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ARTIFACTS AUCTIONED AT ELVASTON CASTLE
An auction was held at Elvaston Castle
(Saturday 29, 2007) to sell off about 120 artefacts which
used to be on display at the estate's museum, which was
open from 1980 to 2001. Derbyshire County Council, which
owns the castle, will put the cash raised in the auction
towards paying off a grant from the Fund for the
Preservation of Industrial and Scientific Materials,
which the council was given to buy carriages for the
museum.
Among the bidders was Patrick Bosworth, who
paid £400 for a Fordson Standard N tractor dating from
the early 1940s. Mr Bosworth, of Holme Farm, Stanley, has
been collecting tractors since he was a child and hopes
to restore the old vehicle using spares from another
tractor he bought at the auction. He said, "I'm
really pleased. This is what I came for and I got it.
I've now got 10 tractors in my collection. Once I've
restored it, I'll take it on the rally circuit. It'll
probably be back here for the Elvaston Steam Rally in the
next couple of years."
Tractors were the main money-raisers at the
sale, with bidders paying up to £600 for the machines.
James Lewis, of Bamfords Auctioneers, which ran the sale,
said, "It was amazing how much these tractors went
for. You could buy a mint condition tractor for about
£900 and we've had one sell here for £600. When I first
came to look at the lots a year ago, you couldn't even
see the tractors because the nettles were so overgrown. I
hear that many of them are going to be restored and will
stay in Derbyshire."
Stephen Peake, of West Hallam, bought two
horse-drawn ploughs for £10 and £15. He said, "I'm
going to paint them and put them in the garden. I've been
looking for something like this for ages. These are early
20th-century ploughs and they'll look really good in the
garden once they've had a lick of paint." Philip
Ufton, of Crown Hill Farm, Stanley Common, picked up a
1940s threshing machine for just £10. He said,
"I've got no idea how I'll get it home. I didn't
come here with this in mind but it was cheap and I'll
restore it. I could get it working again but I'm not sure
what I'm going to do with it after that!" (Source: Derby Evening Telegraph, Oct/07)
Readers
comments:
Vintage ploughs for £10.00, what a joke they
are worth at least £100-£150 each. DCC gave this stuff
away. The reason it was a poor sale was the lack of
advertising from DCC. I rang twice asking about this sale
and both times I got the reply "sorry I don't know
anything about it". I then asked to speak to someone
who did know and was told "don't know who to
ask"! I would now like to know how much this badly
organised car boot sale cost DCC after taking out
auctioneers fees, wages to DCC employees, payment to the
so called experts, etc. It must have cost an awful lot of
ratepayers money to sell ratepayers goods. I suggest next
time DCC hold a sale they get someone in who knows what
they are doing because it's quite obvious our
thick-skinned leaders cannot even run a car boot sale let
alone run a great City. Jim Gill
Let's hope that Patrick Bosworth has a Steam
Rally to take his new purchase to in the future. The way
things are going at Elvaston, the Council will sell the
events field off for yet another profit - maybe for
Executive Housing or perhaps a new and fantastic
out-of-town shopping centre. They are total crooks, this
lot, selling OUR heritage to line their council coffers
with unethical sales of OUR property. It was never the
County Council's to sell in the first place - it belong
to (and still does, in my opinion) the people of
Derbyshire, and that fact should never ever change. Sam
Vimes
On behalf of the community, The Friends of
Elvaston have now written to the Ombudsman's Investigator
for advice.
Despite an undertaking given by the Chief
Executive Officer of the County Council, Nick Hodgson, to
the Local Government Ombudsman's Investigator, in a
letter dated May 20, 2005, stating that;
'Although the former Working Farm Museum was
to remain closed, some form of display and use of the
main items of historic interest to Elvaston are part of
the outline proposals if there is sufficient interest
from the public.'
The public was not consulted on the disposal
by the County Council, either as to whether it would like
to see these items displayed, or whether it agreed to
their disposal.
We also understand that according to Museums
Association rules, PRISM (Preservation of Industrial and
Scientific Material) grants on any items on which such a
grant has to be repaid are to be exhibited no further
than 30 kilometres from their original PRISM Funded
location. This has not happened and the items have been
dispersed to private collections.
Further to this, the disgraceful condition
the exhibits are in is entirely due to their neglect at
the hands of the Derbyshire County Council. Many of these
exhibits were formally in good working condition but have
been left out in an open farmyard with no cover for many
years. In its internal documents the Council merely
explains the condition, without explaining who is
responsible.
What many members of the public don’t
yet realise is that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Castle itself contains around 120,000 exhibits, many
of which were never exhibited, nor were they properly
catalogued at the time that they arrived. Prior to 1990,
the Council ‘encouraged’ many independent
museums to make use of Elvaston Castle as secondary
storage. The Report states that the removal of the
collections will require the County Council to identify a
suitable storage facility for the collection (Let’s
hope that it isn’t a large scrap container, the
chosen method so far!). Initially, this will have
to be a substantial size and the rental and on-costs will
need to be found for at least five years. Once
the collection has been reduced in size, it may be
prudent to move to smaller buildings, but this will need
to be on a long term basis. The
costs of this will be subject to a further report.
The botched auction sale at Home Farm, where
an important historical artifact such as a 1940s baler
can be sold for the ridiculous sum of £10, proves that
Derbyshire County Council doesn’t seem to care about
the artifacts, or how much money it costs for their
removal in order to create vacant possession for the
developer. This is an important fact to bear in mind,
because the County Council has already been discussing
and planning the clearance for some years. In a Cabinet
Report on the Museum Collection in 2002, it states that
the Home Farm collection is not included in the report
and cites the reason that;
‘The material in Home Farm has not been
assessed in this documentation but is now in a poor
condition due to the poor condition of the building and
roof. Most items stored at Home Farm are no longer of
museum quality and often duplicate material in existing
collections.’
This is typical of the County Council’s
amazing capacity for spin. Forget the building and roof.
Apart from a few items afforded the crude cover of an
open fronted hovel shed, all of the tractors, ploughs,
harrows, seeders, hay carts and trailers, milk traps,
road vans and Gypsy vardos were left out in the open with
no cover, to rot, over many years. The Council even tried
to accelerate this process by burning some items at Home
Farm, before the publicity generated by the Friends of
Elvaston caused them to stop this particular approach.
However, it is rumoured that a later disposal crew armed
with a digger and a skip were considering cutting up some
items. Is this really the 21st century?
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