Going nuts for socket sets – and wrenches and spanners too ...
THE old antiques trade hands will tell you that there is absolutely nothing that is not collected by some bloke, in some shed, somewhere. Actually that’s an understatement. Not only are the most obscure objects collected by lots of blokes in lots of sheds – but they’ll likely have formed a club and be publishing a regular newsletter! Ridiculous? Permit me to introduce The Spanner & Wrench Collector, the journal of the Hand Tool Preservation Association of Australia. A touch specialist perhaps, even in the world of tool collecting, but trust me, the Australian spanner enthusiast is not alone.
The Spanner & Wrench Collector has been running a series on rare socket sets and it recently featured The Ferret Spanner No 2, a set manufactured in the Edwardian period by a remarkable British company. It is one of the Ferret sets that took my team into the weird world of spanner collecting when we were commissioned to sell off the contents of one of the county’s oldest blacksmith shops, at Thorganby near Binbrook.
Long established workshops often produce wonderful antique artefacts, stored away long ago, just in case, but never needed. The Thorganby Forge treasures included a boxed Ferret Spanner No 3 socket set, which (eat your heart out Wrench Collector) is considerably larger and more impressive than the No 2.
But could a box of old spanners really ever be interesting? You be the judge. The Ferret sets were manufactured by Accles & Pollock of Oldbury, Birmingham, an engineering company that was started by James Accles in the Victorian period and became one of the country’s leading manufacturers of bicycle tubing. The pioneering British motorist Charles Turrell joined the company in 1899 at which point the firm began producing motorcars, first a 20mph two-seater, the Accles-Turrell, and a couple of years later a four-seater New Turrell model. And it was to supply a toolkit with these early motorcars that in 1905 the firm – now joined by Tom Pollock and renamed Accles & Pollock – began producing the Ferret spanners, the world’s first tubular socket spanners.
Exactly when our Ferret No 3 set arrived at the Thorganby smithy and how it remained, complete with both levers and all the sockets, in its original wooden box for over a hundred years is unknown but the nation’s spanner collectors will no doubt be delighted that it has survived. It is to go under the hammer in the Thorganby Forge online auction that ends on Friday, October 23. The result will be interesting. Examples rarely come up for auction but when they do they often make well over a hundred pounds. Amidst some valuable machinery, forge equipment and tools the dispersal auction does also include a number of antiquities that are even older than the spanners. Those include a horse-drawn harrow (a piece of farming equipment used for breaking up and levelling soil) that is thought to be late Victorian and a jig used in the making of the steel bands that bound wooden cartwheels. There are also pieces of vintage tractor equipment dating back to the 1950s.
■ The auction catalogue is available at www.eddisonscjm.com. The viewing session is on Thursday, October 22 at The Forge in Thorganby. The online auction is scheduled to end at 1pm on October 23.