Sworders’ Out Of The Ordinary Sale Returns With Historic And Rare Collectibles On August 18

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, curious minds and collectors of the marvellous — roll up, roll up and gather close. The auction spectacle of the season is about to begin.

Now in its ninth year, Sworders’ Out of the Ordinary sale returns on August 18. Beneath our imaginary big top, the curious, the uncanny and the extraordinary take centre stage, offering a celebration of objects that sit far beyond the bounds of the everyday. It’s the place to find a cavalcade of curiosities: a witch’s ball, an iron maiden, a mahogany cased vampire slaying kit or a George I memento mori ring.

Much interest is circling around a rare eyewitness UFO account from the early days of the modern ‘flying saucer’ phenomenon. Written in Durban soon after the sighting on March 8, 1953, the author Barbara Graves carefully records the weather conditions, appearance of the object, and its unusual movements across the sky.

She told her correspondent, Muriel Armfield, of Chertsey, Surrey: ‘I hope you don’t think I’ve taken to the bottle when I tell you that on Sunday, Tom and I saw a Flying Saucer over Durban. We were taking photographs in the Botanical Gardens when I spied a round object in the sky, very high and moving. We watched it travel a good distance, and then it seemed to remain in the same spot for quite a long time – then went higher and higher until it was lost from our sight.’

At the time there was a wave of similar sightings in South Africa. On the same day, two South African Air Force flying officers reported seeing unidentified aerial objects above coastal city of Durban.

Contemporary documents from the formative years of the phenomenon are astonishingly scarce with this letter expected to attract strong interest from collectors of UFO memorabilia at its estimate of £300-500.

The spotlight also falls on an extraordinary collection from Tim Wonnacott, one of television’s great showmen and a longstanding champion of the antique and the unusual. His eye for the theatrical, historic and eccentric is reflected in a wonderfully varied assemblage that includes items as varied as a Mi’kmaq (Northeastern Woodlands) tribe model of a canoe (estimate £800-1200) and an armadillo inkwell.

Of particular note is a relic from the Mutiny on the Bounty – a leather-bound book with panel inscribed: This Relic of John Adams’s House was taken from Pitcairn Island by George Fudge of HMS Reindeer Dec 1st ’65.

Adams was among the eight mutineers, led by Fletcher Christian, who settled on Pitcairn Island in January 1790. They stripped the ship of anything useful, including much of its timber, before it was scuttled.

The mutineers remained undetected until February 1808, when John Adams and some Tahitian women and children were discovered. He was eventually granted amnesty and died on Pitcairn in 1829. By the time the crew of HMS Reindeer visited in 1865, many of the original houses were in poor repair and they too were stripped to create souvenirs. This one is expected to bring between £1500-2000.

Tim Wonnacott’s collection also features a large marble relief of a standing pharaonic figure. It was formerly at Ditchingham House, Bungay, Suffolk, the family home of the novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925). In addition to his writing – including best sellers King Solomon’s Mines and She – Haggard is known for his interest in the spiritual realm and paranormal phenomena. His interest in Egypt was fostered by four visits to North Africa and a close friendship with Wallis Budge, keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum.

While Haggard owned many antiquities, this carving, housed in a Victorian polished oak frame with wrought iron fittings, is thought to be later and may have been removed to Ditchingham from one of the secret occult societies to which Haggard subscribed. It is estimated to bring £7000-9000.

A money box fashioned as a pillar box that opens to reveal a spring-loaded figure of a suffragette concealed inside is a great rarity. And remarkably it comes by direct descent from Rose Hobden who purchased it new in 1913. The estimate is £3000-5000.

For audiences at the time, the symbolism of the pillar box and the suffragette waving a flag inscribed Votes for Women would have been immediately understood. In 1911, as the Women’s Social and Political Union’s campaign for electoral suffrage entered its militant phase, Emily Wilding Davison had proposed setting fire to letter boxes as a form of protest. Later that same year, she was arrested while attempting to burn the mail in a pillar box in Parliament Street.

A similar money box is illustrated in Diane Atkinson’s book Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2019).

 A copy of the banned Sex Pistols poster designed by Jamie Reid (1947-2023) to promote the single ‘Holidays in the Sun’ in October 1977 has a guide of £500-800.  Reid took the graphics directly from a Belgian tourist brochure, replacing the text in speech bubbles with lyrics from the song. When the Belgian Traveling Service threatened legal action, the artwork was destroyed and the poster reprinted with a replacement image.

Another scarce poster promotes the Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Paintings and Objects show held from November 7-18, 1966, at the Indica Gallery in London. The conceptual exhibition was the setting for the first encounter between Ono and John Lennon who attended the private preview on the evening of November 7. The poster was given as a gift to the vendor by John Dunbar, the Indica Gallery’s co-founder, who arranged the introduction between artist and musician. It is expected to bring £3000-5000.

Another jewel from Swinging Sixties counterculture is an early contact sheet of photographs of Marc Bolan taken some years before he formed T Rex or its precursor Tyrannosaurus Rex. The ten black and white portraits were shot by photographer David Wedgbury ahead of the release of Bolan’s debut solo single The Wizard in November 1965. The contact sheet comes from the collection of English music journalist Roy Carr with a guide of £300-400.

From the world of natural history comes two bones from the foot of a dodo, the huge flightless bird that went extinct in the Dutch colony of Mauritius around 1690. They are from a group of dodo bones discovered in 1885 during the investigation of the Mare aux Songes swamp by local schoolmaster George Clarke. Hearing that a few bones had been found in this area, Clarke hired local servants to wade through the swamp and feel for further bones with their feet. Estimated at £2000-4000, they come from the collection of Errol Fuller and are offered with a copy of his book ‘The Dodo: From Extinction to Icon’.

The subject of a large and striking early 20th century oil painting is ‘Haddy’, the skeleton of a Hadrosaurus discovered in 1858 at Haddonfield, New Jersey, by amateur fossil enthusiast William Parker Foulke. Displayed at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences since 1868, it was the first dinosaur skeleton assembled for public display and caused a sensation at the time. The painting shows the skeleton as it was exhibited for much of its early life – with a (wildly inaccurate) plaster skull based on the head of an iguana. A rare period depiction of Haddy’s original display, exactly when and how it arrived in Britain, is unknown.  It is expected to bring £500-700.