at 120 to 180 pounds,
17:09 it does look like a cheap gun, which could do good service for years and years,
17:17 and not much money. And that may be true. But unless you go and have a proper look at it,
17:21 or send somebody that knows what they're doing to have a proper look at it, you're just guessing.
17:26 And sometimes you guess right. You know, I've got Americans who I know who they buy stuff like this,
17:32 and you know, if one in three is better than they hoped, and one in three is worse than they
17:39 expected. And one in three is about what they thought they were buying. They kind of live with
17:45 that. That's a result. Yeah, I can see that. Okay. The sale goes on to three days. Yeah,
17:53 there is, of course, the absolutely statutory, I think it is now statutory following your
17:58 recommendation, that every sale has to have a leather skin in it. So I noticed that for 200
18:03 quid. Okay, yes. Did you have you looked into the further reaches of it? Is there anything in there
18:08 which jumps and makes you go, my goodness, what a brilliant idea. That is the autumn mask I must
18:13 have to put next to my tiger. Well, sometimes the clothing in these auctions gets overlooked.
18:22 Yeah, you can if again, if you pick up a jacket, you know, a coat for 30 or 40 pounds,
18:30 which, you know, there's a Grenfell gentleman's jacket, a sort of which is a classic old shooting
18:35 jacket, sort of shooting Mac lot number 483. You know, Wesley Richards actually sell a modern
18:42 version of that now. And it's about 500, 600 pounds. And they've got one in there that doesn't
18:48 look very worn. And it's 30 to 50 pounds. I remember an old friend of mine from America,
18:53 when we were at Holt's one year, he bought one of Joseph Nickerson's old tweed jackets,
18:58 which just happened to fit it. But that was a beautiful, you know, Savile Row or German Street
19:04 made bespoke, proper properly designed tweed shooting jacket, which, you know, if you try
19:13 to buy something like that new now, it would have cost you I dread to think, you know, 1500 pounds.
19:19 And he paid like 150 pounds for it or something. So if you can be bothered to look into the sort
19:26 of further reaches of these sales, sometimes you can pick up stuff which for most people
19:31 just isn't on the radar. I must say two things that jumped out at me. One is JG Millais,
19:38 the Wildflower in Scotland, which is yeah, there's a lot of books in there. 20 to 30 quid. I mean,
19:43 that's a gorgeous book. And then only on the basis I've got to go and make a film about it in the
19:48 next couple of months. There's a Shakespeare Hurricane Beachcaster 3.6 meters long. Again,
19:54 about 20 quid. I mean, what's what's not to love? Fishing rods are very cheap. Yeah, in this in this
20:02 world that we live in, you know, reels because they they can look nice on a shelf. Eye watering
20:09 in what they cost sometimes. Yeah, these are the old vintage fly reels. But but but rods,
20:15 for some reason, are always ridiculously cheap. And I think you're right. You know,
20:21 you can pick up some really nice stuff in the fishing rod department. If you have a look.
20:27 I did notice a lot 550 is a Draper shotgun wall thickness gauge for 12 and 20 more shotgun barrels.
20:32 Right. Again, it's something you'd want to have a look at and just
20:37 check that it's in decent nick. But anybody that's interested in collecting old shotguns really needs
20:44 to have a wall thickness gauge. Because if somebody brings you a gun and says I've got this old gun,
20:49 are you interested in buying it? The first thing you do is put the barrels on the gauge. And
20:54 if the barrel if the gauge reads 17 thou, the answer is no. If the gauge reads 30 thou,
21:01 the answer is, hmm, let's have a closer look at this. So you really need to know what you're
21:06 looking at in terms of wall thickness, because by peering down either end of the barrels,
21:11 you just can't tell. This is not the only auction going on. I mean, this kind of in this week,
21:16 Clark, Clark and Simpson in Suffolk have got a one day Wilson 55 in Cheshire, but a two day
21:22 coming up. Wilson 55 are going along nicely now. Every sale they have, they seem to get
21:29 some more interesting guns in there. And the chap that's in charge there is passionate and
21:34 knowledgeable. And I've been up there a few times and I've bought one or two things from there in
21:39 the past and they are making inroads. Yeah. Is it boom time for this kind of selling? I mean,
21:47 or is this perhaps a representation of the fact that everybody's trying to get out of guns as
21:50 far as they can? Where is the market? Well, I think partly for these these provincial auctions,
21:58 which I don't say that in a rude way. I mean, they are just they're not in London. And having
22:02 said as an aside, Bonhams have just axed their sporting guns department. So, you know, when I was
22:08 growing up, for want of a better word, London was the epicentre of sporting gun auctions. We had
22:14 Christie's, we had Bonhams, we got Sotheby's and Holt's. And now none of them are in London selling
22:23 modern sporting guns. So in a way, having the London auctioneers having knocked the little
22:31 provincial operations sideways for good part of the sort of 90s and 2000s and 2010s, in a way,
22:41 we're seeing with the internet, making the stock in the provincial auctions more immediately
22:49 visible to people from all over the world. They're having a bit of a resurgence. You know,
22:54 you no longer have to take your gun to Sotheby's for anybody to see it. If you put it on into
23:00 Wilson 55, or you put it into Mitchell's, you know, if anybody wants to find it, they can find it.
23:05 it.
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