Mouseman armchair sets record in York
A Mouseman armchair that was made in the 1930s by a young trainee who went on to become a legendary World War Two commando hero has sold for £10,500, over five times its top pre-sale estimate in a York saleroom.
The chair went under the hammer in a Country House Sale at auctioneers Duggleby Stephenson, and thought to have achieved a record auction price for a single chair made in Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson’s Kilburn workshops.
The chair was the work of 21-year-old Graham Hayes, the son of a wealthy Yorkshire businessman, who spent two years training at Kilburn, intending to start his own business. However, the Second World War intervened. Hayes was commissioned and became one of the founding members of the Small Scale Raiding Force, a commando team brought together by the Special Operations Executive to carry out Winston Churchill’s instruction to create ‘a reign of terror down the enemy coast’.
Tom Howard, a furniture specialist with Duggleby Stephenson, said: “The adzed oak armchair was brought along to one of the regular valuation days at the York Auction Centre by Hayes family descendants who had inherited it.
“At that stage we were not aware that it had been made by one of the great commando heroes of the Second World War, but even as just a very nice piece of Mouseman furniture we rated it at £1,200 – £1,800.”
Captain Hayes led one of the assault teams in ‘Operation Postmaster’, the daring 1942 raid – recently depicted in Guy Ritchie’s film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – in which commandos boarded and captured three enemy vessels moored in the ‘neutral’ port of Santa Isabel on the Spanish Island of Fernando Po off the West African Coast.
However disaster followed on a mission just a few months later when a commando team carrying out a night-time reconnaissance of the Normandy beaches was ambushed by a German patrol. Hayes escaped and with the help of the French Resistance made it down the escape route to the Spanish border but he was betrayed and handed over to the Germans. After being held in solitary confinement at the notorious Fresnes Prison near Paris for nine months he was executed by firing squad on July 13, 1943 – four days after his 29th birthday.
Tom said, “Once the Hayes story emerged interest went through the roof. Advance commission bidding topped double the initial valuation more than a week ahead of the auction. On the day the bidding got off at £5,000 and there followed a quick, fierce, online battle including bidders all over the country. The hammer went down at £10,500, the chair knocked down to a private bidder based in Cheshire – just seventy seconds later.”
He added: “That’s a record Mouseman result for Duggleby Stephenson and we believe it’s a record auction price for any single chair made in Robert Thompson’s Kilburn workshops.”
The recent Country House Sale saw a number of other noteworthy results, including A Little Owl bronze by the renowned animal and bird sculptor Sally Arnup (1930-2015) that was expected to go for £400-600, which made £3,900. Meanwhile a three-quarter length portrait of King Charles II attributed to the circle of Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680) went for £4,300, double pre-sale expectations, and an Italianate landscape by John Wootton, one of the most fashionable English artists of the early 18th century, sold for £10,000, which was double its pre-sale estimate.