Ready, teddy, go ... it’s the bear sale you’ve all been waiting for!
TWELVE thousand pounds does sound a lot of money for a teddy but that is what a Humber area businessman bid in a ferocious auction battle over a rather strange old bear. The day haunts him still!
The auction of rare dolls and teddies took place in one of the London salerooms back in the early 1990s. The businessman, a financial services specialist, found himself sitting next to the famous Sir John Harvey Jones, the onetime ICI boss turned television star. Sir John was there for the antique dolls. The Humber area businessman was there for the teddies and one extraordinary bear in particular... It sounds incredible but just a matter of weeks after the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, the Steiff company produced a number of ‘memorial bears’, black teddies that were made to commemorate the lives of the people lost in the disaster. It was one of the smallest runs the company ever did, only 600 bears in five sizes, of which just 82 were the large 20in size.
The local businessman had decided that he would bid up to £10,000 for the auction’s Titanic bear, a sum that he thought gave him a chance of winning the rare treasure. In the event he went to £12,000 but the bidding carried on even then. The hammer finally went down at £17,000 and the bear was whisked off to Japan. Mind-boggling is it not? Seventeen thousand pounds for a teddy bear! Crazy! But here’s the thing – just ten years later another of these bears sold at auction for £91,750, establishing it as one of the most valuable Steiff teddy bears of all time.
The local businessman did eventually acquire a Titanic Memorial Bear for his collection but it is a replica, one of a limited edition of 1,912 bears produced by Steiff eight years ago to mark the centenary of the disaster. Even that is worth several hundred pounds. Happily the disappointment of missing out on that original Titanic bear did not dim the financier’s passion for teddies. (An escape from the pressures of work, he says.)
In a collecting phase that lasted for more than 30 years – and took in everything from car boot sales and antique fairs to the auction rooms of the nation - he amassed a wonderful selection of rare and interesting bears by Steiff and other famous makers. Now in semi-retirement and downsizing he has decided that the time has come for the picnic to end.
We will be putting the entire collection of over 850 teddies under the hammer in a specialist teddy bear auction in the New Year. Our bear experts are still cataloguing at the time of writing but we know that there are many rarities including a 1907 Steiff bear – Sylvester – that is valued at close to £10,000. The collection even includes some that pre-date toy bears being ‘teddy bears’, a name that was adopted in 1902 after the American President Teddy Roosevelt famously refused to shoot a bear that had been captured and tied to a tree during a hunt. These early bears include a nice French example that dates from the late 19th century.