Photo credit: Ewbanks/BNPS
A necklace nearly taken to a car boot sale with a £15 price tag turned out to be a rare 18th-century Polynesian treasure worth almost £100,000. At Ewbank’s auctioneers in Surrey, it sold for £99,000, far above its original estimate of £60 to £100, according to Antique Collecting and the Antiques Trade Gazette. It was part of a batch of items that had been priced at £15 and was destined for the A3 car boot sale opposite the auction rooms. Before the sale, interest from collectors suggested the necklace might reach £20,000 to £30,000. Even that estimate was hundreds of times higher than the £15 price originally attached to it, as per the report. A bidder in the auction room dropped out at £50,000, leaving a French bidder using Ewbank’s live online bidding platform to compete against an Australian telephone bidder. The contest pushed the hammer price to £99,000, as per the reports. It became the highest sale at Ewbank’s in 2016 and the highest price achieved on the firm’s live bidding platform, which had been launched earlier that year. A £15 item became a £99,000 auction result, a rise of more than 6,000 times its original price.
Because of the enormous gap between the necklace’s initial valuation and its final sale price, the story is remarkable. The piece, made from human hair and sperm whale bone and originating from the Austral Islands in the South Pacific, had been found during a house clearance. The necklace was brought to Ewbank’s by the owner of a house clearance firm, who had no idea of its significance. At the last moment, the owner changed his mind and took the necklace to Ewbank’s instead. That decision transformed the fate of an object that might otherwise have been sold for a few pounds at a roadside stall, as per the reports. The final sale exceeded every expectation.